chuckeles 2019-04-29 11:34
So I trusted you and turned off all antivirus measures. But this error pops up.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → Computers in a Nutshell
By gonutz
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 192 | 3.45 | 63 | |
| Fun | 184 | 3.37 | 61 | |
| Innovation | 22 | 3.99 | 60 | |
| Theme | 463 | 2.48 | 57 | |
| Graphics | 463 | 2.43 | 54 | |
| Humor | 23 | 3.90 | 59 | |
| Mood | 284 | 3.02 | 55 |
So I trusted you and turned off all antivirus measures. But this error pops up.
Yeah I'm not sure about this... I'm already regretting downloading this 'game'. It crashed on me with a suspicious error message. It's gonna be a hard pass for me.
I also got an error message when starting it. It triggered my antivirus when starting...
Didn't run for me either, so... I guess it lives up to the title at least!
@chuckeles @splicedev @otresnjak Hey, thank you all for trying it out. I was afraid something like this would happen so I better explain myself here... :-)
@chuckeles it seems this answer is not for you, judging from your tongue-in-cheek way to formulate your comment, it seems you are playing the game right.
For the others, please tell me WHAT the error message is exactly. Does it produce a log file...?
If you only experience anti-virus alerts, that is a different thing, as said in the description, those should be ignored. But if you encounter any further error messages, it might be a good idea to investigate them...
I couldn't start it, immediately came up with an error and outputted an encrypted log, and trying to decrypt the log isn't possible since I don't know what the password is. Shame because this game looks like it would be funny.
@gamepopper Continue, you are already playing it. :-)
@gonutz Okay now you say that, this game just got a bit more interesting. Thanks for filling up my documents folder with thousands of text files. :smirk_cat:
@gamepopper Now you're on to something! :-D
Let me known when you get your errors fixed and have played the actual game :-)
Dudes, keep at it. Apply your brain, you'll figure it out :D
Gotta admit, it's a challange
I just got past the many log files, you can do it, too
gamma.png
No spoilers though :P
Edit: I've done it. That was, well unusual I have to admit, but alot of fun. I tend to like riddles anyway, so a riddle that requires you to come up with creative solutions is right up my alley.
--------------------------- Error --------------------------- Failed to upload your rating.
I hope you enjoyed the game. Judging from your rating you are eager to give this game a great review with a detailed comment on its Ludum Dare site
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/$141527
Remember that though the game might have been rather short, much emphasis was put on compatibility, security and reliability so you got to enjoy a high quality game.
Thanks for playing!
- gonutz
P.S. did you know that you can hit Ctrl+C in a Windows message box and it will save the text to clipboard? Go ahead, try it. --------------------------- OK ---------------------------
Great game though imho, 5/5
Don't even need to pick up the game to give it 5* for humour. Comments only add to it :~)
Interesting...
Very interesting game indeed! I like this kind of puzzle. Very creative!
stumped at the thousand log files, but what a hilarious and outside of the box creation. love it! :)
Well that's incredibly cool. No points for graphics (obviously). But the humor was interesting satire, and the whole concept is extremely creative. I haven't finished it yet, but I don't see what it has to do with the theme.
I feel dumb right now, I cannot seem to get past the very start of the game (although I know this is part of the game). I tried adding --decrypt-log to the end of the file name, but that doesn't seem to work. :S Really like the premise so far though!
I guess there is some problem with your game... 2019-04-30 20_50_52-LD.png
@nexusviper I don't see one... ;-)
In case this was not a troll post - let me tell you that you are already playing. Have fun! :-)
Heh... that's clever. I'm embarrassed to say what I had to do to solve the log files... Well done.
--------------------------- Error --------------------------- Failed to upload your rating.
I hope you enjoyed the game. Judging from your rating you are eager to give this game a great review with a detailed comment on its Ludum Dare site
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/$141527
Remember that though the game might have been rather short, much emphasis was put on compatibility, security and reliability so you got to enjoy a high quality game.
Thanks for playing!
