Hello! We just completed the global game 2018 and we decided to learn PICO-8 for that! We started from scratch apart from looking at a few tutorials, so everything is a bit messy, but here we are!
The theme of the GGJ 2018 was 'transmission' and we decided to make a game of communication in space.
The feedback is still rough (hard to grasp what is happening at some times), but we are quite happy with what we did 2 days without knowing anything! PICO-8 sure is fun to use and, strangely, we had a lot less problems fixing issues in this game than with other jams, as due to the fact that everything was in our control we soon learnt where the errors were.
Let me know what you think!
Here are the game instructions:
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HELLO WO#?! is a game of communication in space
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Commands
- X to confirm a selection
- Z to view diplomacy status
- Arrows to move the selection cursor
- You are the planet 2242 Sagot.
- Your goal is to communicate with other planets in order to form alliances and avoid being destroyed.
- You cannot actually win in the game (as of now), but you can try reaching the highest number of allies possible
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Your planet has a small home icon.
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At each turn, you are given a recipient to message.
- You can either choose a good message or an insult.
- Press X to select the message
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After you choose the recipient, the message appears above your planet and the needed translation to communicate with the inhabitants of the other planets appears on it
- You have 60 seconds to form a transmission route between you and the target planet.
- Use arrow keys to navigate towards the target planet
- All planets in-between will affect the message due to interferences, you need to find a route that helps deliver the correct message.
- Press X to send the message to the target planet when you have it selected.
- If you are out of time, the message will not be delivered and it will count as an error
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After the message raaches the target planet, you will get an effect based on your intent and whether the message was correct
- if the message was correct and you were friendly, the target and all other planets in its faction will raise their friendliness
- if the message was correct and you wanted to insult, the target and all other planets will lower its diplomacy status. However, all other planets will rise it a bit.
- if the message was an error or it timed out, all planets (and the target in particular) will be angry
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After that, a new turn will start
- all planets will have their interferences re-rolled
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When the diplomacy value of a planet reaches a given threshold, it may become an ally or an enemy
- if the diplomacy is too low, the planet will become an enemy and won't show anymore what
- if the diplomacy is high enough, the planet will become an ally and it will not interfere anymore with your messages!
- if you have 4 enemies, you lose the game!
- Final notes:
- During the game, you can keep Z pressed to view the diplomacy status and faction of all planets
We are very pleased by your game, humans. We looooove the idea, messages, design and soundtrack.
However, we regret the absence of an option to speed up transmissions.
Did you ever test your game and manage to win ? Our elite scientists failed to make a single correct transmission unless the recipient wants an empty message.
We encountered a bug when a planet tried to remove a symbol from an empty message.
We hope you'll fix that, simians, for the sake of future interplanet communications.
Hi freds72, the idea of the game is to transform the message you see on top of your home planet into the message spawned on the destination planet. Each planet in between applies some kind of transformation on some character of the source word. You should understand what kind of transformation each planet applies and find the right path to get to the destination planet with the correct message.
At the beginning you can choose what kind of message you want to send (it could be a peace message - the top choice, or a war message (the bottom choice), you should understand wether you made the correct path choice if the answer message you receive is of the same type of the one you sent (peace message, if you sent a peace message, war if you sent war).
Every message makes something change in the universe diplomacy status (the target planet and all its allies, and their enemies will change their attitude towards you, accordingly to the kind of message you sent). You can keep track of the diplomacy status by pressing the Z key in the transmission view. The goal is to keep the number of planets in war with you low as long as possible :-)
On behalf of all humanity, we greet the Fireflies and thank them for their words of wisdom!
For what concerns the issues you bring up with our communication systems, there surely are many which we'd like to address.
All in all, I see that there must be some interference with our messages, as we may not have been able to correctly translate our intents in so few pixels and colors.
I will provide first an example of correct answer: you see that the start message (from the home planet) needs to reach the target planet by adding two icons of the correct colors. Be mindful, as I did not say this before, but colors are as important as symbols!
Here is an example with two additions: https://i.imgur.com/40cScKJ.png
Here is an example with one removal: https://i.imgur.com/I2siZB0.png
To be more clear, there are a few interferences that may be encountered:
- addition of 1 symbol of a specific color (the plus)
- removal of 1 symbol (the minus)
- removal of all symbols of a given color (colored square with a cross)
- reversal of all symbols (the two arrows)
- swapping the first symbol with the last one
- swapping the second symbol with the second-to-last one
Apart from that, we did test that the system was somewhat playable, yet we were not able to test whether it is balanced. We will however work on that, adding a victory condition as well.
We welcome the suggestions (and the bug report) and we will release an advanced version of the communication sytem.
Peace,
Humanity
Wassup Carbon-Based Unwinged Friends !
We received your message with delight in spades. Have you improved the system since last time ? We replayed it and it seemed more balanced. We would still appreciate the option to speed up transmissions. And we're afraid we're a little confused by the symbols for Peace and War (especially war). War = Yin/Yang. That standard is unknown to us.
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