Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD39 → Power, MT
By philstrahl
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 57 | 3.90 | 34 | |
| Fun | 250 | 3.31 | 34 | |
| Innovation | 153 | 3.50 | 34 | |
| Theme | 69 | 4.00 | 34 | |
| Audio | 25 | 4.03 | 34 | |
| Mood | 1 | 4.64 | 33 |
Wow, great job, beat it, really had me captivated! Excellent choice! It's amazing how visual this text based game was! Very clever! I've never really enjoyed a text game before, but this was actually quite thrilling! I really like how it left so much to be imagined and how mysterious it was. The only issue I saw was that there needed to be some emoji rendering shim because I just got boxes instead of the symbols. Or, perhaps just some fallback images?
The story is impressive. The only issue I have is that I got stuck with no button to press at the water tower:
"With a jolt you throw yourself at the valve. In the state that it's in, it comes off after one turn and a torrent of water bursts the riser pipe.
The torrent of water splashes down onto the field and floods the power generator that goes out with a gurgle and anlong with it the floodlights expire.
From down below a few bolts and flashes twitch from that embodiment of darkness but the few gallons that did hit it, instantly turn to steam with a hiss."
Really great job! The imagery is phenomenal, naturally accompanied by the dark sounds. I had a blast playing this, and I am not normally a fan of text based games! I think you've convinced me to start playing more games like these with this masterpiece.
Good job overall, I really liked how you were able to create an atmosphere in a text-adventure game. The game feels very alive. I also though the phone mechanic was smart and well thought out, so good job!
P.S. I cant wait to watch the documentary. They got me into jamming and I submitted my first game for this event because of them!
Very well written and fitting music.
This got me hooked! I'll bookmark it to finish it later, I want to try other people games too :)
Good job Phil!
@randompast Thank you for playing and you bring up a good point! I've replaced the emoji with little pixel images now :)
@jakub-panek Oh dear! That's a plot-stopper introduced by the wrong placement of a switch-statement. It's fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience!
@pixelformedstudios Wow, thank you so much for calling this rickety little thing a "masterpiece"! Glad you enjoyed it!
@xonic Thanks for playing and watching! I shot a lot of footage, but I hope it's not going to be too boring since all I do is frustratedly stare at text most of the time ;)
@smbe19 Thank you! :)
@uzyfeo Thank you, glad it got you on the hook, then. When you come back, there are fewer typos!
This was great. I loved the mood the music set.
This game is something special.
The story is very engaging and the sounds you added make it beautifully emerging.
You did a good job. I'll wait for your Post-Mortem on your youtube channel :wink:
Keep Coding!
The mood was good, and the music really set the tone, but the decisions (at least at the beginning) are simply 2 options, and you have no idea which one you should pick. I know it's too much to ask for a telltale style game, but with this style of game play, it feels cheap when you die. Other than that though, the game is impressively graphic, and has a captivating story
Really cool that you used actual locations. I was looking up where I was on google streetview and it was fun to see that there actually is a post office and school with a football field looking like you described it.
I've never actually played a text adventure before and it was surprisingly engaging and very atmospheric. Great job!
Double points for the theme also! You're actually running out of power, while also running out of Power Mt.
@omnipotentindie Thanks for the feedback! I wanted to kill players as early as possible to get the point across that, yes, you can die in this game and you should be on your toes. But if you felt that was cheap then I probably didn't make it clear enough that the monster still is on the front lawn, so that players know that the front door leads them to their demise.
@gurbx Hey that's great that you played the game like it was developed: With Google Streetview open for reference ;) Also, I am ecstatic that you put into words what my underlying concept of it all was: “Running out of power while running out of Power” Thank you so much!
The atmosphere is awesome, it really put's you in a dark place. I whish I could tell stories in an enganging and graphic way like you did on this game Haven't finished yet but at least I experienced the excruciating pain of my skin being torn off :P
What an awesome, breath taking experience. I was reading the texts at first and as the mood starts to rise, it became a moment to me to think twice before clicking on a decision. (At the start, I also turn on the compass and flashlight, I won't think I could make it without power) Most of the time I fail, even if I took so long but failed in the end. Gladly there's a power bank, like today's generation haha... Anyway :D
It's more of a puzzle styled game where there's a pattern that you build as you go along. The audio elements supported the darkness of the story. When I reset the game, I just clicked on the last choice that I assumed it was the correct like before, but sometimes it fails. So patterns sometimes don't work at this game (or is it just me). As I noticed that the battery at the start doesn't start the same as everyone else, it seemed like the start of the story will change the possible outcome of the game in the end. Totally this text game has a lot of potential, especially for the players who are used to read a lot of novels and books (unlike me...). You really did a great job in this game.