- gonutz
P.S. did you know that you can hit Ctrl+C in a Windows message box and it will save the text to clipboard? Go ahead, try it. --------------------------- OK ---------------------------
@liauj Oh please tell me! I am very excited to hear the creative ways in which people solve my evil puzzles :-)
Congratulations, by the way, on making it through!
@kevin-liu Hey Kevin, how is it going. Have you managed to "play" the game set? :-)
@gonutz I managed to get past the initial part-- now I'm stuck with a ton of log files, hahaha.
Just passed it.. with the help of the "walkthrough" :)
@khaoz-fang you mean the walkthrough of main.go or which one? :-)
Really fun idea! I love puzzles and this one was great. Good job
I'm extremely confused on the text files and I've been trying for over an hour. Can someone please give me a pointer
I did it! I've never felt more accomplished and frustrated in my life!
As annoying as it is, I really love this game. It's very unique and frustratingly funny. I found the auto-save thing hilariously unexpected. I wouldn't have gotten passed the 1000 .log files without looking at main.go. That challenge seemed a bit unfairly tedious, even after combining them into one file and removing the "loading image 'nutshell/computer" text and scrolling through it just because of how massive the one text file was, but other than that, all of the puzzles were very clever and funny. It does fit the theme very well. I spent an hour of my life to "buy" a <5 minute game, but it was worth it. You are evil, this game is evil, but great job!
@muchoswaffles thanks for the great and detailed review! I love to hear how people solve the puzzles and how they feel while doing it - mostly frustrated like you I guess :-)
For the 1000 log files, there are multiple ways of solving that, yours is a good one. I have not even thought about many of them but going with you approach, how about writing a script that replaces the "nutshell/computer"s in the original 1000 text files with nothing and then sorting by file size? I had not thought of this yet.
By the way, that is why I am so proud of this game. It does not give you the solutions and not even the tools to solve it. You basically have to be a programmer to be able to come up with solutions for the puzzles, you need to know your computer and have the right toolbox to get through the game. This is my first entry that is more on the experimental side of things. My other games were classical 2D jump'n'runny games that I am also very proud of but this time I wanted to do something new.
Also big props for interpreting the theme. I was thinking about writing this in the description because I feel the same way about computers in general. They often work terribly and I have spent a large part of my life getting them to work the way I want. That, to me, is what "Your Life is Currency" is about in this game. I did not write this in the decription, though, because people are smart and they can figure things out!
I had the same problem like nexusviper. Sorry that I couldn't play it, but it was probably a good game.
@nexusviper @franciszek-pyrc You played it, you just stopped. Give it another try. You can do it. Solve the error message.
WOW This game i most unique game i've ever see in my life! Great job!
@c0d3d Hey, I am sorry you got stuck at the log files, please see the posts three above this where I replay to muchoswaffles, there is a possible solution in there if you want to give it another go. I would be very happy to hear back from you, my game is supposed to be frustrating, but not too much :-)
Also great to hear that you put that much effort into the game already!
Wow, that's meta!
Really proud of myself finishing your game. That was a really really really original game. That was a long time since I didn't use the grep command (for log files). Had a good laugh at the password form and at the autosave part. Well done!
Wow...that was a cliffhanger. I like the social commentary of Auto-saves. In the end, I skipped the log files and tried to ... ERR--ARR-BLEEP ... and after that I GORF-C64-VIC-20-DFSDFSDFASDF ... and then I was able to start the game and play! I think my life was currency playing!!!
I mean windows wouldn't start it but hey you wasted 10 seconds of my life so I used up some currency. If you have time check out my game too :v:
This seems interesting, but I'm already stuck. I'm not sure what it means by "Decrypt the file using this application with flag --decrypt-log". What does it mean by Flag?
@lexyvil it means that you should call the program from your command line and then pass "--decrypt-log" as the argument, so basically it looks like this:
C:\Users\you> Computers.in.a.Nutshell.exe --decrypt-log
The arguments after the .exe file name are referred to as "flags", "parameters" or "arguments".
