Fails to load on Chromium version 68.0.3440.106 on Arch Linux 64 bit. The game complains about losing the WebGL context.

@wirkilichkeinbaum Seems to run okay on Chrome 68.0.3440.106 and Firefox Quantum 61.0.2 on Windows. I'll keep investigating and see if I can get it to run on a linux distro. Anyway, thanks for trying it out !

On Safari (macOS) it says "WebGL 2 not available".

The artwork and voice takes were very appealing to me. I’m not really sure if this minimalistic approach fits into the category “game” but if you consider it a kind of virtual novel it is an awesome one. Cool submission. Good luck!

Good "visual novel". Sound design and voice acting are great. Pixel art is ok. I had hard time to recognize the environments and the props. Good job !

Audio seems to only come from the left.

Good voicing, interesting story. Audio is a bit wonky, seems to be only coming from the left speaker.

@akirassasin Sadly, this one's on us ; Godot WebAssembly HTML5 export requires WebGL 2, which is, to my knowledge, not supported yet by Safari.

@wiredoverload @max6333 Thanks for the report, it's fixed now, as indicated on our submission. I hope small bug fixes like these are within the allowed post-jam modifications...

Thank you all for playing !

I got the game working on Firefox, the story was great! A little more interactivity would be fun though.

Love pixel art) Good luck!

It all worked for me. It's probably the best one I played yet. The story was pretty cool but I feel like 42's voice didn't fit the game's style that well. I might be wrong but that's what I felt.

This was pretty interesting, and I had some great fun! The voice sound effects were also very nice.

Great game! Interesting to see some voice acting in a Ludum Dare game. I understand it was a visual novel but I still hope there would have been more to do.

I went back and played a second time just to make sure it is possible to lose: yup, it is, so it really is a game after all :)

I like the fact that 75 and 42 have so completely different voice styles, but was a bit disappointed to see that all the other characters have the same voice style as 75. Just one more voice style would have been fine, the different antagonists can all have the same voice; but the same voice as our avatar? That just feels weird.

This was really creative, the intro was a bit long though. The lady voice actor was pretty good too.

A good game idea, the music should be improved. The graphics are good.
Try our game too, maybe you'll like it)

Wow. That was terrific. And the voice actress of 42, she was amazing!

@jokku It sure was a challenge, and there's still much to improve, but we really wanted to give it a try. Great to hear you found it interesting!

@gelisam It is indeed a shame that we didn't have enough time left to make some other voices... At first I really wanted to voice everything, including the 'baddies', except 75 (if you played it, you probably understand why by now), but due to lack of time and decent material, we barely made it with finishing 42.. Definitely something we'll work harder on in the future! Thanks for the feedback & for playing (twice! ;) )

@g4mr Thank you! It is true that our rereading and restructuring of the script could have been more developped. This was our first time working together and we did learn a lot about how to step our game up for the next time. Hope to see you there ~

@raccoon-js Thank you so much! Glad you enjoyed it!

@darylsteak That's great to hear, thanks for playing!

@kajetan-andrzejak I gotta admit, voicing a pixel art character was risky... But we thought it could really add something interesting, so we went for it. Again, real shame that we missed out on doing the vilains voices. That's also maybe why 42's voicing can feel off.. she being the only one who talks and all the other characters having the same voices.. But it's awesome to hear that you enjoyed it that much for the rest! Thank you for the feedback

A little non-interactive for my tastes, but I finished it. Good audio, nice story.

That was cute! Nice voice acting and also some good Atari style pixel art.

The voice acting was superb! Also loved the art style. Great entry!

Ok, so I LOVE THIS GAME. That's all there is to it.

Good art and voice acting. Interesting story too. I didn't see a lot of visual novel in the jam yet, good to see something different for a while.

Well that was a pretty creative use of the theme. Taking it literally, a little too literally... :smirk:

I enjoyed the interactivity you do get, besides proceeding through the story. I think the voice acting is the most effective part of the game. There's good changes in dynamics and tone with the voice depending on the situation the character is in. The only thing that bothered me was that there was sometimes noticeable background noise or static when the voice played. But the overall voice acting was well done.

I do agree that it would have been great if 75 also had at least a different sound effect from the overseers (since it is addressed that 75 cannot speak, if I recall). And voices for the higher-ups would have been awesome. I guess the only thing missing for me was more background noise or ambiance. I loved the mood set by the pixel art colours, and the piano at the end was fitting enough, but there could have been way more sounds or ambiance during other parts, especially the ship chase scenes.

