919113 2023-01-09 22:15
I like your game style.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → I Require Human Parts
By flaterectomy
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 181 | 3.84 | 27 | |
| Fun | 318 | 3.52 | 27 | |
| Innovation | 283 | 3.48 | 27 | |
| Theme | 167 | 4.08 | 27 | |
| Graphics | 616 | 3.04 | 27 | |
| Audio | 278 | 3.41 | 26 | |
| Humor | 350 | 3.04 | 27 | |
| Mood | 16 | 4.38 | 27 |
I like your game style.
The UI design works really well here. I am impressed with how the theme worked out and how engaging it is to hunt the crew. It was really easy to pick up, your intro and description blurbs are really nice.
A very neat game, I really like the mood and writing! Surprisingly challenging, I may have missed something but I found several humans and they all managed to escape. I played it twice, to no avail, but still enjoyed the experience! Really cool entry.
Great text adventure with a fun and unique mechanic. Overall mood and presentation were great, definitely capturing that sci-fi/Alien vibe. The sniff and security camera mechanics are a nice design that work very well. I misunderstood the sniffing mechanic on my initial playthrough and still ended up searching the other spots, not realizing that there was no point to it and wasting my HP. But once it clicked on my second playthrough, I managed to catch the whole crew :D Nice touch randomizing the names and locations each playthrough.
Not sure whether intentional or not, but did have an instance where there were two crew members hiding in the same location. Not like that's unrealistic, but I almost missed it. I saw on the security camera that one of the members was hiding there but when I used the sniff mechanic, it only found one of the crew members. If I hadn't by chance saw that particular crew member on the cameras, or the sniff mechanic only mentioned that character, I would have most likely missed the other one.
Atmosphere can be tough to sell in text adventures, and you nailed it! The text itself is great to sell the effect of hunting down the crew members, but the visuals and music surrounding it takes it up a notch. I really liked having the map up in the top left corner to orient myself, but it wasn't super clear which option would lead me where.
@919113 Thanks, I'm glad you do!
@boldbigflank Thank you, much appreciated!
@nvrskipgameday There is a 33% chance that the crew member slips away, I've had it happen up to 5 times in a row myself--that's the risk of using 'real' random chances for these things. I'm glad you enjoyed it still, though!
@fc85057 I added the sniff mechanic pretty late in the process after realizing that having just the security cameras would make for a pretty boring loop. I agree it's not immediately clear. You *can* find people without sniffing by inspecting the location they happen to be at, though.
Two crew members hiding in the same spot is unfortunately a result of me not being a good programmer. I couldn't quite figure out how to avoid that from happening with the system I had made. The chances that it will happen are pretty slim, but I ran into it during development too.
@ellie-rasmussen The disconnect between the visual map locations and the room names to pick from was intentional, you'd have to learn the room names as you play. I figured having that having that learning curve was a free-and-easy way for players to get better at the game as they play it--but I agree it's difficult!
Amazing game, really love the atmosphere you created and the unique way you used the theme. I had people slip away from me 3 times in a row, but managed to kill three on my next play through, yeah just a really enjoyable game, my favorite from what I've tested so far.
It's always fun when a game with only text and some audio can pull you in so well. Great Job.
Really good game, I liked the UI and the dialog. I would say make the music and audio a bit louder, as I didn't hear it unless I turned the volume up a lot (and I didn't notice the audio slider).
Apart from that it was a fun game!
Very moody game and great match for the theme. I love it!
Great game, had lots of fun. I didn't even noticed that there were a map top-left before i read the comments, but after a couple of tries i pretty much learned layout by myself. Though it would've helped if it was somehow labeled.
That's simple, yet unique.
A cool, well written game The HP mechanic, though a bit punishing, is a great addition and really creates tension
It was a surprise to see text based game :) But a welcoming one. UI is very slick and responsive, and music was atmospheric, but some sound effects would be nice to have too! Overall it's an enjoyable game with a good sense of humor, and play(read?)through length is good too.
@flaterectomy Small world, huh?
Your game was really good at creating tension for a text adventure game. The ambient music and time limit created a sense of panic. The kind that would normally be reserved for the *humans* in such a scenario. The one downside to that is that I had to stop reading the dialogue when I got to really low health, lest I waste precious time.
I thought maybe the message telling you to limit your queries on the medical system was a hint to keep querying so you could waste the ship's power and turn out the lights. Maybe that was the solution to keep people from slipping away from me. Well that wasn't the case. Then I read the comments and found that people slipping away is just a random chance to happen. I must be very unlucky then!
I also thought maybe the comms panel was going to be used to trick a human into coming out. Like, you would send a message to one of the humans making it look like one of the humans you just killed saying, "Hey, I have it trapped in the Medical Bay! I need your help killing it though!"
I had a lot of fun and the mood you created was excellent. Great work!
@zungryware RE: "I also thought maybe the comms panel was going to be used to trick a human into coming out. Like, you would send a message to one of the humans making it look like one of the humans you just killed saying, “Hey, I have it trapped in the Medical Bay! I need your help killing it though!”"