Let me know how it goes :-)
Man, that was a real mental workout. I was only able to make sense of the log files by looking at the source code to see what it was supposed to spit out (no way am I opening all 1000 one after the other!), but other than that I was able to get the game running and finished without too much trouble. It's a very fun and inventive idea with a strong message. Good job!
@gonutz not sure how to find password manually in a blank file..
@nexusviper or is it really blank...?
--------------------------- Error --------------------------- Failed to upload your rating.
I hope you enjoyed the game. Judging from your rating you are eager to give this game a great review with a detailed comment on its Ludum Dare site
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/$141527
Remember that though the game might have been rather short, much emphasis was put on compatibility, security and reliability so you got to enjoy a high quality game.
Thanks for playing!
- gonutz
P.S. did you know that you can hit Ctrl+C in a Windows message box and it will save the text to clipboard? Go ahead, try it. --------------------------- ΟΚ ---------------------------
Oy, look at that, it works :grin:
Sorry to say I didn't actually pass the 1000log thing, went straight to the --gamma thing.
@liauj @khaoz-fang @muchoswaffles @microwerx @f1krazy @lyrcaxis
How many people just look at the source code to get the answer?! ;-)
In fact I was thinking about this solution since I just wrote the code the way I always do, extracting common things that appear often and that I wanted to change easily into constants and putting them at the top of the code. I realized that this was an option half way through finishing the game and I intentionally left it in because that is a valid solution in my opinion. The whole game is not built in a way that will let you solve it without any external tools. The least you must do is open a command line (or create a link to the .exe and edit its parameters) and look through actual files on your computer. I wanted to create a challenge that felt real and where players must know their computer well to solve it, that is why you have to use real tools, everybody might use something else. Looking at the source code is just as viable a solution as any other, even if not quite as much fun :-)
I tried copying/pasting from the log file, then I opened the .EXE with a text editor and tried copying/pasting different strings as passwords, then I tried several times guessing passwords, then I tried running a certain string from the .EXE. Didn’t look at the source. If this is too spoiling, I’ll rewrite this comment if you’d like...
@microwerx that sounds very funny to me, knowing all the answers ;-) Don't worry, this is not too spoiling, there is a spoiler warning in the text after all and if people are like me, they just look for the game link and start playing, without even reading a thing about it. That is my preferred way of experiencing a game. Also busts games that do not include their controls in-game :-)
Interesting game! Couldn't find the problem in the log files, so ended up looking through the EXE file instead. I could find at least two ways of solving it from the EXE file. But I also found indications that there are more ways to find.
Very original game, and very relatable problems! Well done!
Big suggestion for next time you want to do something like this, make sure that it comes in a folder and any additional files get generated in that folder it came in, otherwise you might clutter someones folder and they might very much dislike that(like me)
--------------------------- Error --------------------------- Failed to upload your rating.
I hope you enjoyed the game. Judging from your rating you are eager to give this game a great review with a detailed comment on its Ludum Dare site
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/$141527
Remember that though the game might have been rather short, much emphasis was put on compatibility, security and reliability so you got to enjoy a high quality game.
Thanks for playing!
- gonutz
P.S. did you know that you can hit Ctrl+C in a Windows message box and it will save the text to clipboard? Go ahead, try it. --------------------------- OK ---------------------------
That game is so damn hard, how did I end up using GIMP to play it?
The idea of your game is just brilliant, thank you for making me wasting time (yet laughing ^^) x)
@gonutz I did look at your source code, three times in fact:
1) Before I attempted to download the project, because reading the comment section initially sketched me out :P 2) I thought I had no answer to the final section, which I was apparently doing just slightly wrong. Had I continued to try, I likely would have figured it out by sheer chance. Maybe. 3) You got me interested in Go hahahah
By the way, my embarrassing solution (SPOILER---->) for the log files involved concatenating all log files into a single text file, using a word editor to replace all common keywords and numerical digits with white space, and finally searching for the last standing string. Probably not my greatest idea but it worked lol
@olavdeng2 Don't worry, once you complete a "level", all the files will be deleted. When you get through the whole game, the only file left will be the original game exe.
