It is the year 3042. The machines have taken the control of the universe. Only a few groups of humans remain in the recondite corners of the space. After ages fighting against the machines, these has taken the control of a bunch numbers of human subjects. And the artificial intelligences are experiment with them; knowing their weakness; learning from their enemies.
The mechanics will challenge your reflexes and micromanagement skills. While you are repeating a simple key patterns, you have to stay aware of the hard disk state; the model batteries; and the subject time.
I made all the design, coding and art. For the music and sound effects, I have used royalty free resources from freesound.org and looperman.com.
I would appreciate some feedback a lot. Hope you enjoy it :D!
Mechanic Rules:
- You have to analyse 10 human subjects. Each one remains 32 seconds maximum to you to do it.
- Middle screen: Shows the key pattern you have to repeat (it refreshes every 3 seconds), to gain one analysing cell. When the bar is full, the human subject is analysed.
- Left screen: It shows you the amount of space used in disk(white). Each subject analysed fill 2 cells. If you run out of space, the next subject will be disintegrated by the system and 2 cells of space will be freed.
- Top right screen: It shows you the time remaining (white) of the current subject to be analysed.
- Three little screen on right bottom: The boost has a percentage to fill all the subject bar or burn the current subject; the bolt fills one battery of the model XhJG48_X. If the robot runs out of energy, you have to wait a few seconds until he is working again; the file removes one cell of data from the hard disk.
Change log
- minor bug fixes: the current subject bar ui didn't display correctly when discounting cells by time; some sprites overlapping.
This game is pretty intense and involves a lot of multitasking. It is only that it gets a little repetitive over time. The atmosphere of the game is well well created, it gave me the spooks.
Nice job man, I liked the look of it and really enjoyed the challenge of learning to type in the right patterns. It was hard!^^ Spins your head around a bit. Didn't really know the end goal, I played for a while but never really understood it. Will try again later, maybe read some more;) Overall great game!:)
Thanks for playing it @trozen ^^! Thank you. The boost has a chance to fill all the cells at once, but it has a percentage to fail and burn the current human; the save remove data from the hard disk (the monitor on the left) to have space enough for the next subjects; and the recharge fill the robot batteries with one cell. :D.
Really good atmosphere, and the gameplay is really fun, tried getting a perfect score, but ran into the problem where I literally didn't get the delete files power often enough to always have space on disk. Other than that it's really good! Love the clicking of the keyboard sound effect.
I really appreciate all your feedback. Thank you very much, for real:D! All of you are right. It might be complicated to understand some mechanics and the tutorial pad doesn't explain some points >.
First of all i really like the graphics and sound fx and music, remind me a lot "Red string club". Really love that. I also like the gameplay in itself that is to type combination of key to progress. Unfortunatly i didn't understood much at the first time. Maybe the UE should be a lil cleaner or explain more what you're dealing about (in my opinion). But great job keep it up pal !
You got a great atmosphere with the music and coloring. Very nice pixel art as well! Without reading the mechanics it was very hard to understand what I was doing.
Thank you very much @randdir@troligtvis and @krapht . I appreciate your words. I'm taking note of everything and I will try to not make the next jam game that hard. Sometime I have troubles to balance the difficulty. My intention was make it challenging but maybe is too much. Anyways, thank you very much for playing it guys! :D
this was fun and challenging... I love that 3 keys I use ALL THE TIME for gaming were suddenly impossible to remember which was which because I remembered them by touch not letter.
Amazing graphics. Really responsive controls. My only complaint is that when I "lose" the screen doesn't really show anything, unless I run out of space. Great game! I also really like the atmosphere and the setting.
That was a really good game! The graphics, the music (that typing SFX!), the and the intentional repetitiveness, as well as the "machine thinking" in it were very nice! For me it is one of the best games of this jam so far.
Awesome game. I really like the theme, and the robot+lab looks super cool.
The gameplay was ALMOST self-explanatory. The one aspect which confused me at first was that you had to use the mouse to activate the powerups. It might have worked better if they were numbered and activated by 1-3.
Since I really liked your game I will start with "negatives". I would definitely change the in-game font (right after the beginning), I was able to read it and it looks really cool, but I had to really focus. Also it can be bit confusing at the start even after reading all the notes from description. But! I was able to get into it pretty fast and had a great time. The art is amazing and the sounds/music fit very well to the mood of your entry! Great Job!
Great atmosphere, the graphics and music really plays well with one another, it was super hard to get into getting them letters in the right order, I work as a programmer, so I thought I would be great at it, but nope, I pretty much sucked! But a great experience never the less! Good job! Cheerz!
I absolutely adore the art style! Echoing other comments on being hard to parse without reading the description, though I've been guilty of this in several of my entries as well.
I don't really have much to add that others haven't already said. The atmosphere is great, the pixel art is excellent, and the music really gives a feel that you are doing dark (robot) work.
Challenge was not so much hard, but rather intimidating. It took a bit to wrap my head around how everything I had to do. With more development time, I would recommend starting with a few mechanics at first and gradually adding more over time, but that's not always doable in a jam.
Loved the presentation! Gameplay wise, didn't really click with me. I was trying to understand what the other bars meant event after reading the instructions. I think working on improving the player feedback so that its clearer what bars do and have the player understand why they need to do the patterns. Maybe start with a test subject that has few squares to feel and have a transition when its filled so that the player has a moment to appreciate what they did.
Very nice game! I included it in my compilation video series of the Ludum Dare 42 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/CqHeG7NJrrQ
I had trouble understanding the rules though. What exactly does the boost, save, and recharge do?