ben-toosey 2023-01-09 16:46
I like the story and the take on the theme! I haven't seen an interpretation like this yet! Very familiar gameplay, but it's quite hard to think of multiple 9+ letter words for initial guesses!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Encryption Harvester
By lone-wolf
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 90 | 3.71 | 23 | |
| Fun | 55 | 3.86 | 24 | |
| Innovation | 118 | 3.52 | 24 | |
| Theme | 265 | 3.13 | 24 | |
| Graphics | 183 | 3.45 | 23 | |
| Audio | 100 | 3.50 | 24 | |
| Humor | 66 | 3.50 | 21 | |
| Mood | 30 | 4.00 | 23 |
I like the story and the take on the theme! I haven't seen an interpretation like this yet! Very familiar gameplay, but it's quite hard to think of multiple 9+ letter words for initial guesses!
Really liked this game. It was an interesting idea to make a wordle-like game but add a story. Would have liked to see a bit more relation to the theme but other than that it's a very good entry.
I really enjoying the different style of wordle game. The sounds effects are simple but on point. I would just prefer if you had to input actual words. By being able to input anything, it's far too easy to give in to the temptation to cheat. Anyway it's a solid idea otherwise well executed.
Really nice game. I enjoyed the story. The interface felt really good. It was great to interact with. The auto-typing looked/sounded great. After a few rounds, I stopped seeing yellow letters, which increased the difficulty significantly. At that point is was too hard, so I had to mostly cheat my way to the end. On that note, the cheat option was really useful, since I still wanted to see the story.
@ben-toosey @adamwatters @vasco-freitas @pincushion Thanks for playing and giving your feedback!
> I would just prefer if you had to input actual words. By being able to input anything, it’s far too easy to give in to the temptation to cheat.
I think being able to cheese it a bit helps stop people from using the !cheat command I provide. I've never made web requests with Godot either, so I'm not sure how quickly I could set it up to poll an online dictionary :P
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> After a few rounds, I stopped seeing yellow letters, which increased the difficulty significantly
Hmmm, good to know, I wanted to ramp up the difficulty further in the story but wasn't sure how much of an increase that was.
I did provide a setting to force-enable it, but I guess that's easily missed. I probably should have colored the *`disabled`* text red unknown2.png unknown.png
@lone-wolf I think I read the "yellow if they are found somewhere else in the world" and never read those instructions again, since I didn't expect that text to change. Colouring it red might have drawn my eye to it.
I think if you remove `Extra Letter Hints` and just show the yellow letters by default it would be much better. I enjoyed the story, but then I learned I can't enable the hints :cry:
@muhuk thanks for playing! What stopped you from force-enabling the hints?
You can exit to the main menu and click that toggle without losing your progress, should I have explained that?
@lone-wolf aliens probably :shrug:
@muhuk I don't have any game mechanics that prevent you from force-enabling the hints. Although I do disable `!cheat`s (not the same thing) in the timed mode, which is meant to be competitive. I don't think you were playing that though, so I'm stumped.
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* Enabling the post-jam version automatically turns on the force-extra-hints toggle * Made the yellow-letter help text below the hacking terminal more noticeable when disabled * Added help text saying your progress is saved if you exit to the menu
I loved this, though I must confess that by the end I cheated a bit
(for example, for a 9-letter word, typing in AAAAAAAAA then BBBBBBBBB, etc)
I think that a quality-of-life change would be to tell the player how long the word that they need to find is - otherwise I have to manually count the spaces.
@archfan7411 thanks for playing! Timed it perfectly with my review of your game lol
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> I think that a quality-of-life change would be to tell the player how long the word that they need to find is - otherwise I have to manually count the spaces.
I recently got my game played on stream by someone and they said the same thing. It's added to my TODO, although I'm not sure if I'll do anymore post-jam fixes
well polished and very original take on the theme. enjoyed the story, the hints are well balanced and to include a cheat command to help those who stuck shows the understanding of the goal of games in general as well. very nice entry by itself, and the fact it's a compo game just makes it even better!
I'll admit I made heavy use of those cheats, but I wanted to see it through! Nice work. The connection to the theme is a bit tenuous, but the story was compelling and it was well-presented.
Ooh! I spent way too much time on yours haha. I love it! Such a simple idea put in such awesome package! I haven't finished it though, I'm a bit too tired to do deep thinking
Some feedback I've got:
- I love the animations in the text when trying to decrypt the word. It gives this game a hollywood feeling - I like how you put the 'post-jam-toggle' inside the game - I have not yet seen a customize controls menu in an LD entry yet. Especially in a compo entry - I like how the game gives you the option to go further with the story, or for you to choose to kill the time with more puzzles!
@bartalomew @john-gabriel @wouter52 thanks for playing!