Is there a frame for winning though? As I'm trying to get to a victory point :D
@rombus Thanks for playing and your nice comment! Then now you know the feeling of how it felt, writing this game in the summer's heat with de deadline looming ;)
@toadietechnika Wow, thank you so much, Toadie! And the game is very deterministic, the only random instances are the amount of power you start out with (within reason, of course), how much you can recharge your phone with the power bank and how long it takes you in the marshes and examining around the post office. About the marsh: Having switched on both your light and your compass decreases the number of turns you have to take.
And yes, you definitely can win:
**SPOILERS**
> After you switch on the generator, the thing advanced and will get you after eight turns, which is enough to look at the photo and unlock the valve. If you've unlocked it before, you have to wait until the dark entity is close enough, otherwise, you miss it. The text should be clear as when it's the right moment :)
**END OF SPOILERS**
I've been following what you do for a while on youtube (looking forward to that ld38 and now of course ld39 documentary :wink:) and was a little surprised to see you go in such a different direction concept wise. Happy to say: it turned out great!!
Jumping right into the horror with Mr. Davidson in the beginning immediately made clear what kind of story this was going to be. Perfect amount of detail in the various settings and the story itself always was logical, meaning what I thought would be the right thing to do turned out to actually be the right decision :grin:
Only criticism I can think of is making the location options a little clearer. Sometimes I felt confused what heading "back north" meant in that situation, but that's probably just me haha
Overall very nice job (on the save system too, I can imagine that took some time...)
Nice Game Phil
@somethinboutgames Thank you for playing! Yeah, I wanted to try something where I wouldn't spend too much time polishing. Well, I found ways to polish anyway ;) And thanks for your feedback regarding the location text. Maybe I change them to e.g. "North, back where you came from" or something... or just "back where you came from," when the compass is turned off. The save system, however, was no work at all, it's a functionality that comes with the Sugarcube story-format for free. Still, I had enough coding to do with state checks, debugging, and the cell phone feature anyway. :)
Really enjoyed the mood , so misterios . The music added everything, a simple graphic game but with a beautiful and intriguing story ! Well done .
I'm still waiting the ld38 post mortem hahahaha .
Great job.... I used to live in Montana (not Power, though).
Really nice job with the ambience. Audio adds a lot to these Twine games and really bring them to the next level.
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This is one of my favorites so far, the mood and the use of the theme is superb!
Did anyone get more points? :grin:
@simonhutchinson Thanks, Simon! Much appreciated reading that from an audio guy :) And I hope there are no glaring mistakes in the story that reveal that I have never been to Montana...
@brorawr Thank you for playing and the nice words! I just played it and the highest score possible is 12, the fasted path is 45 turns so you did very well!
Finished in 46 turns and 12 points, although it did take me a couple of tries, I was somehow hoping it was going to be one of those classic type commands style text adventure games, but in 48 hours i guess not, still cool anyway. The story was fun although maybe a couple of odd moments - you are being chased by an evil creature, you are running for your life, you come across a bar you can't get into - option - take a photo. Seems like a strange moment for selfies but hey why not. Anyway I had fun, felt maybe a bit linear but that about my only complaint. The nice atmospheric music made it for me. If by chance you run out of games to stream ;) and you felt like playing my LD entry that would be cool too. Looking forward to next LD documentaries. Keep up the good work.
Really bold decision to make a text adventure, but it definitely paid off! You are very good at writing(especially for not speaking English natively I assume?) and with the help of ambience, you were able to set the mood and match the theme perfectly. It felt great going into the post office and scrounging around before being rewarded with more battery power. Nice entry overall and I look forward to watching your next documentaries!
@automatonvx I tried playing a text adventure with a parser recently (Seastalker by Infocom) and as a noob to the genre, I hated it xD So I wanted to make my text adventure much friendlier to people not familiar with the genre by offering a couple of sensible choices instead of having them run against an unforgiving parser.
