The Junkyard
Search for junk, dig it up, repair it, and craft it into useful tools.
A short incremental game for New Years IGJ2023. Theme was "Capped at 1", so junk is unique, and progress is all 0-1.
Click buttons to start an activity, one at a time. Search may find nothing, but there is still something to find until the button is disabled. Skills are needed to do everything, and higher skills will speed up progress. Some skills need to be unlocked with tools, and will be useless without them.
Comments
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when sequel
Fun game!
Why does CPU usage go so high when lots of items are waiting to be recovered or repaired? I got close to overheating a couple times because of this.
I haven't had this problem, but I did check the performance. It looks like most of the time the CPU is drawing numbers on the screen. Imagine if all the numbers you see on the page were updating as fast as the guide when you're watching one bar fill up.
For most people this won't be a big deal for this small game. I will try and avoid this in my next games, because I probably want more numbers on-screen. If you know anything about css, you can hide all the numbers you don't care about and it should go faster/cooler, but I can't really test it because my computer runs the game too fast to tell.
Sorry for the trouble. Thanks for the feedback!
Nice game, finished with a time of 4.25K. Took a bit to figure out how everything works so there were definitely some blunders early on, but after that it was pretty fun.
I feel like knowing exactly which items lead to the powered suit is the main bit of knowledge that would help complete the game faster. It's also really annoying having certain important skills only be present so late, but it's definitely part of the fun deciding if I should give up a skill in order to gain one I might care about more.
Good game, but the multipliers didn't make much sense. Building complex machinery should give higher multipliers (instead of simply adding every multiplier of that type together).
Tips:
The rules of the game are a bit inconsistent. I can recover an alloy plate with dig leverage and chop, despite not having the chop skill yet. Would make more sense if you actually needed them all.
Also after 10 minutes I still have nothing to craft. Maybe add an item to the craft list from the start so I have something to work towards. At the moment I'm just clicking stuff waiting for progression.
Regardless a fun and original concept, well done. Will keep playing to see if there's any other mechanics to find.
Edit: I'd like to add that you could easily spice up the skills by making them more descriptive. For instance, map the "large" item property to a "Haul large items" skill instead of just calling the skill large as well.
Power Suppy should probably be Power Supply :D
the color scheme is really unpleasant to look at.. the combination of low contrast and comparatively bright background is actually painful for me (combination photosensitivity and poor visual acuity).
so unfortunately, i can’t actually try the gameplay.
edit: to my shock, it actually responds to dark reader, unlike literally every other game i’ve clicked “run game” on itch.io. okay, giving this a whirl.
okay, having played through, some feedback: the tiny box bounding the game is the strangest thing, and the fullscreen button isn’t a practical solution, especially since a lot of things take a fair bit of time and someone might want to switch over to, say, discord. or at least keep it visible.
‘provides’ to me implies something is being gained, but in a large number of recipes you are trading a capability for itself, to no net benefit, or actually losing capabilities in net. more than once i accidentally lost my only source of a capability because i overlooked that it was attached to something strange (disconnect and welding are both weirdly arranged for sources). a clearer indication of losses would be nicer.
i kept expecting to get something to help with tiny and large, since they’re so slow, so i was surprised nothing turned up by the end.
criticisms aside: i love the shape of this, and it’s clear even partway through what the final payoff will be, and although getting a whole chain of “auto-search” providers is a slight letdown as you’re narrowing in on the goal, there is a tangible sense of “yeah i’m gonna fly”.
in a hypothetical larger game, an unfolding mechanic that uses this to get to ever increasingly higher tier sources of salvage would be neat, maybe work your way from a tony-stark-in-a-cave suit to something a bit more refined.
Glad you liked it! And I'm glad your existing tools worked. I'm using web technology for the graphics, without otherwise forcing color schemes and such. With a larger team I'd get screen readers and the like to work as well, but for now it's good to know that this is working without much additional testing from me.
Most of the issues you mention were intentional to give the game more of a puzzle aspect and/or challenge at the end, without making it tedious. But I agree there's a lot of room for improvement there, and these comments have helped. I'll need to get lots of people to help test if I do a longer-form game. For a short one like this, there was no time for refinement.
I'll keep this idea on my list of longer games to make. Though my amount of time for development is uncertain at the moment.
understandable with the time constraints.
i really like the design here, and something more fleshed out could be great.
best of luck finding time for hobbies.
So how do you Hard Reset the game when you have Firefox?
There should be a "Hard Reset" button at the bottom. It deletes your saved game, so you still have to refresh to restart the game, or it will autosave like usual on a ten second timer.
But you probably don't want to reset. There shouldn't be any stuck situations (send screenshot if you actually get one). And the game is short, an hour or two so if you're active.
Of all the games in the jam, this is the only one that works on mobile. Also it was pretty fun. 3.90k. Nice work.
Thanks for trying! I had mobile in mind, but I forgot to actually test it on a device. Glad it worked!
Great game! Only thing that didn't make sense was the disconnect ability. All the other one's objects make sense (ex: large pipe for leverage) but the disconnect ability is the power supply and the valve? from a practical perspective these make little sense and I was continually waiting for the disconnect item to appear in search until I eventually ran out of searchables and realized the issue.
Besides that its an awesome game and I would gladly play more even with its issues
to be a little more specific the problem is that both of these objects require disconnect ability, so I was intentionally avoiding them.
Evil Grin.
(We applaud optimization, but remember to have info and constraints first or it's not effective. Did you get a final time and then replay the game? Even though it's random I bet you did a lot better the second time!)
This was fun! I'd definitely be interested in playing more if you ever decide to expand on it.
Thanks! I'll consider a version2 but I have other ideas to try out first.
Rather interesting, although the dual-skill recoveries get weird since it means that one skill can be slightly ahead of another (My leverage is 0.02 behind because I'd started it slightly before I got the leverage ability but I then stopped it to progress in other stuff). The Mechanical Right Arm should probably also still provide a Searching bonus, since I"m guessing the metal detector still works in it :P
Sorry about the OCD trigger.
The MRA is part of the hidden tutorial that teaches you that you can lose a skill if you craft it away. That would have been more significant late-game, but the challenge of balancing while preventing a locked game was more than I could handle for this short game. So it ended up less of a puzzle than I intended, but no one should ever be locked out by missing skills.
Thanks for playing! I'll be more careful with balance in the future.
Yeah, I ended up noticing something giving me a "hidden" welding level to prevent being soft-locked.
Either way, an interesting idea and an experience I'm glad I played!
I think you can make the player "softlocked" by missing a certain skill, but at the same time, enable inverting a craft, so the player can get out of the softlock.
Inverting a craft should cost nothing, but it still takes time to craft it back.
WHY IS IT SO GODDAMN SMALL!?
You can make it full screen with itchio's button in the lower right. The game was designed to work at any size.
Full screening causes an unpleasant noise.
Definitely not from my speakers either, it's really fucking weird.
fullscreen doesn’t play nice with any kind of multitasking. the ability to actually resize the game would be nice.
The game is a browser screen, it's itch.io's interface that's poorly planned. In Firefox, once the game is started, I can right-click and select "This Frame -> Open Frame in New Window" to get the result you're looking for. There should be similar options in most browsers.