The post-jam toggle is convenient but it's surprisingly hard triple-checking everything to make sure only fixes make it into the jam version, I need to figure out a way of hosting multiple web versions
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While I'm talking about the post-jam version:
- Added letter count to the text showing the current word - Made the guess command change its color while typing if you don't have the right amount of letters - When you make a guess the terminal will automatically write 'guess ' for your next command - Added text to tell you when you're guessing two words merged together (like "PACIFICOCEAN" instead of "PACIFIC OCEAN") - Fixed highscore mode being pretty much impossible play. It might as well not be in the jam version. - Clear terminal whenever you move to a new set of words
- Fixed a bug where the highscore mode would hard-lock the game.
Ah, I think I spent a bit too much time banging my head against the wall trying to figure out the words. Is there a way to refer back to the story you just read to get hints on what words might be? A feature such as this would make it a lot more enjoyable for casuals such as myself!
This is a solid entry though, good job! I love how this is different from the other entries submitted to this Jam, which immediately jumped onto farming themed games. With a bit more polishing I could see this being a lot more fun :D!
@scolondev Thanks for playing!
> Is there a way to refer back to the story you just read to get hints on what words might be?
There should be some help text pointing this out, but you can type or click `exit` to exit the terminal and re-read the part you were just at, my hints were not fully fleshed out though, I'd recommend filling out `aaaaaaaaaaa` or something if you want to advance a little.
Also make sure you enabled the 'Extra Hints' option too, I didn't have much time to playtest my game and made the mistake of leaving it disabled by default.
I'd pay for this game. Nuff said. Only downside if the music. If you create/source some tension increasing music over time.
I love the terminal interface for this game, it's a lot of fun; in my opinion, the terminal sounds also worked quite nicely. The only complaint I have about the sounds is I think the music is too quiet.
On a technical note, the web version just does not work for me at all. At first I thought it was just a Firefox thing -- in Firefox, the intro won't even display -- but in both Firefox and Chrome, the terminal seems to freeze up when I try to type in it. The downloaded version worked fine though!
As others, the main strategy I used was to type a lot of the same character in a row to try to just grind out some information. This is surprisingly fun, although my fingers started to hurt from typing "guess" over and over; eventually I stopped typing the "guess" part because it still worked (a helpful feature, to be honest!) and later I switched to the jam version, which was even more helpful with the indicator of when the right number of characters was entered.
In terms of what made this grinding strategy fun, I think it was mainly when it got to the last few letters, where I could sometimes guess the word directly. Whenever I managed to do that, especially with a long word, it was very satisfying--and a surprisingly similar feeling to guessing a wordle, despite the very different overall strategy!
One interesting property in the game is the rhythm of word-solving. To explain what I mean: so, at the very end of the game, there were a couple two-letter words, which could be solved extremely quickly. As I was just rushing through these, it felt like a climax, like when the hacker in a movie is just about to break into the vault, or whatever. And I think that you could play with this feeling more, mainly by not having a 9-letter word after those short words.
In particular, there is a very nice contrast between grinding out the long words in the middle of the game, and between quickly cracking the short words at the end--and I think you could turn this into a very satisfying story beat, where the player accomplishes something through a series of decreasing length words, so there's this feeling of "gaining on it."
Hopefully that made sense. It was a feeling I got there, and I wanted to make sure to describe it. :smile:
One other note: at one point I did one of the optional guessing sections, and in that section guessed the word "candy"... this was a fun moment for me at least, as I am "in the know" as to the rest of the series, perhaps? I don't know, it was cool.
Overall, I think the way this game used the wordle mechanics was interesting and rather fun, despite the grinding, and it had some nice moments throughout.
I can't believe this game doesn't have more ratings!! I had a great time and even streamed it for a friend so we could play together. :slight_smile: Some of those words were tough, but it was really fun! The UI was great and the typing sounds were spot-on. One thing I might suggest is a slightly longer audio loop, or a shuffled playlist of short loops, just to keep replayability/long game runs from wearing out the loop. Overall, great entry!!
@maartene @teenythanos Thanks for playing and leaving the kind words!
Music is something I usually only allocate two hours to, so it usually comes out pretty shallow, I probably could have done more if I didn't geek out when making the terminal interface, we'll see how my scoping goes next LD.
@honey-pony Thanks for playing and leaving so much feedback!
Not sure what happened with the web version, I can't find any issues, and it's an untouched Godot export.
Your observation regarding the word-solving rhythm never occurred to me, but it makes a lot of sense, that was very perceptive. That and your other points will be really helpful with making a non-LD version, depending on if my unexpected post-jam version's energy returns.
> One other note: at one point I did one of the optional guessing sections, and in that section guessed the word “candy”… this was a fun moment for me at least, as I am “in the know” as to the rest of the series, perhaps? I don’t know, it was cool.
This started out in its own universe, but the Trick or Retreat (Tor for short :eyes:) universe slowly crept into the story as dev went on. I'm probably not going to be able to escape it for a while :P
I'll work on a separate music volume slider next LD, I always lean too far on the side of not killing people's ears otherwise.
I Love those text effects. Looks so cool and oldschool.
Very interesting entry ! I love the mood and the story is really good ! Well done !