I also agree in regards to the photo "puzzle", which is very arbitrary. The problem was that I didn't want to throw away the implementation of it because I needed something to put a little drama towards the end. By design I put the player in about three "hubs" from where they couldn't (or shouldn't) return to previous locations after a certain trigger. For one thing, this ensured that I pretty much always knew where the player was and what they had accomplished already, but also for pacing reasons, from the dramatic escape to a little exploration and a showdown — making it pretty linear indeed.
@teammonumental Thank you very much for your kind words! Correct, I am no native English speaker but I tried my best to hide that fact as best as I can. ;)
This was the most atmospheric games I've played so far! You did an amazing job with this game. I grew up playing text adventures and this brought back some of those good memories. Well done!
Great job on this game! I really love how using either the flashlight or the compass could change the outcome of a situation. It really adds a lot more decision making than if you were only able to choose from a list of paths. Not to mention, the audio/atmosphere are also really well done.
This is really nice, and it's refreshing to see interactive fiction in Ludum Dare! This had quite a bit more writing than I expected at the outset, so congrats on that! I think, as a result of so much story you wanted to give, there were times when I didn't really understand what to do or why I would choose any particular thing. With some things being timed, I would be places occasionally without anything I could do. Perhaps simply having a wait option on any passage would have helped let me know that sometimes I might be too early for something to happen. Also, since you're using Sugar Cube (which is my Twine format of choice), I would want the phone options to appear in the sidebar. That way, the player can always toggle their phone options and have more control over the power consumption. This also would clean up the passage space for when you simply always display it (the display looked quite nice, though!). Finally, the random starting power was a bit odd to me. I got lucky with a 92%, and that just told me to leave everything on the whole time, which worked fine (particularly with the recharge). I ended the game with 30+%, which makes me wonder if conserving power is even important.
@incobalt Thank you so much for your in-depth feedback! This was my first Twine/SugarCube game and I was picking it up as I went along, so I didn't even think that it was possible to stick the cell-phone menu into the side bar, I will definitely look into that.
And the only thing that's times is the monster approaching after you switched on the generator. Anything else is story-driven, meaning that a certain event only occurs when you have done everything necessary to progress. Very linear, I know, but it helped me keeping the whole thing manageable ;)
Regarding the starting power: When first playtesting, it wasn't possible to beat the game at all, no matter how well you played because I was very frugal with the power I provided my players with. So gradually I upped the initial power while reducing the drain-rate for flashlight & compass until it was almost impossible to run out of power unless players just run in circles. My reasoning behind this was to avoid frustration when you had to start over even if you did everything right, but not on the first try.
You did a great job creating a horror atmosphere, both with the visual descriptions in the text and the music. The story was well written and just the right length for an LD game. I also like that you kept the text fairly short on each page, as too much text would have slowed down the pace of the story.
One piece of the story that did puzzle me a bit was when I was in the middle of 3rd street and saw light coming from a trailer to the south, but I didn't seem to have an option to go south and explore it.
I finished in 58 turns and got 15 points.
@Avon Thank you very much! I tried to keep the amount of text bite-sized after the intro; break it up at least (cf. post office). I don't like being hit over the head with a wall of text and I assumed even playes of text adventures would like that either.
About the trailer with the faint light inside: Due to time constraints I had to cut that part where you'd meet Jackie, the only other soul alive in Power, to tell you a bit of back story and would offer you her power bank in exchange for something. But also pacing was wrong, and a fetch-quest didn't seem that appropriate either, so snip-snip! :)
Interesting way to present a game, I like the idea and the mood. I'm very interested in the way you do that! Did you use some framework or is handmade code?
@franfox Thank you for playing. And I used [Twine](https://twinery.org/) with the [SugarCube 2](http://www.motoslave.net/sugarcube/2/) story format for creating the game which frees you from (nearly) all the nitty-gritty of HTML5 and instead allows you to write the game with a bunch of macros in between for setting variables, changing state, and so on. Just download Twine and my source code and drop the .html file into the Twine editor and you can see exactly what's going on :)
Great story and music that intensifies mood also game is quite long with many choices to make one of the best games i played so far this ludum dare
Really interesting game! Loved the music and mood. It's really well written too! Congrats :smile:
Loved the mood Phil! Nice game! Still trying to win!
Thank you all for playing, voting, and your feedback!! :)