Ludum Dare #37compo
TELEMATICS
"One Room".
You are in "THE One Room". The one room in which the fate of humanity is decided:
The control center of a nuclear missile base. It is the year 1968 and you are locked in this room, together with a big red button and a teletypewriter that gives you the information you need to protect you country.
You just hope you can finish your shift without starting a global thermonuclear war.
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Notes:
1) This game has 4 different endings, one of which can be considered the "good" ending.
2) Reaching the good ending is somewhat difficult and requires understanding the types of messages that the enemy is sending you.
3) The balance of the actual game may be a bit off as I didn't have time to balance it accordingly.
You are in "THE One Room". The one room in which the fate of humanity is decided:
The control center of a nuclear missile base. It is the year 1968 and you are locked in this room, together with a big red button and a teletypewriter that gives you the information you need to protect you country.
You just hope you can finish your shift without starting a global thermonuclear war.
--------------------------
Notes:
1) This game has 4 different endings, one of which can be considered the "good" ending.
2) Reaching the good ending is somewhat difficult and requires understanding the types of messages that the enemy is sending you.
3) The balance of the actual game may be a bit off as I didn't have time to balance it accordingly.



Comments26
Cool entry. Interesting presentation, if a bit dry, but i guess that sells the atmosphere even more so :D
Getting a more fallouty vibe from this than fallout 4 actually. good job on that :D
I realize a lot of the game is based around reading through text messages and limiting the input the player receives, but at times I felt like I could've used a couple extra indicators of whether the enemy was escalating or deescalating. A little display with "number of submarines active" or "number of silos open", or even just a pair of lights that flicker to indicate if the message you're receiving is positive or negative may have made the game more playable. The text was just scrolling too quickly for me to ascertain if the actions of the enemy nation were escalating or deescalating the situation.
Enjoyed my time though, thanks for the entry.
The scene itself is beautiful, and I was really impressed by the teletypewriter in particular. I found I was sometimes getting feedback a little too quickly, while at others I was craving information and getting nothing; this was great and the game was incredibly tense as a result. The jamming silo doors was a nice touch; I totally freaked out when that happened.
If you take it any further I'd like to see a couple more degrees of escalation to balance the difficulty. I agree with amras0000 that some clearer indication of whether the enemy is escalating or not might be helpful, but I'd also worry about relieving the tension too much with changes to the dynamics of the user feedback. It might be that with more granular escalation (and so more feedback via the teletypewriter) this isn't so necessary.
Some extra incentive (such as a leader board or at least an indication of how long you survived) might also be good, though I think the game's tone would suffer if the player could 'win'.
Lots of fun; a great game :)
Now of course the main concern is the difficulty. The game is a bit hard. But then again, after figuring out what the messages mean for a while and getting comfortable with the buttons, it is manageable to stay alive for quite a while. And the different endings mean you have different things to try while playing.
All in all a fantastic effort. Well done!
Learning curve is steep. At first the time passed too quickly for me and surviving for two hours was difficult. When I already knew how to react to the messages, I felt that they could have been more varied.
But the extremely limited communication through the typewriter was also very interesting. Maybe if it was a bit slower overall, giving the player time to react and think about what is happening, or if the messages were more varied, or if the player could 'bluff' in ways other than the controls.
Good job :)
The game is really fun too, but it is very hard and i had to replay it several times. That is no problem at all, but it would be great to skip the intro, so that you could start right over in case of nuclear destruction. :)
~josefnpat
Very atmospheric and also very pressing. I got the 3 endings but I don't want to work all day for the "good" ending.
The gameplay itself is pretty interesting and fit the theme very well. Now I found it quite hard to figure out how to stay alive (best I could do was 2pm, not sure if because of me pressing buttons correctly or just pure luck :P), anyway I felt the point of the game was more to convey a message and an atmosphere, and that it does really well. A little nitpick, I felt like some of the game over messages, while pretty funny broke the immersion a bit.
All in all it's a really impressive compo entry, and I'd really like to see more of that art style!
NB. Just before pressing Submit I tried a couple more playthroughs, and almost managed to finish my shift, so I think I start to get the hang of it ;)
I think this is a great interpretation of the theme. Just you in a room with extremely limited input and output, yet you can essentially destroy the whole world ...
The graphics are excellent and the telematics text is fantastic.
Really good work. I need to find out how to get the good ending :)