Your old PC can't get online. DIALUP.EXE keeps failing, and the keyboard is broken. Half the keys are scrambled, some are cracked, and some are missing.
Luckily, a ladybug lives in there.
Walk across the keyboard and press keys to find out what they really type. The keyboard is scrambled in a specific pattern, and your job is to figure out the pattern and enter the correct word in under a certain amount of moves. HASHMAP.EXE fills in as you go. Spell out the answers, dig through the folders, find CONNECT.EXE, and get on THE NET.
Every step costs a move. Cracked keys cost more to press. Missing keys are holes you have to walk around. Run out of moves and it's game over.
Stuck? HELP.EXE on the desktop shows the controls.
SIMPLE TUTORIAL:
The goal of the game is to figure out a specific pattern that the keyboard is re-ordered in. You can think of the keyboard as being read out in a sequence, where you read it row by row, from left to right.
the keyboard will be re-ordered in specific patterns that you have to figure out. For example, it may be reordered from QWERTY->ABCDE. So when the bug presses the key Q, A is outputted onto the terminal.
Example:
Bug presses Q -> outputs A Bug presses W -> outputs B Bug presses N -> outputs Y Bug presses M -> outputs Z
USEFUL OVERALL STRATEGY: A useful strategy when trying to solve these problems is to start from key Q, and enter consecutive keys from Q,WERTY... and so on and so forth until you find a pattern. For the ABCDE example, pressing QWERTY in order as the bug would output ABCDE to the terminal. Useful for finding a pattern.
OPERATIONS: there are 9 different operations of varying difficulty that can be applied to the sequence of keys. A simple operation is FLIP. given an ordered sequence of characters, the entire sequence is flipped.
We will go over other operations besides these two, these are among the simplest ones. the trick is being able to pattern recognize an operation when you see it
GROUPING: the complete sequencing of characters can be split into different groups. For example, for the basic sequence ABCD...XYZ, can be split in half into 2 groups, one group starting from A..M and the second group going from N..Z.
ordering can be applied to each group independently. For example, the FLIP operation can be applied to the group A..M and N..Z, so that the sequence becomes M..A..Z..N. To re-iterate, a sequence like this would map to QWERTY keyboards row by row, so pressing the key Q would output the letter M on the game terminal, and pressing the key M would output the letter N on the game terminal (Because in our example character sequence, N is at the end of hte sequence, and in the QWERTY keyboard, the key M is at the end of the board)
CREDITS
Robert (RobertCloudDev): VFX Designer and Animator
Maxwell (Maxwe59): Back-end Developer, Game Structure/Management
Font: Press Start 2P by CodeMan38 (SIL Open Font License)
Made with Godot 4.7
NOTE: READ TUTORIAL ABOVE TO UNDERSTAND GAME MECHANICS
didn't have enough time to implement a tutorial in game lol
I liked the concept, and the visuals and controls felt smooth. I struggled to figure out how to play, though—the tutorial didn’t make the goal or the main mechanics clear to me. A short guided example at the start would help. I’d like to give it another try once I understand it better!
at first it was quite confusing, but i think i enjoyed the brevity of this game. maybe on startup you could've shown both Monitor and Keyboard. I was confused by the on screen keyboard at first. All in all a good fit for the theme and a nice package.
I didn't quite understand what I could do aside from try keys, and hope I get lucky finding the letters I'm looking for, and that the letters I needed weren't too far from each other. A lot of info is thrown at the player right away, so maybe just start in split mode, and make it clear all you have to do on level 1 is type a short word. I'm not convinced the scrambling is a good mechanic here. I think it'd work better as a movement puzzle on a keyboard with mechanics that get more complex over time. But maybe I'm missing something.
Comments4
All in all a good fit for the theme and a nice package.
I didn't quite understand what I could do aside from try keys, and hope I get lucky finding the letters I'm looking for, and that the letters I needed weren't too far from each other. A lot of info is thrown at the player right away, so maybe just start in split mode, and make it clear all you have to do on level 1 is type a short word. I'm not convinced the scrambling is a good mechanic here. I think it'd work better as a movement puzzle on a keyboard with mechanics that get more complex over time. But maybe I'm missing something.
Overall, very cool game!