I conciously made this decision as this is supposed to be a satire on my life's experiences with computers. I actually have spent a way too large amount of time chasing log files after a Kernel panic and they really were all over the place. That is why I made it one file on the Desktop and a thousand in your Documents. Said to hear that that upset you. How did you like the game, though?
@liauj Wow, that is cool to hear, actually that solution to the log files would have been what I would do. This was one of my imagined scenarios of how to solve this if you had no clue where to look. I myself would during testing just grep for the magic word in that line, which you cannot know playing the game of course.
By the way, one thing for that stage was that I intentionally made all lines the same length so that all files would be exactly the same size. Otherwise you could simply sort by file size and be done :-)
Probably a good idea to look at the source code for a dubious game like this ;-)
Great to hear that you now have Go on your radar. As a Go missionary here on LD, might I come in for a moment and talk to you about Go...?
@gonutz do we need to use any specific text editor?? Because I scrolled through the entire log file but found nothing inside it... Is the password "blank" ?? hahahaa
@nexusviper No, just use any text editor that you want, I found a bug with the default Windows Notepad though: when you open Notepad, click on "Open...", then select the filter "All Files(*.*)" and select the .enclog file, it will not be displayed correctly. However, if you right-click on the .enclog file and say "Open with..." Notepad, it will show everything correctly. Basically everything that displays UTF-8 right (which today should be almost anything) will work.
Tip: the file is not ALL blank. Extra tip: use not only the vertical scroll bar, use the horizontal scroll bar as well ;-)
I really enjoyed the game. I like puzzles and happen to be a programmer who likes to throw together random scripts / parse things
Not what I expected. The wife walked away from this one while I grinded to the end.. well done unique experience! --------------------------- Error --------------------------- Failed to upload your rating.
I hope you enjoyed the game. Judging from your rating you are eager to give this game a great review with a detailed comment on its Ludum Dare site
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/$141527
Remember that though the game might have been rather short, much emphasis was put on compatibility, security and reliability so you got to enjoy a high quality game.
Thanks for playing!
- gonutz
P.S. did you know that you can hit Ctrl+C in a Windows message box and it will save the text to clipboard? Go ahead, try it. --------------------------- OK ---------------------------
Yup i have the same error as everyone else...
Ok I finally understood the first "level", but what I am supposed to do with the logs files in documents..? Any hint? :)
@jacqueslelezard sure, find out why the game did not start - that is what log files are for, right? ;-)
Unfortunately the game crashed on launch
What an epic finale! I used notepad, vscode, and photoshop with success (and at one point winrar unsuccessfully). I briefly considered rebuilding my drive index to enable file contents in search, and further along changing registry to access encryption options. What a journey! I'll probably still be laughing about this tomorrow.
PS. By chance, I got an error on the site while trying to post my feedback here: "Failed to post comment: Could update subscription status". Well played indeed.
Yeah, this is definitely not a game for me. I can appreciate what you were trying to do, but at the end of the day, I spent more than half an hour and got absolutely nowhere. A nice critique on poorly planned man-machine interactions, but being frustrating on purpose is still being frustrating. Eventually I got a point where I said "okay, I can either create a new Unity project, write and debug a script to automatically read through these 1000 files, then do whatever convoluted steps come next, OR I could be doing literally anything else." So I just quit. Sorry. I feel like you should have started with a few easier computer problems to better ease dumdums like me into the game.
Also, I'd just like to bring up this:
>If you cannot play the game please post a comment here to let me know
>By the way, do not read the comments
@rheel Please tell me the exact error message and if you can (!) reconstruct any log files to find a hint to the error message.
P.S. you are already playing the game right.
@nathant Hey, great to hear you "enjoyed" it :-D
Also nice that you noticed, that I purposefully sabotaged the LD homepage to make commenting on the game buggy as well ;-)
I did not even know there were encryption options that you can reach via the registry :-)
Thank you very much for the review, I'll be sure to check out your game later, it looks cool, the screen shots remind me of Katamari.
