Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → README.btc
By heartclaw, alexfsmirnov, vaclav-kucera and enichols
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 140 | 3.87 | 43 | |
| Fun | 251 | 3.62 | 43 | |
| Innovation | 146 | 3.68 | 43 | |
| Theme | 394 | 3.54 | 43 | |
| Graphics | 777 | 3.14 | 43 | |
| Humor | 658 | 2.64 | 39 | |
| Mood | 163 | 3.81 | 43 |
Wow, This game was intense. You get immersed into this game really easily. I am a big nerd for games like this, hacking or crypto cyber games are really fun for me. I think the style and gameplay match eachother. The game is well made, has a challenge to it and is really fun to play! GREAT jam game!
Overall great puzzle game. One thing it was lacking for me was instant feedback about the correct answer
Such an interesting game!
I've started to feel that "sci-fi IT" mood, like in various movies. Graphics may not be the best (it is good though!), but with music it's even more immersive.
Great plot, I've enjoyed reading all those messages. Puzzles were confusing at some points, but they demand some thinking which is good. :smile:
Great job!
Great job on, very interesting take on the theme suggestion
I'm too bad in English to understand all the rules but the game looks cool
Great game, it has a lot of content for a game created in 3 days!
I like your take on the theme, and the gameplay is fun. Good work!
At first sight the rules was hard to understand, but the game is a great puzzle! I love that! Some feedback would be nice (you earn this and that, you had x good answers)
Quite a unique take on the theme and in general as far as gamejam games go imho, very interesting!
Interesting puzzles. It's not obvious what you have to do when you start the game, but idea and implementation are very nice. It looks like the big work was made on this project. My congratulations.
Great entry, very immersive. Didn't quite manage to get a grip of the minigame though, the mechanic of the toggle-able blocks seemed a bit inconsistent.
This was a neat puzzle game. Love it!
I like it! From the very beginning, it had me rubbing my hands and cackling with glee. Okay, maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but it was pretty cool, and I played through to the end. I wish I was able to make something this cool.
ReadMeGameOverScreen.png
Typo in manual: Dscribed Puzzles and computer interface were cool. README confused me. I guess it is notes to self, but it used YOU initially and then I. Also why would notes to self be in README? I kept trying to do things like drag windows around and reorder them because of habit.
For bitcoin validation: I would have liked feedback of whether or not my puzzle answer was correct (I think I was always correct). I was initially unsure about whether it would be possible to do all blue + all white at the same time, but I figured out that it will always be one or the other. There's a level where you can have a laser go through a 4-corners and hit the thing that blocks 4-corners. This was weird because it's a sort of self-contradiction. (https://imgur.com/a/QnOItdO) Teleporters have IN and OUT variations. I only figured this out because a teleporter was randomly not working and I looked more closely. They are visually very similar.
The hacker and inflation copypasta in news is pretty long, when they could be one line messages with a ... I dont know what is the point of hacking or inflation. I bought servers and defense early and didn't seem to have enough money to purchase inflation. I usually forgot the codes of the transactions requested by email. The way to donate was subtle, I noticed it after spending my money on other things There was an email about a transaction with no recipient number, which confused me because I'm dealing with lasers, not numbers. I would have liked if every puzzle started in a state where no dots are lit up and no 4-corner blockers are hit.
Overall, the game is very cool. I got the 'Life is nothing' ending.
Well I'm impressed. You got a full experience with both a puzzle game and a meta game. And both where pretty good as well! The texts may have been a bit uninspired, had some typos and some news could repeat but overall, great work on getting the mood right. I also got the "Currency is life" ending.
No linux :C
Very cool, and interesting puzzles.
Some of the mechanics were a bit opaque - I don't feel like I completely got a handle on what everything in the puzzles did, and the use of some of the things to purchase wasn't clear. A bit more depth in the manual, or some tutorial levels, would have helped.
This is great! Simple yet very effective. It wasn't immediately clear what each object did, but after playing around it was clear. I also didn't realize you could rotate the lasers at first, so a tutorial would have been helpful. Excellent job on the mood, keep it up!
This was really cool! I really appreciated the narrative behind the game and looked forward to reading the README each day. I'll admit the story was kind of simplistic, but it was still effective at putting me in the world of the game, especially for the time constraints of LD. It's kind of funny because one idea our group came up in brainstorming with was "Papers Please except you work at a bank", and this was kinda similar to that idea but executed on it very well.
