Haha, the story was great, the end screen had me laughing out loud.

Very fun game concept, I think you incorporated the theme well. Keeping track of all the new laws and skimming the text to get all the important information against the clock became more and more challenging. I was very immersed and super-focused the whole way through. Great job on the game and the writing in particular!

Funny and fun (that sounds weird), although I don't usually like text-based games, this was a fun-stressful game - keeping track of everything while trying to beat the clock was very entertaining.

Well done! Original and quite funny game. It's challenging at first but then when You get to know cases (from what I noticed They change a little) it's doable.

Okay yeah this can't possibly receive anything less than perfect for mood (I don't wanna die and I hope they change the penalty for me messing up to something smaller by the time next Thursday rolls around!) or humor or theme. And it's so unique! I mean, I've always said I was a speed-reader, and this ABSOLUTELY put that to the test.

I saw you said you hope to perform better next LD on Itch, but I mean... you already did so darn well!

The 10 second time limit and ever growing list of special cases added to the laws just made for a truly horrifying world. The job was impossible for me! Very excellent idea, and the mood is truly scary to think about. I was actually relieved to be fired though for a only a moment :sweat_smile: Despite the rush and struggles, I think you made something pretty innovative and unique! Nice work.

This is a super-clever idea, one of he best of the compo. I think ten seconds was a little too tight to make a good decision - maybe 10 seconds could have been given to review the new law, and then another ten for the case, and another ten to decide? I like the idea of high-speed judging, its pretty funny. Mood is excellent. Nicely done!

@pbg That would be a good change to make yeah, I noticed during testing that it was a bit more stressfull than I was aiming for (even after being very creative with how fast time passes in-game, there may be a slight time dilation going on :P). Thanks for the suggestion! :D

lovely idea(game)...(I guess I'm the worst judge ever)

There's too much information per ten second window. I am an incredibly fast reader and still couldn't keep up. This game obviously encourages skimming to look for keywords. This is not something I'm very good at, since I'm used to just reading linearly very fast and not thinking about how I'm reading. So it could be partially skill issue, but I am convinced that the timing is too tight to the point where meaningfully engaging with the game is near impossible.

I also made a game this jam where I was intentionally overwhelming the player with information. I think I learned some important lessons from playtesting that I'll talk about in my feedback here.

1. It is tempting to overwhelm the players so thoroughly that they understand nothing . After all that's the very point we are trying to make with our games, this could be viewed as achieving the intended experience. More difficulty is just selling that premise harder. I think this is a mistake. Understanding is a spectrum with being lost on one end and mastery on the other. Our target should be the sweet spot in which a player is trying their hardest to understand but it's still overwhelming. When the experience is too overwhelming, players give up. They won't engage with it the experience can be simplified to "have no idea what is going on".

It's better to have the players invest themselves into understanding something, and then overwhelm them. There must be a finely tuned balance where the experience isn't just all impossible complexity. If you go too far on difficulty then you ruin it.

I think the fundemental problem is this game is that it goes so far in being absurdly overwhelming that I grew apathetic and couldn't appreciate anything

2. It's so easy to keep adding funny and interesting complexities . We should be aware that these increase difficulty in a compounding way, instead of linearly per feature as might be intuitively expected. Varibles such as the amount of noise, amount of different types of information , facts that have to be kept in working memory and strangeness of information all interact in complex ways. Be careful in making one of these more difficult when that change exists in the context of all the others.

There's a lot of things that individually would be fun in this game, but all together makes it cross over to being "too much". Laws covering specific edge cases and potentially contradicting with lower order more general laws. Having to parse details such as age and gender, especially adding in NB. Having to keep all the laws in your head. Reading through the noise of the scenario for the key information. Not getting distracted by the silly details. Having to quickly connect the scenario info with the relevant laws to make judgement.
If I had to do some of these things, the game would be fun. It could be the right amount of overwhelming. All of these together, especially within a mere 10 second window is the problem for me. I am convinced the right answer would be to cut something.

3. Decide which information streams you want to be challenges and which you want to be helpful to the player. Having footholds for the player can be helpful in reaching the aforementioned balance of difficulty. Without things that actually help in understanding the only way to hit an interesting difficulty is to carefully make sure you don't go too far. I think this game suffers from having nothing in the player's corner. Perhaps the laws could be reworked to be more easy and useful to parse, which could have huge effects on the entire experience. Perhaps you could seperate the experience of reading new laws and judging new cases; giving you time interact with each.

Consciously acknowledging what is meant to be helpful and what is meant to be annoying goes a long way in intentionally designing things. It's especially important to test out the things that are meant to be helpful, and make sure they are doing their job.

This game and the cases are hilarious, but I couldn't figure out what was going on enough to actually judge most of the cases. I love the concept, but I feel like some tweaks to make it easier to play would be helpful.

Also, a bug report - if you keep clicking the same punishment while the "next case" button is showing up, you can win while only dealing with one case :)

@ninjacreeper47 That is some very good feedback. I did feel a lot of these things when I finally had the game finished enough to playtest it myself. Unfortunately this was too close to the deadline for me to make the wider changes that would've been needed to fix it. The only fix I had time to implement was that the 10 seconds are actually a bit more than 10 seconds, unfortunately stretching it any more would've been a bit too obvious. :D Thank you yet again for a list of things to keep in mind if I ever make a game like this again. :D

@john-wuller I thought I had finally released a game without an exploit, I was once again proven to be wrong. :P Thanks for the feedback and bug report. :D

The idea is a very fun one. The text being sometimes quite long and the instructions on the right being really confusing make the game very hard in my opinion. Looks I'm a terrible judge !

Fun concept, though the new laws every 10 seconds was a bit confusing, and made the game pretty difficult. That said, I enjoyed it, had fun, and quite a few good chuckles. Worth beating.

Cool game. The game looks good and plays well. Nice work.

Well done! I wish there was maybe a few extra seconds to read the new law before having 10 seconds to judge the person, but maybe it's better as frantic as it is. I also thought it was quite funny! Nice work.