Firstly: Thanks for putting Mac instructions in the description!
Second: This was fun, I liked how each level had a different story, thought it was a bit too easy.. until I had to do 2 at once, then I failed miserably :cry: good job :thumbsup:

Loved the atmosphere and the polish of this one. It is well written, and the gameplay, although repetitive at first glance, manages to evolve into something really fun.

Pros :
- Great aesthetics : you managed to make your game look good without graphics, thanks to your smooth font and color choices, and the music accompanies the game very well
- Fun writing, with varied little fun situations
- Simple, but evolutive gameplay
- Great leaderboard

Cons :
- Some key layouts really disturbing (eg. "w" gauge below "s" gauge)... or maybe was it itentional ?
- Random difficulty spikes (speed) can destroy the player on his first try when he has not completely figured the gameplay out.

@jlv Yes, key layouts should make player's life difficult, they are also used to control overall difficulty.
As for difficulty spikes... Yes, they can happen, we didn't have much time to fine-tune the difficulty curve. 🙈
However, this time we have at least managed to make the first few stages accessible for most players 🤪

Interesting game!

Amazing game, I really liked the history behind each challenge. The sound was awesome, I caught myself playing it with my hands in the desk hahaha. Nice work thx for sharing.

Good job, seemed very simple at first but as the speed picks up and especially once the second bar appears gets quite tricky. When one of them starts to fall outside the range recovering it without losing the other one is surprisngly hard. Like the addition of the stories too, and the music suits nicely. Great work! :smile:

Very clean UI and a challenging mechanic! Very well scoped too. And the little stories give it personality. Having the online leaderboard is appreciated, but the fact that you can see other players scores in the bottom is even better. Very well done!

Had a lot of fun playing this and taking turns with my friend, however the stories did repeat themselves after a while, which was a shame.

@koalaura Yes, sorry about repeating stories, but we have lost a day and a half developing another idea, and then moved to an idea which turned into High Point. Also, the language barrier meant we had to write stories in Russian and then translate, which also added to the development time.
Cool you had some fun though!

Wow, that got me going for a bit! After three buttons at once started I just lost it :rofl: I need another person press the third button just so I can concentrate on the others. Awesome!

I lost after 2 Buttons. But the music and UI are enough to hold me for a few more tries

Oh, fellow Russian-speaking devs - thought that Lomonosov isn't the most common name to hear on LD normally, haha. Great job! I enjoyed the gameplay, especially after the 1-button phase was over, and the stories were really nice. Being able to see the leaderboard while playing was also a neat touch to have, and overall UI and presentation felt super polished for a jam. Thank you for the game! :)

@gil4 Many thanks! We had fun making stories, and quite a few of them are "spoken from our heart" :smirk: We didn't have enough time to make enough stories though, so it may become a bit repetitive.
But who reads the stories on the second try at getting to the top of the leaderboard?

Hi,

I liked the idea, but I would say it is not so well done. It is fairly possible that we play your game and ask ourselves a couple of times "What am I doing?". And it's true, the game does not make you feel like what **you** are doing is what the **"you"** the game says is doing.

One way to change that would have to come up with different gameplay ideas : mashing or staying active on one button is not the same thing and could be two separate gameplays (maybe for the guy shooting JFK it would be staying on one button and just releasing on the good moment, maybe for a guy running it would be mashing).

One other way to do this would be by simply giving the letter we're mashing a sense: R for Running, D for Driving, T for Talking, S for Shooting, etc. It is simple yet making us associating what we're doing with what's happening on the screen. Here we're a bit "out" of it, unfortunately.

I say unfotunately because the idea of giving us __any__ moments to deal with is actually a good idea.

The music is really good yet very repetitive for a game that could go long. I would suggest that you associate maybe some or all the screens you got with a soundeffect to make the story more alive.

Also, I really appreciated that you managed to get the difficulty going up but slowly. That's what arcade is all about (check out the game Celeste for that matter). Nice job there.

Anyway, you definitely have good ideas here. Continue this way and don't stop trying to improve ^^

see ya

Really like the concept, Nice and simple. Reminds me of the typed of games I used to play online in college :D

Hey @pl4typus ! Many thanks for your comments. You are right about different ways to serve the same gameplay, it could have been done. What we started with, though, an original idea we had, was born out of rejection of the theme. So, at first we just wanted to make a game where players would spend their life earning currency - holding a button and spending real time of their lives to earn time based score. Not exactly a game, but a statement and, maybe, an art object. And then we started turning this idea into a real game, adding quizzes, QTE events and what not. And on the second day we found out it doesn't actually work. It is not a statement and doesn't look like a good game.
So, we had a discussion and had this idea that you saw and played.
We didn't have enough time to flesh it out, so made it very simple. And the music was made at the last moment. It's a miracle this game even happened at all.
We take your criticism seriously and will try to make a better game next time. :thumbsup_tone1:

@fear-games Hey, thanks for your comment! You are too kind to praise a game entirely made of QTEs, which are usually hated in all games :laughing:

@tangiblegames I like a lot the idea of the art statement. Definitely would have stand out of any jam entries. Also would have gained many criticism but would have been worth it because I think it is fair that we express ourselves in videogames this way too.
Probably that in that case some twist would have been well received for the player as in some games do (Stanley Parable for instance unfolds a story behind the whole "freedom of will" statement) but maybe not as in other games they don't and that's the point too (Passage by Jason Rohrer).

Anyway. Thanks for your explainations. If you would like to review our game too, it would be cool. I did not do much on it but hey...

I had a lot of fun with this. The music is very fitting.

Очень зашли шутейки про отца алкоголика, наверное первая и единственная игра на этом в которой годный юмор :)
Дошел до 6 места, когда начались 3 кнопки и разные скорости смещения шкал там начался хаос, скоординировать три разных движения это как гладить по голове и животу в разные стороны используя термоядерные бластеры держа их щупальцами осьминога убийцы :)

@dioinecail Благодарим за столь лестный отзыв! :handshake:

@oune Thanks a lot!

Im really glad you spent time taking care of 'customer support', that definitely earns a thumbs up from me! :)

@popdaddygames Hey, thanks! Would love to play your game, btw, but it's Windows only. And it's local co-op, which just makes it even harder to get enough ratings, I suppose. It takes courage to make a game few people will play during an LD voting period. All the best to you!