The visual design and polish (menus, desktop screen) was great and worked well with the narrative.
The puzzles themselves were pretty fun. Like some others said above, I didn't realize until later that you could click on the lasers to rotate them, and I was also a little confused by the squares that cause other squares to become blockers, but overall I was able to figure out the mechanics by clicking around. The "teleporter" blocks were also a little strange because one was input-only and one was output-only, but there wasn't any visual distinction between the two, as far as I could tell. There was one level where I managed to highlight all white and blue squares, so I wasn't sure whether to accept. Finally, I thought some levels were surprisingly easy for their place in the game (there was one later on in the game that looked really complicated but almost all the white squares were already covered and you only needed to rotate one laser to hit the last one). Overall, though, the puzzle mechanics were neat and there were definitely some very interesting/fun ones.
A couple of very minor issues: - I accidentally closed the game at some point when trying to see what all the icons did. An "Are you sure?" confirmation would be nice. - I would have liked a summary of how I did each day. I had no clue how many I got right, and also didn't understand where exactly my money was coming from, so getting more of that would have helped with planning what to buy. - As some others said, the news got very noisy sometimes with a lot of the same things copy-pasted.
These things did not take away much from the game though, and overall, I thought this was great and enjoyed both the narrative and puzzling aspects. Nice job!
I wanted to download and try it out but the Windows download does not work for me. The drive folder opens but I am unable to download the files.
Damn it, this looks exactly like the kind of game I'd love... but I'm a lowly Linux user... any chance of a Linux/web build?
It's a nice game! I enjoyed it! Great job! :D
GameOver.png
Evaluation...
1 - Mechanics and Learning: Understanding the workings of puzzles was challenging at first. Then it was complicated to also reflect on the implications of the actions taken on the "desktop". I'm not sure why I missed it exactly (it did not take six days, according to the explanation, and in the email there was something threatening me, but it seemed to be for the next day). I think screens that explain more or less how each desktop icon works when we pass the mouse pointer over it would be positive for learning.
2 - Flow: Initially it was challenging, although it did not get to the point where I felt distressed. However, after playing twice (one until having to stop, and another to the end), I ended up noting that the anguish does not come in the puzzles, but in the general context. And that was very interesting.
3 - Narrative and Polishment: The narrative is presented during the game through text and at the end, also through text. This forces the player to read a lot, I think is typical of most strategic games. The graphic art was cool (especially considering the jam time). The sound was average, I think the song ends up becoming a point of tension and agony after some time (I do not know if it was the intention exactly).
4 - Culture: I believe you take advantage of current issues, moral issues, and current employment issues. This may attract some people, forming a community of players (favoring the sharing of different endings). This can be expanding stage to stage, with images to increase.
5 - Monetization: I do not see many ways to monetize; perhaps selling the game in its entirety, and then expanding some DLCs (some free, some not).
Hey @qzqxq, thanks for the review!
Could you show us the level where you could highlight all blue and all white squares? I'm pretty sure I've checked all of them, but it's totally possible I missed something.
Also, the teleporter blocks are a bit different if you look closely - input ones have an "arrow" pointing inwards on one side, and output ones have it pointing outwards.
Anyway, thanks for playing :)
@mrspeaker @cerkiewny Looks like quite a few people (including myself, actually) use Linux here. We'll try to make a Linux build during the next few days, I'll keep you updated :)
@alexfsmirnov I played through the levels again but couldn't manage to find it; my best guess is that I just missed a blue or white square somewhere when I made that statement, so sorry about that! Going through the levels again did give me a greater appreciation of the puzzle design, though. :P
I can see the arrows now, but even knowing they exist I still find them pretty hard to make out - I'd recommend making them a different color or something similarly distinctive.
Cool game, with lot of content created in 72h!! The rules are hard at the beginning, but at the end I understand. Great game! Congrats!
@qzqxq Thanks for your kind words and extensive feedback! Papers please is one of our favourite games and definitely an inspiration, we just thought it would be cool to play an actual crypto miner and validate transactions, but with the choice to accept/reject them on purpose :)
@mrspeaker @cerkiewny and everyone else, Linux build is up!