Welcome to your exciting new job at Bankwave! As a Bankwave employee you'll deliver the highest standards of service to our loyal customers.
We know you'll fit right in with the Bankwave family.
Oh, and whatever rumors you've heard about missing deliveries of cash have been greatly exaggerated. Everything is fiiiine...
Controls
* Click: Pick up and interact. * Shift+Click: Stack bills and coins. * F: Fullscreen * Q: Quit
Tutorial
We've put together a small tutorial to help players understand how to play. Instructional graphics are forthcoming.
* Click to pick up items. * Shift+Click to stack bills and coins. * Click to drop items. * Drop unneeded items on customers to return them. * Place valid deposit slips or checks in your till. * Return or trash invalid paperwork and cash. * Keep your till balanced or suffer the consequences.
* Several race conditions which were causing game-breaking bugs and weird customer behavior were fixed by moving from `sync.Cond` to channels and a worker goroutine. * Crossfading issues which were resulting in crashes when switching from credits to main menu rapidly. * Resolved concurrent access to map causing crashes. * Fixed the logo on the splash screen so it actually shows... but I still don't know exactly what I did 😭. * Fixed a bug introduced by an earlier bugfix. :T * Addressed a few issues with dialogue not showing lines one at a time. * Lowered 10 minutes per day to 6 -- more playable with the amount of content we presently have. * Removed a few extra debug lines and test hacks that snuck in. * Fixed a bug which prevented the day/night cycle shader from working properly (swapping RBG for RGB 🙄) * Reverted back to Ebitengine v2.4.x and OpenGL on Windows, which reportedly yields better performance and stability. * Performance updates for text rendering by explicitly enabling caching in the etxt library we're using.
The Team
Meet Frabjous Studios' team for Ludum Dare 53! 🚀
Alex Mills is a naturally caffeinated math and computer science nerd who started leading his first videogame project at the tender age of seventeen. Since then, he's acquired almost twelve years of software developer experience. A proud corporate dropout since founding Frabjous Studios, he is perpetually five years behind on pop culture. He loved the ending to HBO's Game of Thrones.
Gregg Rossetti is a composer, producer, and teacher who specializes in creating both classical and commercial music, as well as occasionally performing. His musical accomplishments include performances across the U.S. and Canada, several commercially-released albums, and hours of music for video games, web-comics, and films.
Leot Goose was a traveling acrobatic juggling magician trained by a French mime. When he isn't working in marketing for Fortune 4 companies, he moonlights as a creative game developer. He is an experienced game consultant, and has assisted with the development of several indie games, books, and published TTRPG modules. Call him Mr. Goose.
David "Pixelgazer" Colditz is a budding musician and synth nerd who enjoys whichever esoteric genre of music you've never heard of. He is also an avid appreciator of bread and considers himself an internet connoisseur.
Carlos "Elekkay" Lazo is a freelance artist from Peru who is constantly drawing something -- yes, even as you read this. He loves pizza in any shape and every species of rodent.
Manifesting to this Earth-dimension through a slippage in the primordial Nexus, Jaye Cline returns to us as a hopefully non-toxic, sentient oil with a fondness for pixels and sub-catarrachtactenated-filobian culture.
PinkVirus is a young independent artist and developer 🎨👩💻. They love exploring and experimenting with different forms of art, from illustration to animation. 🧐 They enjoy the freedom their work provides and are always looking for new ways to improve their skills and express their creativity. 🚀
Joshua Djakaria is an avid board-gamer with a passion for discussing the works of philosophers like Kant, John Rawls, and Alan Watts. When he's not gaming, he likes to meditate and do yoga. He has over nine years of experience as a software engineer, and he's excited to use his skills to create video games that people will love.
CaptianSkilly is a young creative working in all of the fields involving music, visual art, and writing. He is trying to make his focus in life the mental health and well being of others, to help to change the world into a more loving and accepting place. He also really really likes taco bell, even after he swore to go organic.
Art and audio are great! So, I understood only one rule in this game: dragging money between the cash register and the client. Ouch, and the Panic Button! Nice work! It would be great if the player can clicking to the same banknotes for gather it all before move it into the cell. And it needs more readable feedback from the client that a time is running. Good luck!
You're right about feedback about the clock! We had planned a day/night cycle and it's implemented... but the shader refuses to do what it's supposed to. Might be related to using an unstable branch of Ebitengine because we're _living on the edge_.
Thanks for playing! Final submission will be ready here soon.
@katamary We're about to post the completed submission. Give it another try if you get the chance. :pray: There's a bit more polish on it now (still no day/night cycle though :C). :D
Wow beautiful game! Some indication that you have to drop money on the customers would have been good. I was also confused as to whether there was a difference between hitting next once you've done what they asked or finishing their dialogue. Otherwise well done, love the vibe!
