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Ash_NR

[RELEASE] With Free Monster Samples

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I've gone with a short and snappy pod blast from 09, With Free Monster Samples.

 

So I came to this jam with a specific interaction in mind. I wanted to work on a morse code method of communication in a future game. I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to come up with a proof of concept for it.

 

The game is inspired visually by Downwell, it creates the layout for the game and look for the game. Mechcanically the player is trying to get rid of their Monster samples. They need to visit door to door to get rid of all of their samples within the alloted time. The problem is, everyone's music is too darn loud. Knocking on the door will cause the occupant to say hello in their particular language. The player needs to use morse code to knock back that word at them. In an ideal world, players would get higher scores for more complex greetings. But I think I'm already pushing it with I've got already.

 

I've got a 2D platformer setup set up (thanks to Acrocatic), and a rad $1 animated dude that bounces off the walls. So I hope to get some more of the core gameplay into the game over the weekend.

 

I've attached some gifs of the progress of the game

 

You can download the game here: https://ash-nr.itch.io/with-free-monster-samples

 

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Sounds neat. How are you planning on visualizing the morse code? Are players going to need actual knowledge of morse to play it or will it just be a facsimile of what morse is really like?

 

If it is the latter, I recommend you look at a little series of games called What Hath God Wrought? (http://lazerwalker.com/altctrl/) which uses an actual telegraph but just gives you the feeling of communicating with actual morse code rather than try to actually make you type out messages that make sense.

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Wow, What Hath God Wrought? is great! Yeah I was thinking of utilising the Downwell border on either side of the main level to display the cheat sheet. Maybe even grey out the invalid letters for the current challenge.

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What I might suggest is that you try abstracting things further. Rather than give the players a cheat sheet, give them free reign to input whatever they want, but put a hard cap on how many characters of input you'll accept. You then take what they input and use that to output an emoji or something representative of a greeting. If, for example, you let them do 4 inputs, and each input has 2 possible states (short or long, standard morse) then you only need to worry about 16 potential outputs and can focus on making each of those more expressive and fun. It would likely be easier on your end and lead to more hilarious results when the player's attempt at a greeting just turns into a picture of a smiling poop.

 

Sorry, this is just my designer brain taking over for a few minutes. Obviously it's your game and you can do whatever you want.

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Hmmm, I was thinking about some sort of foreign or derived language but I figured that would be too vague or confusing to the player. But it would certainly be more interesting than a stale greeting. I'll mull over it while I work on the input buffer today. Thanks! :)

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Alrighty! Spent most of today and last night working on 30 emoticons to use for the game. Turns out it was more outputs than I thought. And I think I'll need to had a difficulty switch because I think that diving in with 30 potentials options is far too hard.
 
But basically like nkornek suggested, a maximum of four inputs, with 2 different states per input. Not all 4 inputs need to be used. So a single dot or dash in morse will result in an answer. I felt it was important that any input was valid and not that there was a "code" to figure out.
 
So each of the 4 inputs correspond to a different element in a smiley emoticon, 3 of them are physical differences, and the final one is a more abstract concept. A dot (short tap) is a negative or 0 input, and dash (longer tap) corresponds to a positive or input of 1. I hope to elaborate a little in the game what those 4 categories are to help people catalogue what each input does.
 
I hope that there is enough of a indicator in the to show progression down a tree of outputs.

post-34602-0-11439800-1463306452.png

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Thanks, I hope there is a somewhat logical progression throughout them.

 

Tomorrow after work is going to be visualising the input buffer code.

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c6jyKs.png

So late in updating the forum post.
 
Getting sick during the jam wasn't great, so I wasn't able to concentrate on making some dodgy sprites to reflect being a door-to-door salesperson. But game is done and can be found here: https://ash-nr.itch.io/with-free-monster-samples
 
I'll work on getting some gifs of the game in action.
 
Basically the player has to get rid of their Monster energy drink samples by tapping on the doors of people in the skyscraper. The occupant responds with an emoticon and the player has to match with the correct tap. There are 4 tiers of emoticons, so the longest "morse" string will be 4 taps long. At the moment I've set the game to only randomly select from the first 2 tiers of emoticons, so 6 potential options to input. If I get a second I'll add an instructions screen and an input to select for Easy, Medium, Hard.

 

Instructions are on the itch.io page. Hope you enjoy it, and I'm looking forward to giving all the games a whirl!

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Another update. Put in a timer and enabled the difficulty selection that I hadn't got around to toggle in the game.

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This looks really nice, and it's a cool idea with a nice story. I just brute forced my way through it, though - perhaps audio and/or visual feedback for what key presses the player is making would help?

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​I love the gameboy-esque palette. Certainly an interesting idea to use emoticons as a secret language, unfortunately I couldn't figure it out, and got stuck.

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