Late Medieval Network Engineer

*adventure awaits!*

*picking castles, taking names*

*the tunnels*

Intro

Late Medieval Network Engineer is a game where you play a Network Engineer in the Late Middle Ages, responsible for keeping the connections between a group of castles alive while the King is away.

To do this, you travel through the tunnels between castles, dealing with technically correct monsters and fearsome HTTP status codes, or possibly the other way around.

Instructions

Controls: Pointer / mouse, but you'll probably need to be on a laptop (or tablet) to see the whole screen. There are instruction modals in the game, but just in case:

Gameplay is split into two phases. In the overworld, you must choose a castle to travel to from your current castle (which will have a blue marker around it). Once you've chosen a castle, a red marker will appear underneath it. You can then travel by clicking the "travel" button in the left-hand pane.

Travelling takes 1 day. You have to survive for 14 days.

While travelling, you enter the other phase of the game. You are underground and must choose a route through a sequence of cards which will affect your status and the status of the tunnel you're in. You choose from the top row of cards, again using the mouse. Depending on your last choice of card, between 2 and 3 of this top row will be selectable. Cards not adjacent to your previous position will not be selectable.

The goal overall is to keep the network of tunnels healthy and also not die yourself. At the end of every turn, the network will suffer random damage which it is your job to repair.

Theme

I went with this design because the theme reminded me of the keep-alive HTTP header, so I wanted to create something that was kind of HTTP but not really. In this game, you are keeping a network alive.

Details

This game was made using kontra.js and my own tool for procedurally making sprites, pixel-factory.

I like pixel-factory because it lets me keep writing JavaScript all the way through the jam without breaking flow and changing to another tool. You can see an example here -- this is the worm card used in-game.

I'm pretty happy with the results (it's the first jam I've used it for). Generally I think sprites went well with a couple of notable exceptions (health bars in the tunnels, probably a few others).

I didn't get around to audio and wish I had now -- next jam I need to write less code and use more tools! "amount of source code produced" and "how fun the game is" are pretty much completely unrelated :smile:

Thanks for playing and reading, I appreciate it!