@niterich Hey, thanks for trying the game, sorry to hear that you did not like it. I knew it was not going to be for everybody. This is a game that I made specifically for programmers, I think almost all LD participants know how to write a script like you described in one language or another. That is actually the solution that I would have expected so you were heading the right way. Of course if you don't like puzzles like this, that is totally fine.
I still hope that this will only influence categories Fun and probably Overall. I was specifically going for Innovation this LD. I am actually surprised how many people commented that they find the game funny as well. The only thing I am really sure of is a 5/5 for graphics, that is non-debatable ;-)
As for your comment about comments, the spoiler warning had to be added after some posted the answers to puzzles. The other hint is actually to keep people from reading the comments as well. They are supposed to examine the error message and realize that it is too weird to be real and that it is part of the game. This was added after the first two of three comments were people telling me that the game crashed...
@gonutz Yeah, I'm sorry if my comment came across as mean. I guess I was just salty I couldn't beat your puzzle. And don't worry, I still gave you 5/5 in Innovation and Theme.
I wonder if it might be beneficial to post a semi-encoded walkthrough of the game just so people don't accidentally stumble across the answer in the comments. Like, write one answer in hexadecimal, change the font of another to Wingdings, etc. Seems like a lot of people are getting the hang of it though, so maybe it's just me.
Thanks for making me feel both unbelievably stupid and tremendously clever :'D
This was by far the jam game that I've spent the most time with, so thank you for this all-too-familiar experience.
No i did not enjoy this. It reminded me too much of my job and it took up way too much of my ld game playing time and filled my pc with files, i did not find it fun. Its inventive and clever though kind of like the python challenge! -RS
Is there an easy way to get rid of the files the game creates if I decide halfway through that I don't want to finish it?
Edit: yeah `--uninstall`
Double edit: yeah it's cool. The auto-save puzzle is a bit "yeah we get it already" but I did like the other ones. Busting open regexes and photoshop was a neat surprise. Also made me realize that I don't have Python on my computer, so I had to use NodeJS to write the script. Perfectly honest I was almost done writing a script to generate 100k pngs before i decided to look at the merged log file a little closer.
@jjjjason that is actually quite funny, what would these 100k PNGs have looked like?
This is a fun game and I really liked it! Good job! :)
Really wanted to play this game, I actually love puzzles like this, but I can't solve the first thing, 'cause I can't add arguments after my.exe file name. It just changes its name or type and nothing new happens. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? Win7, btw.
@daria-toni Don't worry, you can do two things to call the .exe with arguments:
1) Open a command line (cmd.exe), use cd to navigate to the game's .exe file, then type in the game's .exe file name in quotes and add the parameter after a space. This should look like this:
"Computers.in.a.Nutshell.exe" --some-argument
2) Instead of using cmd.exe you can also create a link, on your Desktop for example, then right-click the link and in the "Target" field where it contains the .exe name, append the flag to it. The Target field will then look like this:
C:\Users\You\Downloads\Computers.in.a.Nutshell.exe --some-argument
When you double-click the link the .exe will be started with this argument.
@gonutz wow, thank you for your fast answer :) I'll try it soon!
Great feeling! Althought I can't beat log file with Excel,I've learned "Levenshtein distance" from Wikipedia.
@gonutz Well, I finally managed to play your game! I won't spoil too much for the people reading the comments, but my goodness, what a game. I had definitely not suspected this when I downloaded it. Very creative game, and required me to come up with some solutions for some puzzles.