That is a *great* idea, and the only consolation for not coming up with it myself and implementing it is that I know for sure I wouldn't have had the time to do it. :sob:
I absolutely loved this game. Great job
It was incredibly fun for a text adventure! And kind of polished. Especially considering that you've discovered this january LD at the theme anouncement :rofl: So, very good job! PS : I had a bug, when I took the human with the "spare" lung, the emphasis word was "heart" instead, and after that I had my life points but the lung label, as the heart label, stayed indicated as "poor" (even if it apparently didn't prevent me to finish the game, so it's just a little bug)
This was well polished and fun to play. I like the mechanic limiting you to a finite number of actions, it made me think more about what I was doing, but not so much that I would have regret or lose over bad choices. I was also surprised at how quickly I picked the gameplay up.
Great work! Until now I hadn't heard of the engine you use, I'll have to take a look at it...
PS: I didn't notice the map, it looked like a logo, so I guess I didn't pick up as much of the gameplay as I thought :P
I was a big fan of your last entry "Cursing Recursion", and I am glad that you continue with your own unique style of games! What makes this game work so very well is the atmosphere you manage to build, not sure how you do it but there is so much tension (though the music and the writing are excellent and no doubt contribute to this).
The game had the perfect length where I was at the edge of my seat at all times. Overall another fantastic entry :trophy:
After commiting horrible murders and self surgeries, I managed to win! a3c78feadec90afaa288aa179cd169bb.png
No doubt my favorite of your text-based games, and also one of my favorite ones in the genre in general.
The hook is immediate. I can tend to read quickly through text, but when I read the part about the tentacles grabbing people I was like wait WHAT and made sure to read more carefully. It is an amazing premise and not often explored in games surprisingly enough. Certainly not in parasitic hunting form.
The UI is intuitive in helping the player figure out what they're doing and the premise of the mechanics. Watching the HP countdown immediately gave me a sense of urgency and understanding of what I needed to do.
What I did not expect was a small element of "skill" to the game. Learning the parts of the ship and how they're named and how to navigate it had some mastery to it which is very uncommon. I bumbled around on my first playthrough, but on the 2nd one I was able to navigate much better, putting the security cams to much better use and knowing how to quickly get to the snack machine.
Cornering 2 crewmates and wombo comboing them felt GREAT. I don't care if it was a bug lol.
A super fun entry which made me rethink the abilities of Twine. I'm curious, is it difficult to implement this stuff in the engine? Whenever I see a Twine game it tends to be a much more straightforward narrative game. I'm curious if you're pushing it to its limits or if it's always been able to do this but people don't.
@lereveur Ahh, this is what happens when I copy&paste code and forget to replace a word. I guess trimming code down to be versatile rather than having multiple instances of the same thing is obviously better (but harder for me to figure out). Thanks for then report! I will fix things up in a post-jam version.
@lone-wolf I was debating whether to label the map or not, and decided against cluttering the header more. Not the *best* idea I had. :laughing:
@simon-rahnasto Hey, I'm glad you checked my game out again! I think the sum of the parts I created ended up better than I anticipated. Glad I just trusted in the process!
@peachtreeoath It was a little awkward trying to depend on an out-of-game skill up of the player, while knowing how to finish the game super quick myself (provided the dice rolls are in my favor). But it seems to have worked out!
As far as Twine's capabilities, it is of course well-suited for narrative node-to-node text games. And that's more or less what this is too, but with some variables and if/else statements you can treat a node as a function and make something more systems-based.
For example, each location node first executes code from a separate TakeDamage node that reduces player HP and some other cooldowns, then it executes code from a separate Header node to display that information.
Add in some CSS to design a less standards look and it gets elevated pretty quickly. I believe Twine has been capable of these things for a long time, I'm really not doing anything special code-wise.
ahhh ok. The map and HP definitely threw me off but that's great to know that that's a standard capability.
The messages are a real MVP. :) Short and fun text game -- Among Us is an obvious reference. Nothing special, but I really enjoyed it. Actually, I made a game with a similar story for Ludum Dare 48 called "Deep Space: Beyond", you can check it out if you are interested.
@thomasward I'm glad you enjoyed the messages, they were fun to write! Surprisingly, I hadn't thought of Among Us once while making this game. I've never played it, but I've seen plenty of videos where people play it, so I *am* pretty familiar. It didn't occur to me consciously, but I am sure my subconscious was drawing inspiration from it. I primarily thought of the Alien movies and Alien Isolation (which I also am only familiar with from videos).
I had a go at Deep Space: Beyond but ended up getting stuck. I was hurrying because of the oxygen, so I skipped reading some things. In hindsight I now know I can read comfortably at my own pace, so I will give it another spin later on.
@flaterectomy Thanks for the feedback. Yes, the Alien franchise is an obvious guess. Also "The Thing", I suppose.
I'll make a little spoiler for my game: you shouldn't care about oxygen, it won't kill you or affect the game result. I will leave it up to you to figure why. :)