The story itself was pretty engaging, and I did laugh when I finally got how this connected to the theme. Nice work. :)

It was a pretty good visual novel, you nailed the mood, story, artstyle and the voice acting. Its hard to believe they were done in merely 3 days, and that's a good thing. But I personally think that the it lacked a bit of gameplay. It felt more like a story rather than a game since there wasn't any choices or meaningful action to be done. But overall this was pretty solid, I was impressed.

Voice acting was neat, also the game mechanic was good, but I lost at first (my keyboard ran out space) and looking at the intro again was tedious, a skip button would be greatly appreciated.

There is one point in the story where 42 ramps up the conversation and yells "75!!!" and I diligently pressed space to shoot da lasar but I died instead. I'm guessing it was the wrong moment?

That voice acting! Wow.

Wow, fantastic story and voice acting! So creative did you voice it?

@echo-team Woops that looks like a blunder on my part : in fact after that line 75 answers, and that's when the round symbol indicating that you can shoot appears. What is more strange is that pressing space at that point should not make you lose, it is not pressing space when you are supposed to that ends the game. Gotta look that one up. Thanks for the feedback !

@josehzz Glad you loved it ! We know that mechanic is tedious, some of our friends even did ragequit after losing the game, so thanks for being on the determined side !

@superqgs Yup, credits to @ignf !

@jlv It's possible I died in the next screen since I do remember seeing 75's answer (perhaps I kneejerk pressed left mouse as well). I didn't know about the round symbol XD

I thought the art was confusing and hard to follow. The plot could use some improvement to make it more interesting but I liked the ending and how it connected to the quote at the start. You should think about adding a timer for special events like hitting the space bar because I wasn't even aware you could die by hitting the wrong button because I would always wait around for an extra 20 seconds looking at the art and checking what button I was supposed to play. Making the game a little more interactive would've made me enjoy it more as well.

But besides the stuff I think you should've done, everything you guys put into the game was well polished and seemed to have a lot of effort put into it. Good job.

Really nice mood and vibe. This could be a very immersing novel, episode or something.
The story started really great, the voice was a nice addition and 75 being on the cocky funny side adds a lot.
The whole 'executives' being the bad guys was too much 1:1 in my opinion, but what do I know.
I enjoyed it, good luck.

Props for the voice acting and that robot animation, I got here from your post on how it was done.

The storytelling suffers from being mostly exposition. Almost all of the time is spent on building up the world, leaving nothing for knowing who these characters are and giving them opportunities to connect with the audience emotionally. This is a problem related to the work being short, but it's often encountered in science fiction and fantasy stories just because those settings allow the author to spend so much time going into details about weird alien races and magical gadgetry. Excessive exposition also frequently appears in games, not necessarily because it's hard to portray meaningful character interaction, but because the premise of most games means that they always have to spend their story time setting the stage for another combat scenario: "the bad guys are coming! see, they're really bad, they just kicked a puppy. better pick up a gun and trade witty banter with your AI buddy" and when you are telling that kind of story, it doesn't have to build up to anything in particular, because the rest of the gameplay will take over the experience - worrying about your health and ammo and feeling triumphant when you win and so on.

One of the appealing things about aiming for a visual novel kind of aesthetic is that you don't have to go for the combat scenarios. But if you put a giant robot in, then combat is expected as part of the genre(I tried doing a giant robot game once and learned that partway through). And then if you extrapolate from that to "ok, we'll add interactions that make for satisfying combat" you end up with some kind of strategy or action game. It takes some careful work to find a good mix of themes/scenario/interactive parts and make it all work together.

@ryanjavanshir & @luca1152 Thank you for sharing these kind words! Really hits the spot..!

@amba Entering a game so close to the visual novel genre is a risk to take.. the opinions can somewhat diverge and become controversial on the topic. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it is great to hear you were on the side who did enjoy it! :)

@random-storykeeper Thank you for your feedback! It's truly amazing to hear you enjoyed the voice performance. Of course, you're absolutly right to point out that the audio does have imperfections regarding some background noise/static. We unforunately did not have access to a proper studio and I'm certainly no professional when it comes to sound editing. There's indeed still quite a lot to improve, and I agree that some more sound ambiance could definitely be something worth adding. Again, the lack of time required sacrifices and this was one of them..