Interesting idea
@otresnjak @jschrtke @kajetan-andrzejak @devbat8712 @eddensoft @kaeveris @big-cow @themoonrise @franciszek-pyrc @pndaa @martomate @f1krazy @chuckeles @gamepopper @dkdwrek @c0d3d @microwerx @luckydaisy @whynotyt @jacqueslelezard @rheel @nathant @liauj @bee-sundance @olavdeng2 @solah @niterich @daria-toni @hangacs @nexusviper @splicedev @joe-the-really-old @kyavi @kevin-liu @lyrcaxis @gurkenlabs @jjjjason @cristihkj @khaoz-fang @muchoswaffles @a-coltzz @lexyvil
I want to thank you all for playing my game and for giving such great feedback! I have been busy returning the favors, I am still not quite done, about ten games to go but I think I will manage it before the dead line hits.
I have very much enjoyed your comments, creating a puzzle game is always dangerous because some people will simply not be able to solve all the puzzles and typically everybody gets stuck somewhere else. There is no real strategy for me as the developer to really know where the problems are until a lot of people have tried it. This is of course problematic for LD, 48 hours is not much time for intense testing :-)
Still I love the very positive response, I was surprised how many people actually found the game funny. I was afraid that frustration about the puzzles might overtake, I was ready for some negative reactions but everything was really positive, even the critique was polite and nice. That is how I try to write my reviews as well. This is a great community, you all did a great job and I want to encourage you to come back again, keep the positive spirit and have fun :-)
Thank you!
AMAZING! I am only finding this now, but I really enjoyed this game! It was creative, funny, and really quite interesting to play! I did glance at the first couple of comments before I downloaded the game. My antivirus was all in a huff, and I wanted to see if it was going to be worth the trouble, but they didn't really give much away.
I used powershell, which really made it less of a drag. Lol, that thousand log puzzle was the one I solved the fastest. I looked at the first file and realized that I only needed to search for the line that didn't have the word "OK".
The puzzle that really stumped me was the password creation one. Yeah, I'm an idiot. I spent half an hour trying to look for clues as to what password I should be putting in before finally going to the source code and realizing that I just hadn't been creating a strong enough password. Duh.
Here is my solution. I cleaned it up a bit. If somebody wants to use it, just remember to run it piece by piece as you solve the puzzle, not all at once.
``` #Directories $downloadDirectory = "C:\User\Downloads" $documentDirectory = "C:\User\Documents" $encryptedLogFile = "C:\User\Desktop\computers_in_a_nutshell.enclog" $thousandLogFormat = $documentDirectory + "\computers_in_a_nutshell_{0:00000}.log"
#Run The Game cd $downloadDirectory .\Computers.in.a.Nutshell.exe
#The Encryption Puzzle cd $downloadDirectory .\Computers.in.a.Nutshell.exe --decrypt-log
#Find The Encryption Key (Get-Content $encryptedLogFile -Encoding UTF8 | Out-String) -replace '\s+', ''
#The Thousand Log File Puzzle 1..1000 | ForEach { $thousandLogFormat -f $_ } | ForEach { Get-Content $_ } | Where-Object { !($_).Contains("OK") }
#The Gamma Correction Puzzle
cd $downloadDirectory .\Computers.in.a.Nutshell.exe --fix-graphics
#The Password Puzzle (Note: You must achieve a "Very Strong" in order to progress.) cd $downloadDirectory .\Computers.in.a.Nutshell.exe --gamma=1.72,-0.246,7
#The Final Round (It's the home stretch. You can let it all out; tears, laughter, roars, etc...) cd $downloadDirectory .\Computers.in.a.Nutshell.exe --version=0.0.12.43785634 ```
@good-enough Wow! You actually created a solution script, how cool is that! :-)
Thanks for playing the game and leaving such a cool comment, I really appreciate the great feedback. I especially like the "tears, laughter, roars" part as I just re-played the game myself yesterday after not thinking about it for a year.
Also I have never seen anybody use PowerShell really. No wonder you could solve the puzzles, you are solving them every day trying to get PowerShell scripts to run ;-)
@gonutz lol. I actually do use PowerShell a lot, but not in a work-related capacity. Command prompts and terminals scare me away because there are so many commands that I don't know, and I just don't get the process, but PowerShell's interface is a lot easier for me to understand for some reason.
And yeah, I was laughing very hard through that final piece.