The Show Must Go Down

Oh, I see a high art masterpiece here! It is fun, innovative, narrative, and non-linear. Being on the backstage is never had so much entertainment.

This is a really cool idea for a game. It fits the theme really well and the humour was good. Although one thing I'd say is that there's not much to do for quite a lot of the game, most of it is standing about watching the play until you need to flip a switch or move a prop. Overall though I really enjoyed it!

Interesting concept I see potential, if you added more things to do it could be a pretty fun game.

Really funny, creative premise, and I liked the art and the general idea behind the game. It was a little unintuitive figuring out how to disrupt the play--I wasn't sure what to do with the objects on the table, although punching the curtain and dropping the piano were pretty obvious. I also feel like I would've picked up on things quicker if it didn't take me awhile to figure out that the narrative stability bar was going from bottom to top instead of vice versa. I'm probably just tired and braindead at this point, but I do feel like it might be more intuitive if you reversed the direction of the progress bar. In any case, wonderful work! Love the humor, the cool splitscreen layout, and the art is fun and appropriate to the concept. Also think you nailed the theme in a way I never would've considered.

Took me a sec to get what was going on, but once I did a very fun idea!

@beeguy Yeah, I had a whole bunch of other ideas of stuff to do (getting the floor wet, explosions, etc.) that would have kept you busy, but not enough time to get them working. Maybe I'll add to it later. Glad you enjoyed it though!

So cute character, and cool graphic style) I really have fun to play this game. Thank you!)

I like the cleverness of being the person backstage messing things up! Being able to mess with the mountain backdrop and switch props around was good, and required timing to pull off the mess correctly.

The piano was the best thing, and being able to land on the guy right at the start was a neat surprise.
Some of the placement of the actors seemed to be weird at parts. The hero stabbed the piano at the end and the mustache man fell over when I could only see him on the right. Even the actors were becoming unstable!

A small technical thing is that trying to replay the game made it so none of the prompts came up, but restarting the game fixed that up. Overall really good job!

@toppervideogames That piano drop was my favorite thing to work on and took up a lot of my jam time; I'm glad you like it!

Thanks for pointing out that bug. That was one line of code I forgot to remove that was messing that whole thing up. I fixed that as I was adding builds for Linux and Mac, so the current build for all three should now reflect that.

Very nice game, cool art and interesting idea. Great job!

But the play bust go on. I liked swapping out the weapons to see what happened. Really neat concept.

Yeah, really liking this game, all the individual elements are great, and it's a creative take on the theme (creative full stop).

It's ripe for some post-jam development. If you flesh it out a bit to include a tutorial and a few more levels it could be a real winner.

I found the idea of ​​ruining the show very interesting!

Never seen a game like this before, really unique and something you may want to pursue further. I had a fun time messing everything up. Great job!

The idea of ruining and destabilizing a play is a very unique to interpret the theme, but it looks wonderfully here. The dialogue and the different branching paths are fun to find, and the characters trying desperately to keep the play on track regardless of whatever you do is hilarious to watch. I also love how non-linear this game is-there are a lot of ways to mess up the play at different points, and certain actions will mess up the play more than others (The piano is the best one to play with). Overall, this is probably the funniest game I've played during this game jam.

"And so the Hero and the Princes 'Won', learning absolutely nothing."
Really original idea, and it was fun to mess around to try and get a few different endings to happen.
I had some good laughs at the dialogue, great submission!

Really cool and unique game! I think all the music, sounds, art, writing, concept, and use of theme came together really nicely! I don't think anything I did backstage promoted narrative stability, and I'm okay with that. Nothing quite like punching curtains, dropping pianos, and creating art by sabotaging art. Really cool entry!

I like this

HOLY MOTHER OF SHOWS! The creativity of the dialogue! All the branches! I have thrown the piano on BOTH the princess and the baddie at different times! it made me laugh a lot, comedy at its finest! Seeing Baddie McMoustache waving the leek wand or berating the guards was just awesome! I don't know how you had this idea, but be it known that I wished this game could be a full feature game with more levels!

Why there is no points for narrative. This will get at least 6!

This was really fun, there's a lot of potential in this idea, expand on what we can do and you'll have a really solid game!

Really interesting concept! I also found it kinda unintuitive interacting with the objects, but I figured it out. I think I did produce a bug where I kept picking up the package everywhere!

Lots of nice cinematic features

The music is KILLER! Figuring out all the ways you can affect the play was lots of fun, I could definitely see myself playing an extended version of this game with more scenarios and more ways to mess with the play. Very cute graphics too.

Great job!!

@timon I wish I could claim credit for the music and art, but most of it was free assets (except the characters, which only ended up that way because I couldn't model a face). I'm glad you enjoyed it though!

its a nice game and i love the various options i had.

Love the falling piano :'D

Other than that a very interesting game concept I'd love to see explored even further! Nice work!

Playing this game was an absolute delight! I loved timing the piano drop and watching the actors improvise! This game’s humor was outstanding and like someone else said, the models and assets used really fit the mood of the game. I'd love to see different levels/shows should you continue this game. I seriously had a blast playing. If this game were to become a fully fledged thing, I would play the heck out of it. There's a lot of replayability seeing how the narrative changes as you switch out the props. Overall outstanding submission :)

@tykenn Thanks for adding a linux build. It worked perfectly fine for me. This game was really creative and very funny, so great job. I liked all the small details like how there was a teleprompter in the background. This game would be really cool if it was extended (more plays and scenarios). I could see it being really popular on mobile devices and consoles also.

Overall, great submission!

Pretty funny game and a very unique idea!

Cool idea for a game, wish I had more options to mess around with stuff. Unless I'm missing what I use the money, sword, and leek on then all I can do is the piano and hack the teleprompter. Still though, seems like there's a lot of dialogue in this and possibly some replay value.

@cdunham You can take props off the table to make actors have to pick up the wrong props, although I only had time to make the dialogue change for different props in the first act. Thanks for playing!