@bloc97 Thank you! That's a huge compliment!
You're not the only one who's feeling a bit dissapointed when it comes to having not that much interactivity, and that is totally understandable. Good thing you enjoyed it nevertheless. Perhaps we'll try something different next time?

@shellbot, @superqgs Thanks!!

@unitedfailures Maybe a timer could be an interesting idea, but we thought of adding this possibility of 'losing' as a sort of "oh, would you look at that, you can actually die"- kind of 'surprise'.
Thanks for your encouraging words! Glad to hear you enjoyed it anyway

Really cool game with a nice story,keep it up
Good luck🍀

I'm glad someone made a VN! They're an underutilized genre imo, and while the story's obviously short due to time constraints, it's still pretty good if a bit trope-y at times and constrained in development due to the time given. My only other minor complaints are that the music could use some development and the animation/continuity of the moving road was a bit confusing? (You enter on the left and it looks like you're going to the right, but enemies are to the right of you and you end up on the left anyways. Am I missing something?). Onto the positives, the sound design was great, I loved the voice acting, I loved the tone set, and this was easily one of the most innovative entries I've played so far! It seems like you've responded pretty well to the feedback above so if you decide to make a post-jam build, that'd be fun to see!

Great Mood! :D

Great voice acting, really like it!

Wow the storie.. I really like it, even if the graphisms were simple, I imagine everything of the storie, so cool ! Really !
Only one thing : It's a bit long to go back where we lost, maybe a checkpoint at the last SPACE-attack instead of restart the entire game ?
But really good job ! And a really good voice acting !

@aug Thanks for the kind words ! Your point regarding the tunnel is totally valid, as we reused the same displacements patterns for all in the ennemies in order to make it on time, hence the confusing layout.

@lu7cie Glad you enjoyed it ! To be honest, this game mechanic was kind of a last-minute addition linked to the "running out of space" joke, and it made me lose my temper more than once when playtesting the thing, so I'm still amazed people find it in themselves to keep going after running out of space. However, it's a design choice we'll have to live with for now; we'll probably implement a skip feature after the results ;)

@alej Thanks for your feedback ! Haha no political/social intent here, I just needed a cast of one-dimensional vilains "rankable" in a hierarchy, and in a power plant, the guys in charge are the first one that came to mind. No hard feelings against executive boards though.

@triplefox Thank you so much for your brilliant insight, both in my post and after playing our game !

Your first commentary about exposition is absolutely on point. I realize now, once everything is said and done, that without @ignf's voice contribution, the whole script would have been unreadable, due to the amount of exposition written in order to obtain somewhat meaningful combat scenes. What I would like to try out in a further LD entry is to use both visual communication and familiar context, in order to explain most of the setting with the first background and remain within the "relatable" realm without having to spend 5 minutes spouting world facts.

Your second point about the appeal of non-violent visual novels and the contradiction brought about by the presence a giant robot also hits home. However, that is something mostly due to my own gaming experience, my favorite visual novels being relatively combat-centered and, inversely, my favorite robot shows being the ones where character development is in the foreground compared to combat. I strongly believe that the "flow" of a VN, induced by the left click interaction, can be used in order to significantly improve action scenes and tell them in a unique way (although I'm nowhere near that point). But hey, objectively speaking, none of that makes much sense, as I also think players'expectations are the way you described them.

I loved the Audio, the Mood was on point too.
I feel like there could be more focus on the characters. Then again, making a visual novel in 3 days is in itself an achievement, and making deep interesting characters takes probably way longer than that.

Another thing that, once again, probably was difficult to squeeze into 3 days of developement, was to add some choices so that the player feels like his/her actions matter(ex: what if space power could be used for more thing and you had not enough space power to do every actions so you would've to choose what actions you were going to take and it would change the ending)

Then again, that's something that wasn't necessarily doable in such a short notice, because it crossed my mind when playing the game.

Anyway, there was a good amount of work here and it showed ! Keep it up ^^

Pretty high production values for a LD game with nice voice acting. Also, it's pretty brutal that you have to start from the beginning when you lose

Really nice game. I'm not a fan of visual novels, but this one was well done. The voice acting was awesome, I think it added the most atmosphere to the game.

Wow, well done with the voice acting!!

The art was great, but what I liked the most was the voice acting ! It was really good ! You never see dubbed games during a jam, and I thought it was a great touch. The story was good too, it gave me good vibes.

