itch.io

Having tried to build a node+connections UI and data across and such, I know a little bit of the pain (a teensy bit). The UI/UX is certainly very elaborate and looks polished as heck! Hope you can take the ideas and run with em again someday :)

Gotcha gotcha, totally fair! Good to know I did all the things :D

Most of the levels felt like tutorials with only the minimum commands to beat em available. Feels like the missing piece is some way to measure things and do simple math. If it were possible to hook NUM from head/tail/fold up to inputs it would be a game changer. So many more efficient and clever solutions would be possible.

Also the last level Stop Codons, I know what I have to do but I don't have the patience to sit there and hook up all the nodes to get to the solution because it is going to be a lot.

I like the Visual Programming and ideas here, but the lack of actual challenge levels and the cumbersomeness of having to hardcode everything makes it not super engaging nor rewarding. It's close though, the seed is there! I can see it evolving into something wonderful!

I enjoyed some of what I played (the move inversion and 1/0 flipping are not my kind of puzzles, but I liked the rot13 and payload parts) but after I did the payload injection I couldn't continue? 


Didn't seem like there was anywhere else to go?

Super cool! Again really enjoyed the levels and it was obvious that you learned from The Stack Machine and added more visualizations of the process the machine was moving through and you could really see what it was doing at each step.

Another game where the a feature (states) were only really useful in the last level so I'd love to see more levels! Maybe even levels where there are two or more inputs so you need to make the rules generic to be able to handle many of them instead of just building them to a single set of inputs.

Really like the ideas explored here though!

I really enjoyed the puzzles! It is certainly cool to have to input the numbers yourself, but I  feel like there needs to be a verification step that at some point in the program the stack matches the level's requirement. Right now it's too easy to cheat the system (I did them all legit, I swear!). And yeah I only needed the ram for the last level because it was the only one where I wanted to meet the "stack must match level input at some point" and needed to just keep the ones digit away from the others while I did calculations.

The other thing I found myself wishing for was more visuals like highlighting what column was being evaluated and maybe skipping of empty columns faster.

In other words, the game design is a solid foundation and I just would love more strictness and more levels! More ram levels :D

It is a very sweet little story about streaming and friendships and fandoms. It certainly hit harder than I was expecting given how it starts, but that feels intentional. Lure you in and then bam!

Finished two playthroughs, first one where I was a proper mailman and didn't read anything, and then another more invasive playthrough where I read everything. It is surprising how many context clues there were that I could still tell everything that was going on without reading the letters! Reading the letters certainly helped flesh things out and the font choices felt very on-point! Also got some of the references that flew over my head in the first playthrough like the Roz one. The art was very cute and fitting (the little alarm siren near the end was especially cute) and the music and sound effects fit the vibes and stayed out of the way.

If you're looking for a short little experience with some fun characters and different game mechanics than usual this is a great little game.

p.s. I felt bad every time I knocked some of the objects around, sorry for messing up your rooms!

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I didn't run into any performance issues like the other commenter but I did have to force it to launch in a window because on my ultrawide in fullscreen it was all cropped. Here's some of the buggy stuff that could possibly be fixable:

The movement was a bit too quick for me and I had to be careful not to run out of bounds and fall out of the level.

There were a couple of times where it felt like sentences repeated, but I couldn't tell if I was just imagining things.

On Day 05 one of the letters is from Ducky to Goota but it's labelled From Xpee to Ducky (and Xpee reacts to it properly)? The same letters appears to show up on Day 06 but at first when I opened it it was just "bleh" but when I got to Goota's place it becomes the full letter.

Day 10 also has a letter from Goota to Xpee that initially shows up as "bleh" but once I travel to Xpee's place it became readable.

On days 09, 11 and 13 the letters from Lioshka to Xpee are also too long and go off the bottom edge of the screen. Lioshka's letters are just too long haha

What a wild and wonderful ride! The visuals, the music, the writing, it's all excellent and all so very focused. I will be awaiting more adventures in ZA FULL GAME. Good luck!

memes

It seems like an interesting program. The buzzing would be a good feature to add but I think the more pressing thing right now is that I don't see anywhere to get the answers for the existing questions? Having to replace them all or look them all up before being able to play is a pretty big hurdle! Cheers.

p.s. I did see that there were two other episodes in subfolders but only one of them seems to have answers? So three episodes come with it but only one seems to have answers.

No problem, glad it was helpful. It's a fantastic idea and shows a lot of promise, good luck to you!

That's all great to hear! I hope you have an amazing time working on it :)

Thanks again for making it and putting a demo together to share with us!

Please don't take any of this negatively, I'm only commenting here in the hopes that you can grow and improve the game! :)

The story was interesting enough, I'd like to find out more about this world with magic of some sort and why people despise those who wield it. What happened to make them so scared? Will I be able to change their minds if I do good? Will I be able to destroy them all if I do bad? What is that weird altar and what does it have to do with the curse? How do I learn about it? there's a lot of room for expansion.

Obviously it's not gotten any layers of polish yet but I did want to point a few  visual things out. The name input took me a bit to realize I had to type since it was just part of the dialog section and the first time I got a choice I also didn't realize I had one because it was above the dialog and blended into the scene.

The characters feel a bit... homogeneous? It's really hard to write varied interesting characters so maybe focus on fewer ones and nail those rather than having so many different but same-y ones. Without looking at the names it'd be very difficult for me to be able to tell them apart.

The demo is a bit too short to say definitively but I think you need to practice writing more. Writing is like anything else and the more you practice the better you'll get. Do writing challenges, daily writing prompts, etc. Even writing more of this VN will help, by the time you get to the end of the story you'll definitely want to come back to the start and rewrite it.

Hope this helps and good luck to you! Making a game is hard AND writing a story is hard. Here you've chosen to do both, it won't be easy but you'll learn a ton on your way and improve in each :D

A fun little visual novel about diagnosing, solving, and preventing cyber crimes. It delves into phishing, data exfiltration, remote control, botnets/DDoS, security vulnerabilities, firewalls, anti-viruses, and a few other things. Could eventually be a very informative game for people who don't know everything they should about all the possible cyber attacks that are out there, including how to identify and prevent them.

That all being said, the demo isn't perfect. There are grammatical problems, unpolished transitions and animations, missing features (no pause menu, no options menu, no way to re-read text you've dismissed), and the puzzles are very bare-bones (guess the sequence, multiple choice match the image).

It's got a lot of promise and has a very cool aesthetic. I was able to finish in about half an hour or less which felt like enough time to really settle into the feel of the game but also left me wanting to know what kinds of crazy cases would be tackled next!

If you're interested in learning more about the subject matter give it a go. You just might learn something and have fun while learning it :)

Really enjoyed reading this! Cool to know that people are still making hardware today to run games on a console from the 1990s. I wish I had the time and dedication to make a SNES game all the way from digital to physical but I think reading it about it as close as I'm going to get :)