Quite an innovative idea you got there!

- Pros: Art is cute. Message interface looks nice. Emojis are :fire:. So are jokes. Cool music.
- Cons: Gameplay was a bit slow (I know there must be time to read messages, so not sure how to solve that). Maybe reduce texts to only one emoji, then have more messages, maybe multiple robots? I'll leave you to see where it can go.

All in all this concept has a lot of potential and I really like it!

I like the game overall, but it looks like I got in the circle (or maybe it was just my imagination) when they started exchanging with messages that none of them like.

@gastricsparrow Thanks for commenting! We had quite a lot of discussions and issues with the game speed. With faster messages they started to get impossible to read. Also, more messages on the screen, the amount of information for a new player started to get crazy. Maybe the game could start getting faster after a while when player starts to get used to the idea (maybe connect speed to the love meters or something).

The idea about reducing messages to only emojis could have some potential and we also discussed about that. We did not have enough time to explore it though because creating meaningful messages with only emojis was much harder than with text. Also it felt too simple but eventually it may still be the way to go. It would also reduce the amount of attention needed to decipher the meaning and category of messages.

But overall, good comments and a lot of same ideas and discussions we had during the project! :)

Nice game. Music is great. It's fun. I would make it a bit harder. Concept is really good

I love the concept! The aesthetic overall looks so nice! The music is so cute as well~

Now that's something that went with the theme by heart. And im impressed you managed to make this kind of theme work. However, i think some insights in what would be a good message and what not would be nice, i couldn't really tell what was and what wasn't a good message. Nice jokes by the way.

@fa Thanks for noting! That may very well be possible, it was hard to test how robots would react in a long run.

@theBOSS12 Thanks for feedback! We had a lot of iterations of the game difficulty and we thought the final version would be the best compromise for all player types. We could have used these kind of comments during testing! <3

@Vyolfers Thanks for the kind words! <3 We were lucky to have a composer in the team!

@derek-volker Thanks for commenting! <3 We also discussed about this during the project. At some point we had an idea that different categories would be marked somehow. We ended up going with the design choice that players would have to monitor robots' reactions to determine what messages will be good. This was still challenging because we have over hundred of messages. It is hard to make messages that are easily attachable to some category - especially since every player is different.

This theme is definitely something I would like to touch in the future. It has many interesting design challenges to make it accessible to all kinds of players.

What a creative game idea! Also the robots look absolutely amazing. However the messages were coming in a little slow which made it a bit boring and the loop of messages was quite small and the robots seemed to dislike really a lot of the messages, unfortunately. But overall very well done!

Original take on the theme, with a sweet little mechanic! Enjoyed the run, and the music does a good job making the environment playful.
As a side note, found it a bit hard to remember what is it that they like :P Had the feeling that the fact that they asked about football, doesn't really mean that they will like football related messages being sent to them (does it?)

The game's cute, the music's nice and despite being repetitive and upbeat it never got irritating. The writing's a bit flat but it does the job, and after a few minutes of play I was able to figure out the robots' preferences and the rest of the game I didn't make any major mistakes.

As others have pointed out, the game is a bit slow. The messages themselves moving slowly wasn't an issue; I'm on a touchpad so this actually helped. But getting a reasonable score on either side takes many, many messages, and a lot of time. I got to the stage where the model bot would accept flirts and had a beating heart, but the sports bot's hearts are growing way too slowly.

A lot of LD games of this style (learn the rules by trial and error) run into the issue of having unclear rules that are hard to categorize. For the most part, though, your adherence to clear tropes makes it obvious which message belongs to which category (except for the TV and pizza message). I appreciate that.

So really, if the game had ended after both bots had 15 or 20 hearts, I would've had a great opinion of it. As it stands, it's still good, just drags on much longer than it should. Nice work.

@amras0000 Thank you for your very detailed comment! <3 We really appreciate it. Actually, according to your feedback we discovered a bug where some of the positive robot reactions were smaller than they should have been. This does not resolve all problems you addressed but at the same time we also made some changes to scoring system to solve issues you pointed out. Luckily there was still marathon left to correct the bugs we made while tired. :D

@sophiakene Thanks for commenting! <3 All points are definitely valid and many other people have raised those as well!

@sndr Thanks for playing the game and taking time commenting! <3 Actually, those football messages belong to a larger category, sports. We knew some people would understand messages the way you did but we did not have time to build that complex of a category system. That is something I hope I could touch on in the future if we plan to continue discovering this idea!

Great Soundtrack and pretty interesting gameplay. Only minor change I would make is having the robots name always displayed above their heads

@creepyounguy Thanks for commenting! That is a valid very valid point. I would make that change in a hurry if I still had time. Thanks for playing still!

cool game. in the middle of my playthrough they keep talking the same sentences and the game got slow, i think that adding more nonsense phrases to shoot would make it more dynamic.

It's a great game ! It's funny, simple yet engaging, the presentation is nice and I liked it a lot !
I don't have anything to say honestly, just good job !