Thank you @clowreed53! @jaycifer, @elekkay and PinkVirus each did an amazing job!
@cinterre thanks for playing and for the kind words! That's excellent feedback. I had imagined that the player would explore this for themselves, but maybe some hints would be helpful. In any case it's good to hear you found this feature on your own!
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Procok2 May 2023, 17:30
The music and art are both amazing, the game mechanically was very nice, and I found no bugs or oversights. Although I did not know what I was doing xD I just accepted every deposit, the turned away everyone who wanted money. That's how banks work right? I like the game a lot, a short writeup would be nice for it. Paper's please showed features slowly and guided you through stuff. I don't see what I need to do here clearly. I know you had way less time than paper's please so it's all good :D Very strong entry, good job! :)
> Papers Please showed features slowly and guided you through stuff. I don’t see what I need to do here clearly.
Excellent point! If we take this idea forward (and that's a very strong possibility) we'll be sure to put much more consideration towards teaching the player what to do. For the jam I thought it'd be interesting to see what comes out of it if we follow what big corporations sometimes do and just toss the player behind the customer service desk and let them figure it out.
I'm so glad that you got the reference that we were going for! Papers Please was our biggest influence for this title. Thanks so much for your kind words! :pray:
Everything about this game is great! I had much fun playing it! My only advice is to make it more clear that the conversation options are buttons. Initially, it didn't seem like buttons to me, so I needed a few moments to figure that out!
The art style and audio worked very nicely - especially liked the bank notes and the background of the city, the aliens etc. Also the boss was really very nicely done. I was not sure whether i did the job right or not some more clear feedback would have been good to track progress. Also the game crashed on me a few times, not sure why. Very solid entry overall indeed, super nice job!
> Also the game crashed on me a few times, not sure why.
@hotaloca what platform are you running on and what part of the game were you in? If you get the chance, I'd love a bug report at https://github.com/Frabjous-Studios/ldjam-53. :pray: Thank you for your kind words!
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blobo2 May 2023, 19:19
I loved the setting! The aesthetics and overall atmosphere were amazing, and the character designs were really creative!
I don't know if I ever understood the gameplay, and I was definitely doing it wrong the entire time.
I recorded my play session so I can provide extra feedback:
@100th-coin THANK YOU 🙏🙏🙏 for sharing your experience like that! It is incredibly enlightening. And we will be making a few major changes to the employee onboarding experience as a result. Can we give you playtester of the year??! There's an LDJam category for that -- right??
Really love the aesthetic, artstyle, mood, and audio! Super amazing job! I really didn't understand what I was supposed to do thought apart from giving them money. I hit Next a few times and it crashed the game.
@francis@cepeka Thank you for your kind words! We are aware of the crashes and as soon as our devs have had a bit of a break we'll look into getting them fixed later this week. 🙏
The music, art, and dialogue for this game are all incredible! Feels like a retro Papers Please. I would've loved to see a bit more feedback in response to my actions. I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to do with the slips, so I eventually just started pressing next and let the money pile up. I hope you keep working on this game after the jam, I'd love to see where it goes!
Good job, really neat graphics too. I tried to figure out what to do for a long time, I noticed the circle on the customer card but it did not seems to matter if i'm playing good for the bank or not. Also, I thought I could pass the card on a "reader" on the left. Spent some time on that too.
Thanks @arthur-sorignet-gautrot and @joe-cowman! We are definitely considering keeping this game going. You might just see it on a Kickstarter soon. 😉 Thanks for playing and keep being awesome!
Awesome sprites and overall vibe. I like it how you thought about situation when someone presses the bell while taking to supervisor at the beginning. This game looked like it could have interesting story, although there was... none? It's a shame, I'd love to vibe in this bank a little longer and maybe having some gameplay goal would make the experience a lot better. I'd also love to see how the consequences of player choices would play out but for now your game feels like a black box. Some dialogue lines are neat though! Lastly, I have two little nitpicks: the font in dialogues uses anti-aliasing(?), so they look a little weird, and I also think that repeating sprite of the supervisor right after you finish the first conversation doesn't look good (given you made a lot of cool designs for this game!).
@lisek-gagatek between you and me there are some race conditions that I need to resolve... :T Part of integrating with YarnSpinner. These are responsible for the vast majority of the stability issues right now. Thankfully, I have a good idea for a better design I can use to address them later this week. I'll be sure to post here once that's happened!
We also have each day locked in at 10 minutes of play time, when it needs to be closer to 6 minutes, based on the amount of content we have.
All of that means that there is much more of a story than players have been able to unlock so far -- we were able to include seven days of gameplay in the LDJam edition! Once the bugs and crashes are resolved that content should become accessible for all players.
