The Lonely Captain

tdennist 2017-05-01 22:58

This is a great interpretation of the theme, and I like the mystery of the environment you're dropped in. I assume the intention was to remain minimalistic, but a little bit more graphical depth would add to the story I think. I did really like how the audio indicates your proximity to obstacles, although I am still a little confused about how the obstacles work, since letting numbers run to 0 does not always cause you to crash. Anyway, great entry, I'd be interested to see it developed more!

avocadosan 2017-05-02 03:05

I really like the audio work in this game! :D

rinberd 2017-05-02 18:20

Cool, the little beeps gave a weird urgent feel to the game!

Writing was nice, good vocab, but the ending was really anticlimactic (especially after those space things referenced in the story) :D But yeah, can't have much writing in 48 hours

voxel 2017-05-03 11:15

Very nice. Took me a while to work out how to get into space but I made it eventually ;)

euske 2017-05-03 11:57

I liked the setup, but didn't really get what to do with the numbers. Are these the other "lost" compasses?

nander 2017-05-03 11:58

@voxel you troll..

@euske These are distances to objects you die if you collide with them.

g12345 2017-05-03 12:04

The intro was very effective. Took me a while to keep me alive, and then I could read all the text. It was a lot of writing in a short time.

Ending was a bit meh, but has lots more potential.

I'd still consider it to be kinda text-adventure, or at least, CYOA.

amras0000 2017-05-03 12:35

There's a part of me that would have really liked this to be written in curses, not love, and played from a terminal. The graphical inteface felt just a tiny bit more than neccesssary for the game.

That thought aside, I loved this experience. A minimal control scheme which distracts you from a text adventure is not something I've seen before, and I do adore it. Every other instance I've seen of a game merging long text narratives and action gameplay, the two have had a solid dividing line. One has always been paused while the other was going. But this merges the two in a really satisfying manner. Great work on that.

One concern about the story: after all the dialogue is finished and I'm on the ending screen, I get to keep playing. Based on how the story ends, my course of action is obviously to aim for something to crash into. And what I'm expecting is a final piece of dialogue that accepts death as the final solution to the predicament. While the story's still unresolved, I'd be ok with the death scene being "I didn't want to die. Press space to try again", but once the story implies I should kill myself, I want a longer paragraph accepting it.

Some more nitpicks about the mechanics: I wasn't too clear on what the 3 red numbers meant. I didn't know if their order mattered, if the objects were some distance to my left/right, or directly in front of me presented in random order. Also, it seemed like sometimes I'd be getting really low numbers (~300), then turn a couple degrees and suddenly get really large ones. I just wasn't sure how to map the numbers to the actual map I was navigating, which meant avoiding obstacles mainly came down to clicking around the compass until the numbers got big again.

Maybe that was in line with your narrative though.

Still, I really enjoyed this game, and would love to see more like it, with the act of reading and absorbing information itself a realtime gameplay mechanic. I'm looking forward to seeing more games you end up making.

nander 2017-05-04 09:39

The three numbers are dstances measured in directions; 30 degrees left, center and 30 degrees right. Since the world is full of concave polygons, you can easily go from even 20 to no measurement.

I kind of purposely didn't fully explain the mechanic, because the character doesn't know what's going on either. I didn't want to 'ruin' the story by having to explain mechanics.