Quality sound!
Neat Concept!

Great voice acting and doing a visual novel justice in the short time of a jam is challenging, so well done.

Very nice, I actually liked only 42 speaking, it made her feel more like a teacher. Good voice acting nice story and quite a funny way of literally incorporating the theme. I did have a bug If I resized the window the text in the text boxes disappeared. Very impressive making me feel connected with the story in such a short time. I would have liked some more agency but I understand it's just the genre so adding some space-agency ;) was nice but could have been used a bit more maybe

Liked the voice acting and the story. Thank you so much for making it skipable as well! Feels like you did a lot in a short time, good job!

>75 - 75
42!!!

*Riveting stuff!*

It is a visual novel, as in there is text and there are pictures. Technically you also have interactivity, but it just comes down to pressing a different button sometimes to advance the dialog. Pressing the wrong button puts you back to the very beginning which is not an interesting consequence for failing and additionally wastes the user's time!

Here's a thought experiment I like to try whenever reading an interactive story: would printing it out on paper change the story structure in any way? In this case the answer is a disappointing and resounding **no**.

Here's what I look for in interactive storytelling, *for what that's worth*:
- Some choices, no fake choices (where the choice has absolutely no affect on anything, immediately or eventually)
- At least one high impact consequence (branches the story, usually near the end)
- Some random or otherwise indeterministic events (restarting from the beginning stays interesting as do future situations)
- Alternatively, saving and loading from any point (reduces re-reading the same parts over and over again)


Now, of course, some say:
> A visual novel running on a computer doesn't need to be interactive!

At which point I reply:
> Why bother with a computer then? Make an animation (as in, a video) or write a novel (with pictures) or a graphic novel (lovely these near identical terms, eh?) instead!

I don't find clicking (or tapping) a screen to be that different from turning a page, except that there usually is a lot more clicking involved, which is distracting more than anything. Then again, I don't read many (non-interactive) visual novels for reasons already revealed.

The jam had a tight deadline and I don't exactly know your original design intentions apart from the few comments, so... I'll refrain from rating this time.

@huvaakoodia Thank you for your detailed and *definitely uncompromising* insight ! I'm really glad you gave us these directions for better interactive storytelling. The thing is...we did not really intend to any give other power to the player than the ability to skip text. I'm a lover of great "flow" in visual novels, and I think that some writers manage to empower their storytelling with a unique sense of rhythm, thanks to this simple left-click interaction. But I am obviously far from this level; we simply tried to make a game we would have loved to play, and interactivity was not our top priority.

Self-justification aside, I really love these four bullets of yours ; these will be of great help for our next try, when we will finally try to design a proper video *game*. (Sorry for the SPACE-fail mechanic, we were truly desperate to make our novel somewhat interactive). Regarding our intentions, you were mostly on point ; we did not aim for any of the first three bullets, the last one being indeed one of the possible post-jam improvements (and the only way to redeem our glorious mechanic).

Once more, thank you for answering my request and providing us with your structured feedback !

Hey that was cool! I haven't played a bunch of visual novels, so it's always fun to give one a go. I can't believe how good the voice acting was! Interesting story, it helped tie it all together.

Quirky and unique interpretation of the theme! I like the low-fi art style. Story was alright, but what made this shine was the stellar voice acting, very impressive! Not a fan of quick time events though and would have preferred the "game over" to be replaced by some other story segment.

That was unique and as such - awesome! I really didn't expect such an entry and it left me pleasantly surprised. The voice acting is very much on point and combined with the story is what captivated me and made sure I complete the game (yes, i said it!). Would love to see what you guys do in the future (a.k.a. time to self-promote with a website or twitter account or something)

I'm used to 'read-blasting' through screens of screens of scrolling dialogue text when it comes to
visual-novels.. Until I noticed that you need to pay attention of the 'space' action prompt..
Good touch of adding Voice & Music to the visual novel.
I got caught off-guard to think that hitting space would be a quick-time event..
Instead this advance the context of the story by hitting space has done its purpose for this theme..:ok_hand:

It's a definite First to see in the wild a HTML5 build of a Visual Novel Game made in Godot! :thumbsup:

I'm always amazed by visual novels in the game jam and this was no exception. It's unbelievable how you find time to do art work, music, story line, and in this case voice acting. The spacebar pressing technique was also quite unique and I loved it. The story kept me to the end, it was definitely something. Very good entry!

cool!