I somehow got stuck at the start of day 2. My boss stands before me, but doesn't talk to me. But also doesn't leave :laughing: Awkward. I tried to ring the next customer bell, but that didn't make him leave either. :laughing:
I am very, very sorry to report that your game was extremely unstable for me and always crashed after about 2-4 customers (Windows version). I tried at least 6 times, but I could not identify any trigger I could name. It's a shame, because I love the setting, music, character designs and overall atmosphere! Also the idea, it seems like a kind of spin on Papers Please, which I love. Feel free to ping me if you should release a more stable version, I'll gladly give it another try and immerse into your world! (Call the cops? Why would I need to call the cops?)
First and foremost, the graphics, audio and premise were stellar. However, the Windows version kept crashing for me, around when the drone appeared. I tried multiple times to get past it and it just kept crashing. Pretty bummed I couldn't see more :( from what I did see, I really enjoyed though!
@conduit@purrseus v0.4.4 should be up within the next 10-15 minutes or so -- I've been told by a Windows user that it's much more stable. Let me know if you run into issues.
If either of you are able to run the game via cmd prompt -- it might show us logs during a crash, depending on the root cause.
Damn this game has a LOOK-- too bad you can't full screen! I played it on stream, here's the VOD if you're interested: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1812362155
I love the art and music! I dig what is going on here, but I had a lot of trouble understanding things. I couldn't figure out where to put the deposit slips, so I put them all in the trash. I thought they would go in what turned out to be the shredder. It would be nice if the shredder didn't appear until the day you start using it.
I didn't get why a sketchy robot was trying to give me all his cash, so I hit the panic buttons but nothing happened. I think it was just the money delivery?
Also, at the very beginning I didn't even understand how to have a conversation. I was pressing "NEXT" to advance the chat but my boss got upset with me for doing that!
So I like every aspect of the game that doesn't involve me being an idiot 🤦🏻♂️
PS: Tabletop Simulator has a great control scheme where you click-and-hold to drag things around, and if you right-click while holding something, you add one thing you're hovering over to your hand. It takes a minute to get used to but something like that could make this game quicker/smoother to handle.
> It would be nice if the shredder didn’t appear until the day you start using it.
My thoughts exactly! I had wanted to animate a little panel that would open up but decided that time during the Jam would be better spent on a day/night cycle (which works now! at least for me). Thanks for this feedback 🙏🏻
> I didn’t get why a sketchy robot was trying to give me all his cash, so I hit the panic buttons but nothing happened. I think it was just the money delivery?
Why on earth would you think your employer would give you panic buttons that actually work? :T
> It takes a minute to get used to but something like that could make this game quicker/smoother to handle.
Thanks for this idea! It's a great one. It could work great, but I guess I didn't think of it because I develop on a Macbook where I only use a trackpad (i.e. right-clicking is _hard_). I think for the commercial version we might have a 'trackpad mode' that enables something like the current Shift + Click system.
Thanks so much for playing and for providing excellent feedback! :pray: Keep being awesome!
The music and graphics for this were so good! There was definitely a period of confusion before things started to click and make sense. I do wish it was a little clearer that you can type in the account numbers and that there was a way to store deposit or withdrawal slips that hid them from view... or even a stamp for them to hand back to customers.
You already know about the crashing but I thought it might be worth adding that every 1-3 seconds, the game consistently freezes for a good half to full second which makes it pretty hard to interact with.
Back to playing it though, once everything clicks, it worked so well. I like the day to day with the little conversations. The ability to mess with rude customers and the shift click system works great. It's pretty nice counting stuff out and making sure everything is correct! I didn't see a timer so I never felt rushed so it's a great game to relax to that I'd love to see you all keep working on!
@sarah-alexa thanks for the kind words! I'm glad to hear that the core game loop is engaging! Devs on the project right now aren't quite the target audience for it, but we've decided to stick with it! We'll be polishing it up over the next two months or so before we start hyping our Kickstarter.
> You already know about the crashing but I thought it might be worth adding that every 1-3 seconds, the game consistently freezes for a good half to full second which makes it pretty hard to interact with.
Damn, I really need to get a Windows machine that I can profile it on. Everything's so smooth on my MacBook. :T Thanks for the bug report! We'll look into it. 🙏
Thanks for playing! You might be interested to know that we're doing a Kickstarter! You can join the wait-list to get an email once we announce the campaign!
I like the neon vapourwave aesthetic! This is like a banking version of Papers Please? Honestly it looks really awesome! I'm super hype! The music is really chill and I can imagine you can do a lot with the sotry and plot!
@frabjous-studios That’s definitely something I’ll keep an eye on!! Also I envy the deving on a Mac! I want to keep my windows laptop but I really want an escape to macOS!
It would be great if the player can clicking to the same banknotes for gather it all before move it into the cell. And it needs more readable feedback from the client that a time is running.
Good luck!