The models are great and look fun. It's my first time seeing a vegetable ship or a broccoli horse.
The dance battle aspect is not something I find enjoyable, there's just not a lot of fun in “smash as many keys as fast as possible”, especially if you need to do it for a while, and with all characters.
I suppose it would be more interesting if there was e.g. some pattern to follow, or another gimmick in the fight you can learn to do “well” and perfect with skill or experience.
But I admit I was most curious about the AI dialogue.
Kudos for implementing it, it's impressive. I was mainly trying to find out how well it works – e.g. if all the characters have a unique personality and how well they react when asked about the world and situation they're in.
The Chill Tomato is aware it's a tomato (good) – even when asked for its Latin name, says it's chill and chilling at *every* damn opportunity, and the dialogue looks like it would match its personality (“hey bro”, “I legit laughed hard”).
I told it I'm a tomato (“glad to have you join our ranks :)”), asked for my middle name (“Tater Mash”) and then full name – which seems to be “Potato Tater Mash Tomato”. Nice.
The problem is trying to get anything of substance out of it. Asking what the goal of the game is (or what I should be doing) gives you a very emotionless speech about finding happiness in life and making every day count.
Asking about other characters to beat gives you a list of various vegetable gangs, asking about other *tomatoes* to have a dance battle with gives you a list of made-up tomatoes, none of which are actually in the game. “What's your greatest fear?” gives you a philosophy essay about losing loved ones and being forgotten and I get no interesting reaction when I reply my favourite meal is a tomato. I feel it says “I see what you did there” or “I laughed hard” whenever it has trouble coming up with an answer.
But I'm impressed that I asked Redbeard about the name of his vessel (Scarlet Scallywag), and if he wants to change its name – he agreed and came up with Red Rogue, and correctly referred to the ship as such when asked later. Oh, and he says “we be sailing through stormy seas” when asked about the weather. But it might just be him losing his marbles.
So I think it's a very impressive gimmick to play with for a while, but it mostly gives you unique random banter, as long as your questions stay on topic with the character you're talking to.
The characters might benefit from an expanded shared set of instructions that tie them together, e.g. what are the other characters, what the world around is like, what are you all doing here, what the player should be doing etc.
I wonder what it would look like if you had to question the AI about a potential crucial piece of information you need to progress in the game. I imagine it would be either very easy or very hard depending on the line of questioning used.
I think I encountered a bug that stopped the “Thinking” label from appearing, so the game always looked stuck for a while after clicking on “Speak”. And the fact that characters repeat their last line when you talk to them later also doesn't seem quite right.
All in all, it's amazing what you managed to put together within the scope of a short game jam, and I've been curious to try a game that utilizes AI dialogue for a while, but beyond this simulation aspect, I don't think I would have a lot of fun playing the game in its current state for long.
But for a while, it's very interesting to be able to explore every little conversational cul-de-sac you can come up with despite the sometimes mixed results.