fierydrake

Everything about this is legit. And great music.

This looks fantatic!

This is epic BigJKO! Those models and anims look great.

Shame you might not finish, the art looks great, the design concept is neat and I'm super curious how this will feel to play.

This is rad as hell. I'm so impressed how quickly you picked up blender modelling, unwrapping and animation. Kudos.

I really like how you planned out the work, kinda makes me excited all on its own. The premise sounds cool, looking forward to seeing how it plays out.

Awesome to see the team's work coming together. Great stuff.

Nice work, hedgefield

Love this. Looks great atte. Going to have to find some time to dig into the games from this jam, for sure.

Original Wizard Jam thread: https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/10083-release-bogost-in-the-shell/ Another sporadic dev session tonight to implement a pause/quit screen (press escape), resulting in a new web build: Version 0.4 20150616_1 TODOs: * Fix camera zoom and pan * Improve in-game instructions/help * Tutorial level

Looks cool Dinosaursssssss

I'm not sure if I'll actually be able to create a game, but all the good talk here made me want to jam something even if it's just an idea. The basic idea is to hack your way from your safehouse, through people's cyberbrains and The Grid (internet) to your target. You can locate your target by sneaking a connection in to government servers via the Grid, their surveilance data is not that well protected, but there is limited time before your search will be detected. The safest route to the target is via wireless point to point infultration of passing cyberbrains. Once you penetrate a cyberbrain you can halt their concious thoughts and take over their body. From there you can hop on to another passing cyberbrain within range. You can only directly control one body in your chain of hacked brains at a time, the others will be controlled by your hacking software. Without further programming your hacking software will only prevent the owner gaining conciousness and keep your connections alive (provided they stay in range), the body will appear as if unconcious. Police will patrol the streets and if they notice anything amiss their suspicions will be alerted and they will investigate. If they conclude that there is something untoward going on, they will trigger increased Grid security in the area and your chance of detection will increase. Core gameplay will be dragging connections between your safehouse and passing people, controlling/programming them in such a way that they won't draw attention and making your way to the target cyberbrain. You may need to switch between nodes to allay the suspicions of the police and corporate guardians.

TODOs: * Quit button / improved menu * Fix camera zoom and pan * Improve in-game instructions/help * Tutorial level

Continuing to work on this when I have time. I want to address some of the control problems and bugs with the game. The first thing was to make it clearer what is happening when the cyberpolice approach one of your uncontrolled hacked people-- I have added a little "?" bubble above their heads that you can click on to answer the officer's query. I have also added a couple of sound effects--one when the "?" bubble appears and one when you successfully dismiss it. It was also bugging me that you could continue to control and hack with people who no longer had a link back to base through other hacked brains, so I have improved the game logic to require that all hacked nodes must remain connected to the base node. Version 0.3 20150519_1

Now that I think back to the start of the game, I did notice that the hotspots were a little small.

Thanks Rev, you're the first to mention the Bogost graphic which honestly was the first thing I made and I smiled to myself the whole time. The plan is to spend a few more hours making a very basic and small level to introduce the mechanics. And also to fix the most blatant bugs and omissions (for example, I don't like how clunky detection is at the moment.) I'd quite like to do something better with the camera, but no one has mentioned it yet -- I feel that at max zoom it's somewhat fiddly but zooming in is a bit annoying as well. Anyway, I'll try and start on some of that tonight.

The polish on the interactions, design and animations on this are off the charts. Great work!

I really liked this. The sound was really awesome, totally sold the apartment. The car starting sound, the music on the highway. Really nice. The style really worked for me as well, kind of like a light noirishness with the lack of colour. I found the dialogue engaging, I didn't spot whether or not the choices affected the dialogue but I did wonder about it. There was one point where I was wondering what I should be doing because the pause in interaction/visual change felt a teensy bit too long (and this is pretty minor really, it just caused me to look around and click stuff 2/3 times when there was nothing to do), just after having picked up the gun. There was a slight shadow of this just before the phone rang as well, but I think that pause was actually pretty great because the phone came as a pleasant surprise just at the right point. Anyway, I really likes lots of elements of this game and I could totally get into it if it continued to delight/surprise with those nice touches and interactions. I definitely felt an echo of 30 Flights of Loving in there. \o/

I'm glad it was a concious style choice to go short. I did like how digestible it was in that form in general, just maybe a few times I found myself getting dropped out of the flow. Anyway, I wanted to try and give some kind of experiential feedback, I hope there's something useful in there somewhere.

Fun! I needed the hint for the letter though. I feel a bit dumb (but not cheated), so that's probably good puzzle design right there! Good dialog, there were several chuckles in there. Nice work

I love the idea and the demos have come out well. I'm really interested to see how the piecing together would work. Looking forward to seeing where this goes. The story caught me pretty quickly. My only criticism would be the layout of the links/text snippets, many of them worked well but I found it a bit confusing at times to understand what each link was for. I'm in two mind about the very small amount of text on screen at one time, on the one hand it made it very bite-size but I think I would have been happy to sink my teeth into slightly larger chunks at a time (to stretch the eating analogy). I'd like to see what others took from it, I may be out in the weeds. All in all a great job

Thanks Spenny. I could push in a tutorial and do a bunch of small tweaks I've been wanting to add but not had time, maybe later this week.

You shouldn't be able to control Nick (he's the one red guy who walks to the skyscraper and hangs around inside), only hack his brain and upload a nasty virus to make him regret his actions.

Apologies! I kinda got bogged down and didn't find time to tutorialise or even break it down properly. By which I mean -- yeah, this is totally old school drop you in the mix kinda cool, yeah! yeah? Oh. You do just click to hack and try to form a chain of citizens to Nick's location while avoiding the police. Then you click on the brain above the skyscraper Nick is in to win. Just beat the clock! The police will patrol if they see someone hacked they will move towards them and "ask them a question" for 4 seconds, if you don't select them in that time they will cause an alarm which will knock out that node and increase the speed the timer ticks.

\o/