[Released] Hold On To Your B.U.T.T.O.N.

[PocketBard]

Hold On To Your Binary Utility for the Tethering of Theropods Overindulging in Non-dinosaurs

 

"Welcome to the Isla Mago branch of Jurassic Park, valued member of the InGen family! Here at International Genetics Incorporated, we are devoted to the safety of our employees, which is why management is deeply saddened by your recent and incredibly unfortunate accident allegedly involving the Coelacanth Fish Pedicure exhibit. As per the stipulations laid out in your lawsuit, you have been granted the position of Chief Security Officer and B.U.T.T.O.N. Operator; your personal office is located in the most secure building on the island, and has convenient access to restroom and refreshments. We sincerely hope that this arrangement is satisfactory to you, and would again like to say that we are devoted to your comfort and safety while in our employment."

 

Gameplay

The gameplay of Hold On To Your B.U.T.T.O.N. is sort-of inspired by Five Nights at Freddies, and one of my favorite Jam games: Enviro-Bear 2000.

 

Learning from past experiences with mass power outages, InGen has implemented a new, easily-operable failsafe device for this Jurassic Park facility. All of the security systems of the park - fences, doors, cameras, computers - are tied to the same electrical circuit, which is kept active by holding down the titular button on your desk (tied to a particular key on your keyboard). If the power shuts down, the dinosaurs will obviously take the opportunity to escape from their enclosures, gradually wandering into the control room where you and your tasty crew are. Simply keeping the key pressed for the allotted time is easy enough, in the beginning, but as you progress through the levels, more tasks requiring your input begin to pile up. With only one free hand, perhaps you'll need to shoo away an inquisitive compy blocking your view of the security feed, or enter a complicated Unix command to troubleshoot a downed section of fence. Can you fill out your time sheet before the day is out? What if you've had too much coffee and need to run to the little security officers' room down the hall? WHAT DO YOU DO IF THERE IS MORE THAN ONE B.U.T.T.O.N.?

 

Stretch ideas

+ It might be easier to make this scary with 3D assets, but I don't have the expertise to create them in this time frame, and I'm actually sort of curious what I can manage with just 2D. Plus, I'm not sure I even want to go for much horror anyway.

+ Initially, monitor will just be a top-down view of the map, with your cameras marking the positions of things in their field of view. If I have time though, I'd obviously want to have a separate view to see the camera feeds directly.

+ In addition to the powered security, you have a small number of game wardens who try to tranquilize escaped dinosaurs. You don't know exactly where they are though - every minute or so, they'll radio their position and sightings in. So, your map would show the last known positions of the wardens and any dinos they spot, but you won't find out if they successfully subdued them until they make their next report (or they miss it...)

+ If I do go with the wardens idea, then that adds the additional task of having to tune your radio to their frequency to even get those check-ins.

 

Highly professional concept art attached below

[Nappi]

This sounds fun (and stressful, but in a good way)! It also seems like a perfect jam game because you can add more inputs / mini games based on how much time you have.

[PocketBard]

Hopefully, with the holidays and all, I'll get the core of the game done in time to start adding in the extra tasks. I know from a bunch of my friends who have done jams before that it's best to have a small concept that can function on its own if it has to. Plus, even if I end up struggling with ideas to add, I'm sure someone out there has some ideas for ways to ruin someone else's day lol.

[PocketBard]

Day 1

 

A whole lot of progress today, in the 2 hours I'd say I had available tonight. The button is done and receives input from the keyboard (the red/green light indicates when the right key is being pressed). For now, this one is tied to the Ctrl key, but the parameters are set up so that I can painlessly change each gameobject's binding. So that's, like, 50% of my controls finished.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There won't be much progress this weekend; some friends I don't get to see often decided that this was the weekend they are coming visit, and I'm gladly going to oblige.

[brendonsmall]

I like what I see so far. I am into the concept, and that button is *chef kiss*

[PocketBard]

Hey hey, I'm still around, kind of/sort of. What I thought were going to be a handful of days of holiday cheer turned into a cavalcade of friends and family lasting well over a week. My fault for underestimating all of the love flying around this time of year, and I'm really far behind at this point. I spent most of the last two days trying to catch up, but there is still a lot to do.

 

First things first, "playable" version is available here: https://pocketbard.itch.io/hold-on-to-your-button

 

The word 'playable' being in quotes because there's not much of a game to it yet, but this at least showcases the core of the game - the button turns on/off the fences and the dinosaur wanders and homes in on the player's location. I just need to add a way to detect win/lose states and it's technically a game, albeit a not very interesting one.

 

You might also notice that the some of the graphics are terrible, and no, I don't mean the sprites for the fences - I just grabbed some random images that were sitting in my downloads folder. I thought it would be nice to apply a mask to the central monitor so that I wouldn't have to worry about sprites spilling over the edges, but Unity has been giving me a weird bug with it that I can't quite figure out. When I use my own sprite for the mask, the view in the editor looks fine, but once I run it, it develops this weird hatching transparency in the upper portion:

 

 

The WebGL version on itch.io works fine, mostly (you can still see a few lines). Building the project as an executable just makes it worse, though...

 

 

Anyway, Zero Hour is approaching. My priorities are as such:

1. Add win/lose and a way to reset the scene

2. Wtf is wrong with this masking

3. Make a few levels or something so that there is some sort of game here.

[PocketBard]

https://pocketbard.itch.io/hold-on-to-your-button

 

Hold On To Your BUTTON is complete and released!

 

I'm really glad I ended up doing this, even if the holidays killed my progress and left me no time to expand on the core concept. I really wish there was more time to have added the other activities I talked about in my pitch, but that's just the way these things go. I am quite pleased, though, that the work I did early on with the code I wrote for the BUTTONs and the dinosaurs; relatively speaking, they are simple entities, but being able to reliably create new content just by filling in a few fields really saved my ass today when it came time to make more levels.

 

However, I never did figure out what is wrong with the masking. I found ways to mitigate the problem, but I just can't get it to go away. Oh well!

[pnevares]

I couldn't quite tell what the masking issue you described was, but I liked the monitor scanlines so if that was the problem it ended up being a good thing! I liked the difficulty increase between levels. I got to "The whole menagerie" (5? 6?) but failed because a dino went right through an activated security fence and I'm not sure why. But I had fun with it!

[Nappi]

I like the concept a lot! I think the difficulty could be ramped up a bit faster, because it seems to me at least that in the first levels you could just keep the button pressed all the time (unless I lucked out of random events or missed some key concept). Also, some of the button labels are a bit difficult to read. I suspect the one on the screenshot might be tilde, but that is a bit problematic key in Finnish keyboard layout (it is Alt Gr + button, which didn't seem to work). Fortunately, I was fine just holding ctrl.