Really enjoyable game. Had fun figuring out how each robot responds to each message, and really dug the music. Great job sticking to the theme.

I really like the concept and the art style.
The point i like the most its how intuitive the gameplay is.
Nice Work!

Fun game, it took me some time to figure out the mood of the robots, but i made them fall in love. :D

Overall well polished simulation - art, music, gameplay, guidance and everything is in place! Cool :)
I was looking for some "ending" or goal for achieving enough hearts. Is there something like that? I stopped at around ~110
Maybe there could be a mode that you could only shoot down "your own" messages (robot in left), and then you could actually "compete" against the other robot on how good of a flirter are you

@Lawok Thanks for playing! We intended player to think he was "between" two robots, not one of them. The game actually ends when both robots reach the needed amount of love (80 to be exact). I guess we were not clear enough about0 that. :)

I would have loved to make better visualization of game ending (progress bar with two robot heads meeting) but had no time for that.

@Mau Great job! The whole point of the design was to figure out robots' interests by trial and error - exactly what you did. <3

@fernando-labarta Thanks for playing and glad you liked it! We worked hard for making the game intuitive. Theme was hard to make clear but we're glad you found it intuitive!

@Dustygriff Thanks for playing and amazing to hear you liked it! <3

@Toulou Thank you for playing and taking time to comment! :)

@Jaime-Paz-Lopes Thanks for commenting! We actually though over hundred of hand crafted messages would be enough. But if you look at every category, it can start repeating messages quite fast. There was also something iffy going on with Unity's random number generator. At times it seemed that it did not raffle all the messages we had made. Next time in a game like this I would add much more messages and maybe variations of same messages to not make the game feel repetitive.

Nice game !

@Bayokeee Thanks for trying it out! <3 I will try your game later today, it looks stunning.

Great concept, nice visuals, entertaining music. Looks and feels polished.

Only nitpick: The eyes of the robots are not blurred in the start screen (at least for me).

Great work.

@Potti Thanks for commenting and glad you liked it! <3 That bug you mentioned actually annoys me quite a lot. I know it is just a visual one with no effect but it is still haunting me in my dreams. :D

Great Game! I enjoyed playing it!
If you plan on more developing, maybe set the speed of the message depending one the love level (the higher, the quicker), and maybe from time to time a flood of false message sent by someone with malicious intent would be fun?
You can be proud of yourself!

I love the concept, it's very stylishly delivered too. I'd probably agree with the sentiment that speed could ramp up a little after the first few messages. It also wasn't apparent what each bot's interests were until I noticed one was called 'Sport bot' and the other was called 'Model bot' and then I was better able to judge which messages I needed to shoot down. I like it!

Charming, little game! It's pretty sweet concept and decent execution. The mix of dating simulator and shooter is a nice concept but i think there should a lot of more messages so the shooting aspects is more fleshed out. Simple graphics and fun, cute music do match together and set nice atmosphere to the game. In overall it's fun, little game, could be more expanded but still pretty neat.

Robot dating, nice idea. I liked the music and concept of the game. I found it hard to make the grey robot happy.
Though pink robot got happy very easily.

Great idea to work with the theme indeed, and well executed as well. I really would have liked more variation in the dialogue as it relatively quickly started to get repetitive. I'm just wondering though.. am I a robot too?

This is absolutely perfect as a web game! The only thing I noticed was that liked and disliked messages were a tad bit inconsistent, especially when comparing both directions. For example, one robot might ask the other to dinner, the other loves it, then the other asks the first to dinner, and the first hates it. Other than that, it was a lot of fun, and the game was forgiving enough that the inconsistencies didn't stop the player from winning.

@david-boeger Thanks for playing and taking time to comment! <3

Robots actually have completely different interests. Even though the other one is interested in something it does not mean the other one is. Their interests also affect which kind of messages they send. For example, a robot interested in sports has a higher chance to send a sports related message.

The chance is never actually zero, so even though one robot hates food, he can still send food related messages - even though it is rare.

If we were to continue making this game, a lot of effort should go on balancing the interests and chances robots choose the message categories. As you said, I think it was a mistake that robot can produce a message of a category that he hates. It can make it confusing for the player trying to decipher each robot's interests.

I'm still quite happy about the balance we managed to create for this marathon but certainly there would be a lot more work needed to take this game to another level.

This is a great concept for a game! All aspects of its presentation work really well together.

As other people have said, it is confusing that the robots can hate the messages they send out. Another fix for that could be to make it so the player can see how the robots feel about the messages they're sending.

Also, using 3D audio for the gun shot sound effect was a really cool decision.

Good job! Cool game!

I left my rating of your game, if you can leave your feedback in our game, Witch's Escape.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/witchs-escape

Funny game, it takes some time to figure out what the robots like but it's really cool to play :)

It's a good time killer! And like you already mentioned, balancing the messages should be a priority, it's kind of inconsistent right now, and more variety would be cool too! Good job :smiley: