Play game
ＴＥＬＥＣＯ２０ＸＸ's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Presentation (graphics, audio) | #4 | 4.750 | 4.750 |
| Originality | #7 | 4.632 | 4.632 |
| Fun | #18 | 4.088 | 4.088 |
| Theme | #47 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Ranked from 68 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game represent Mode?
READ THESE BEFORE PLAYING PLEASE
▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼
- WASD and ↑→↓← to move antenna on keyboard, NOT mouse
- Cutscenes are timed instead of input so pay close attention as soon as you open the window
- Keep all your monitors on and don't try to resize the window
- If you are streaming, the game won't capture everything properly unless you stream your entire monitor, because it uses a mechanic related to changing the window mode
The game will crash in between different sessions if you beat it, so you have to delete \User\AppData\Roaming\Godot\app_userdata\ＴＥＬＥＣＯ２０ＸＸ each time if you want to see the ending again. Sorry!
▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲
Help Teleco move on to the afterlife by guiding her through haunted hardware! She'll need you to change the settings to escape her lot in death.
This game is a 2nd-person perspective rhythm-based puzzle game that is meant to be completed start to finish in 10 or so minutes.
I had the idea to make a game about messing with monitor and audio settings, things like picture modes, mono/stereo, windowed/fullscreen, and wanted to make a game where settings diegetically altered the mechanics. Naturally, the trope of haunted media lends well to that. How might a ghost in a TV handle it if you changed the picture mode? Input/Output? Volume? There's a special surprise at the end too. Look forward to it!
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Wow, just wow - even though the game worked a bit weirdly on my end (maybe I should have disabled the itch app sandbox option for teleco), the way it plays really spoke to me, essentially presenting the whole game as a sum of small parts where the end goal lies outside of any particular part. It really felt like you're dealing with a ghost of lost media!
It's a shame you didn't have much time for the dialogue system - I think the writing itself turned out well but not being input-based slightly hurts the setting I think, taking control away from the player - the channeler who needs to be in control while dealing with ghosts. Although to be fair, I'm only bitter about it because I got distracted during play and missed a good chunk of dialogue because of that ;-;
My only 'complaint' is that it felt really short for how much stuff is happening - I really enjoyed the game world but couldn't immerse fully as it ended so quickly (and also because of the distraction and missing the dialogue :c). Of course, short playtime is completely fine for a jam game, it's clear you were putting quality before quantity, and that's a good thing ^^
If you intend to continue working on the game - will it be a linear experience or have multiple paths/branches? And are you planning on adding any new "types" of gameplay or keep expanding on the rhythm puzzle one? I'm curious, as I think the current gameplay hints at a potentially quite deep, immersive experience in the future.
TLDR - perfect score across the board, digital-themed experiences are my favorite so I'm biased, but I think the game turned out really well anyway. Congratulations!
P.S. Just want to put a word of appreciation for having the player be a "professional channeler" in a game about TV screens, nice one!
ahhhh! thank you so much! yeah a lot of people missed the dialogue, which is a shame because it kinda sets up your expectations and immerses you in the task you're about to do. i was really kicking myself, but i put in so many textboxes and each of them had separate wait times, so with the few hours i had left on the game, i couldn't go through and mess with the timing too much. seriously went down to the wire on just having them in at all. :')
definitely wanted to make sure i had a dense quality idea packed into the minimum 10 minutes the jam gave us to stream. i needed the concept to be one and done, because it's being presented for a mass audience and i wanted to make sure that it wrapped up quick. but in the full version, i'll make sure the player has a world to immerse themselves in for longer, and i hope that you appreciate it!!
but actually, you bring up an interesting point, i kind of have a clear idea of what the game ultimately ends up being about, i didn't really think of adding routes or alternative endings. i think it'll kind of be a video game version of a short film, i can see it becoming overcomplicated and losing precision in its story delivery if i tried to deviate the plot. i also think that the fuller version might have mechanics that end up taking much longer than a normal game, so i don't want to have people restart a route over and over. i think i'll probably prioritize making sure the player takes away one canon story with no alternatives. i'll pretty much be emulating some of the anime i watched where you help someone onto the path of moving past their traumas.
as for the gameplay, i will more or less have to do it in this minigame format i think. i struggle to think of how i would make sure there's mechanical symmetry between them all. i don't know if i want it to be super varied in control schemes and goals, or if i would make all the challenges you pass tied together in some way, even if it's just in how they control and what you expect from the inputs. i have experience in plugging together a lot of inputs to have signals passing between connectors, so maybe it could feel like that. like you're stacking on splitters and connectors and trying to make it work. but no, i don't think the game will focus much on rhythm puzzles honestly, that was kind of a flair that i added for this particular jam. maybe i'll try to focus on how the aesthetics of the world coalesce in the game around the signals you're passing, so it might feel naturally more musical or alive, kind of like with your game, but it doesn't strictly need to be tied to rhythm. funny that we have overlap there!
and thank you haha, the game was originally going to be called The Channeler, but i wanted to focus more on Teleco's escape, and i thought the weird-ass name would be more iconic. i'm really deeply satisfied with all the decisions the team made for the jam, and whatever the outcome, i think i can make something memorable and worthwhile for everyone. thanks so much for enjoying it as much as you did!
This is a fantastic little experience, the premise is unique and you’ve definitely done it justice. I adore the worldbuilding and narrative environment, the portrayal of ghosts and hauntings as this bittersweet/solemn facet of reality has always been my favourite interpretation of things. Both characters have a great dynamic, there’s a nice duality between idea of just carrying out another task as a part of your job, and something as significant as the acceptance or understanding of the afterlife, I really love that. Also, the song at the beginning is very, very beautiful. I think it mirrors the atmosphere of the game perfectly.
damn dude it sounds like you were in my stream listening to me talk about it or something ; w ; i wanted to fit in more character interactions as you go through the level, but i actually put the writing in on the last day of the jam so it's the least QOL and isn't filled out as much as it could be. but i did want the characters to have a dynamic and things like duty, understanding, or acceptance, and i'll be trying to flesh that out more in a full release.
the intro music was actually something my musician was having a hard time with, but i encouraged them to hand it to me anyway so their efforts wouldn't be wasted. they couldn't see the potential in it, so i took it and tweaked it some and they really like it a lot too now. glad they didn't trash it haha. if you're interested in the narrative aspects of it, i'd encourage you to stick a pin in it because i'm definitely going to aim for releasing a full story experience for this in the future.
That ending is 10/10 lol. I really love the aesthetic of the game. All of the sounds, music, and models/sprites are great. I played on controller so the TV tuning wasn't an issue for me. The writing was charming and the atmosphere was great. I felt like none of the mechanics overstayed their welcome and everything flowed together in a really nice and cinematic way. Really fun game, great job!
thanks so much dude >:'3 as a chronic overthinker, feeling like i haven't overstayed my welcome is really important to me. and as a chronic drama queen, i live for the aesthetic
Super cool and fun, everything was so well done and polished and that little ending bit was awesome.
One minor complaint some of the text moved too fast for me to read, I'm a very slow reader
yeah i really gotta fix that for the full release - w - it's going to be one of the first things i code from the ground up again
Amazing work to everyone involved. The concept of this is brilliant. I would love to see it expanded on, there's just much potential. Congrats on a successful jam.!
thank you so much dude!!! definitely going to be developing it for a larger release. i gotta play your game as well!!!!!
Adore the presentation on this! The vibe is impeccable, graphics strong and cohesive as a whole, great music and sound effects the whole lot! I also appreciate the continuous narrative while progressing through the game. Sadly the moment it reaches windowed mode it crashes for me, so I could only play up to there. I tried it a few times up till there, but while the window opens and I hear some sound, nothing else happens and it crashes to desktop. No worries, could be my not so up-to-date laptop.
The following is a list of notes I wrote down while playing, but please view these in the context of really liking the game (The more you like it, the more small things become noticeable in my experience!) If you're not interested in player feedback at all then feel free to ignore (we all know we'd want to polish a hundred things but can't within the time-frame).
While I like the animated and timed textboxes (great pop-in animations too), I would personally prefer to be able to move onto the next textbox with a keypress myself. Sometimes they were too fast and I couldn't read what they said. My eyes would first have to find where the new box is and wouldn't always make it to the end, or other things were happening on screen. While replaying after the crash, I would've liked to be able to skip through the textboxes instead.
While most controls are labelled quite clearly I was a little lost at the start of the game, when asked to move the control sticks. My bad though, should've read the text yo posted here! Similarly when asked to hit start or f11, I pressed start on my keyboard, before realizing that was a controller-only option.
The first time the game console starts and you're welcomed to the opening screen, there's an exit placed below the main TV, but it remained non-functional. Because I walked over it and expected something to happen, my brain registered this as just visual extras, meaning I didn't recognize the first exist as being such.
I enjoyed the volume up/down mechanic, but up until the last puzzle that forces you to use it I felt very little need to do it, the optimal route felt like putting volume on full and just running it. Moving my character on the sound waves also felt a little off and unpredictable, the speed wasn't always what it was moving on ground and moving left/right had different speeds, meaning I had trouble timing the soundwave walks.
On the first red/white split puzzle I got stuck by moving both characters to one of the exits, but there was no way back or way to restart the level and I had to re-start the game. I also found these puzzles (especially the one after) to be good in theory, but difficult to execute due to the movement of the character. The slow acceleration start and de-acceleration after letting go of a key made it tricky to do the precise movements the game was asking of me, when movement felt slightly like being on ice.
All in all great presentation, hope you polish this up post-jam as it seems so close to being complete and fully polished, very impressive! Love the glitchy shaders that change over time, too, rather than being the same effect repeated.
that means a lot coming from you dude! since your game is pretty much an aesthetic maximum haha. and damn, the end of the game does actually close the game for you automatically, but there should be other visual aspects after you go into windowed mode. it looks a little bit like the game crashes after you go into the monitor, but the window you're left with should have other things going on in it. i'm assuming you waited a little bit while the music was going? if you can hear the sounds, you should be able to hear the music track conclude before it permanently closes itself. after about 3 seconds of the empty window you should see something happen.
and yeah the textboxes not being on input really made me cringe at myself, but i added the entire story sequence intro on the last couple days and i didn't have enough time to make it input-based. i figured i didn't want to troubleshoot it this late into the game, so i opted for timed textboxes. in between my frantic development and that i had to rewatch the intro cinematic over and over, i might have been a little too stingy with the amount of time i allotted the players :p i was kicking myself for not putting a coefficient in front of the timers for quick tweaking of how long everyone got. i might've slapped on like 1.25 to 1.5 times more wait time in between each textbox.
also funny story about the pop-in for the textboxes--obviously Teleco's was meant to look like it's coming out of glowy TV static, but the Channeler's text was based on the black-barred yellow Helvetica font that they use to subtitle old undubbed foreign films here. so i wanted the Channeler to speak one word at a time with the text being pushed up and disappearing with each new line, so further emphasize the CRT/VHS era aesthetic. the left on read dev works in movies and actually was really excited to see that i did that, and we had a good laugh over it. :'] but i didn't have enough time to figure that out either, so it uses the same pop-in as Teleco's.
and yeahhhhh lmao, i know i designed the starting area a little messily. i was telling someone earlier about how i think the visual design of the starting island is also confused by the vertical columnal arrangement of CRTs. since you were supposed to make one complete circuit before having your signal pass, i felt bad putting the splitter entrance and exit there, since you wouldn't know what to do with them and they're much more noticeable than the tile path leading to the first "gaomono" creature.
you can move with the soundwaves to go faster in any direction, but i kind of mixed in advanced and casual approaches so that the game could be completed in 10 minutes by someone who isn't familiar with it, but could be completed much faster by someone who was more familiar with it. like the momentum physics were meant for being able to corner faster and make precise approaches towards the gaomono. cranking to maximum and simply waiting will get you through everything else until the end, but if you control your volume as you go you can bypass everything quickly. in fact, if the gaomono are muted, you can actually bounce off them since their audio waves don't lock you in place, so they can kind of boost you to make you go faster. in an earlier iteration, the first splitter is approached by a gaomono that's locked in place if you keep the volume high, but it stressed people out and i thought it would prolong the challenge too much, so i opted to keep it out. but luckily everyone seems to figure out that you have to modulate the volume slowly for the last one.
and oh no, i don't think i've seen anyone get stuck like you describe but i can imagine exactly how that happened. damn. yeah that's an oversight then haha.
thank you for your feedback! it's a damn shame you couldn't see the ending, because i think it really caps it off in a memorable way, but i'm glad that you spent the time on it and i hope you'll be around for when we take it even further. :]
Great art direction right off the bat! Although the TV antennae could benefit from being backlit or silhouetted by the TV screens behind them or something. I didn't realize there were two of them for a while haha. I'm glad I didn't give up there though! Very unique idea - a cross between a rythm game and a puzzle platformer. I loved the storytelling aspects of the game.
yeeeah! i thought of putting like a glowing outline around them but i didn't have time. right until the last day the antennas were still controllable during the SNES segment and they'd be moving around while you did stuff haha. and thank you!! if i had more time i would've put more design intention into the optimal path making the most satisfying musical path as well. i don't think the full game is going to be as musically inclined, but i'm glad that everyone seems to like the story aspect, which was also a last-minute addition actually. :x like i wrote the story and everything, but i was having too much trouble implementing the mechanics to get them in until the last second. but it really paid off!
This is really imaginative game! The art style is cool and the soundtrack is banging! I wish there was more games on the other monitors. The ending was also really unexpected. Awesome job!
yeah, i had other ones planned, i told my artist to make like 5 different TVs and that we'd go from there, but with how much i was coding just the one screen i cut all the other planned ones. honestly if i got all those working this game would be pretty insane, so i definitely overscoped a bit. but what's better than having a wide, unfocused scope is having a tightly-constructed and pared down one. so i opted to make sure that the game had a concise feel that guaranteed that almost everyone who played it would see the ending. thank you so much for your support!
Wow, probably the best-looking game I've played so far for the jam! I love the presentation, the switch between 3D and 2D, and especially the volume control mechanic. My only real nitpick is that I wish there were more (I liked it that much!). I could definitely see this becoming a full-fledged game down the line. Finally, I thought that the ending, both with the meta aspect and the heartfelt thank-you, were awesome. Great job!
ty!!!!!! i'm so happy that people like the weird stuff i make! i've decided that i'm going to develop this for a release next year in october, so i hope the next time you play it you'll take a lot out of it!
Great job on the presentation. I loved the out-of-game aspect, would really enjoy more of that if you expand on this project!
yeah! absolutely, i'm going to try and develop it into a full game for an october release next year!
The aesthetics and theme takes what is a well executed puzzle game so much further. Really well done!
WOW! So cool! This is a must play for everyone, probably the best game in this jam.
A really short and sweet game with a really cool ending! really liked the overall aesthetic of the game as well as the music. The music changing based on the volume and the volume being a mechanic was very cool. I didn't have any crashes or any issues and managed to easily get to the ending. Great job on the game!
Hey bonejack I got it working and this was incredible! Very Avante Garde! It was the first entry I played that towed the line between short film and video game! I loved the shader art and that ending was a fourth wall break that spoke to the unique capabilities of computers as a medium!
thanks grease!!! ❤❤❤ yeah i'm surprised, i thought there would be more story-oriented stuff but so far i've only played a couple other games that tried to convey a concise narrative. i'm definitely going to go much deeper into the story the more i work on it, i'm looking forward to delivering a truly memorable experience. :')
My best rating yet! the game is awesome! the art, music, gameplay, gimmicks, all of it. especially that ending, really caught me off guard. after the jam finishes, you need to fix the tutorial text though, i almost gave up at the beginning until i read the description on here. Awesome game! adore this one!
aw dude that means a lot for real 😭😭😭😭😭 i'll be developing it for a steam release, i hope it's even better the next time you see it!
Loved the visuals and story. Just had to overcome the initial confusion because the antenna section was a little unclear. After that I got stuck in the first puzzle because I missed the controls section.
The puzzles themself were really good. I just wish the movement was grid based because the slippery running was making lining things up with multiple characters a bit annoying. I also got soft locked because my two characters got stuck in the same space at some point and I couldn't get them out.
I like what you did with the ending tho and the whole premise was very clever. Nice job on this one.
yeah, i was kicking myself because i was planning on giving them mouse support, which is why i wrote the line about it, but i didn't have enough time and forgot to change it. 😭 grid based might not be a bad idea for that specific segment, actually, but if i were going to expand that segment into a standalone game by itself, there were all sorts of clever things you could pull off like muting the creatures ("gaomono") which made it so they wouldn't tractor beam you, but their vibration would bounce you around. you could do a lot of movement tricks with it while keeping the casual players safe enough to experiment. but yeah i agree the stereo segments need tweaking. :'] both in how they function and how i convey how they work.
thank you though! i always seek to make unique experiences that stick with my audience.
Hey! Thank you for playing our game on your stream this morning!
We just tried yours and I really love that 3D and music, looking so pretty! I also like that we started off with a story. I do like the interesting take on soundwave/volume being a mechanic, it's pretty clever.
Here's some points that I think can be improved upon:
-Keeping the tutorial for TV antenna staying on screen(minimalistic, though) would be nice since it controls differently from the rest of gameplay and way too early into the game, so in case some players missed the instruction (like me) they wouldn't be too confused.
-Try making some hints on how the volume actually tied into gameplay, since in the beginning I actually didn't realize I could use soundwave to platform. Maybe some dialog referencing soundwave can do?
-Try to give a warning before the sound blaster thing turns on or off, since it was a little difficult to time haha
-Making the story dialog to be on click rather than auto could also be a nice touch. I think I missed a few part of the starting dialog when I boot the game up because the game hasn't load properly.
Oh, and probably optional but maybe some autosave/checkpoint would be nice? The game crashed once for me and I had to restart haha
But overall, good job!
yeah! no problem. :] i'm also surprised at how few narrative-heavy games i see at jams, but my mechanics and narrative tend to inform each other heavily.
with more time i'll definitely figure something out, but the concept for this game definitely could lend itself to being a little disjointed in the way each mechanic is presented. i'm trying to think of ways to tie up all the concepts to have mechanical symmetry. i actually cut out an idea for a later puzzle because having another minigame with wholly different mechanics might dampen the concision (is that a word?) of the ending.
my design decision for informing the player was to have a path that leads to the first "gaomono," which points you at a different platform where a second one is pushing a third one off of a ledge, which they'd only fall off from when the background chord stopped, which demonstrated the mechanic in realtime from safety. the gaomono are also shaped like speakers when they roar, and their waves look like a speaker icon you might see in your digital devices when altering the volume. i was going for more intuitive mechanics, but i also had all the TVs facing up and down where there were audio splitters you didn't have an immediate use for, which was a result of the time crunch, so that confused the design a bit.
it leads you visually into thinking that you have to interact with them in some way when the real path was to the right, where broken tiles lead. in any case, i added dialogue about the volume levels/controls and that was also a crunch thing. i don't like to tutorialize too much (at all, ideally) and try to make things flow naturally, so those were what i ended up doing. it was actually pretty much entirely in hints. :'] which also sucks because i didn't have time to make it so that dialogue advances on click LOL. loads of people keep missing my dialogue. ; wwwww ;
the audio waves did have a timing issue, but it was actually because i had to change the way they worked a few days before. initially, i made it so each individual wave marked you as "floating" to prevent you from falling, and if you were no longer touching them, the death zone would trigger in a pit. but that turned out to be overly machine-dependent, so i changed it to a solid hitbox that stretches with the audio levels and was entirely dependent on reading the audio bus with the background chord that fires every other bar of music. the issue is that before, it felt right because you had to wait for the trail of audio waves to finish before you fell, but in the activated/deactivated hitbox, you fell instantly after the background chord cuts off even if there are audio waves on the screen. not many people have pointed it out, but i do think it's unfair and would be a poor design choice to leave in, so i'll definitely address that and i'm sure it'll feel better. but for people who aren't musically inclined, i'll be sure to add some kind of flash to keep them in time.
the game was designed to be one and done unfortunately, so i kept it so small that i hoped any crashed wouldn't deter a second attempt. i didn't know how to make a save and i didn't want to figure it out in the middle of developing a 10 minute game with 2 minutes of gameplay so lmao. there is actually one redundant checkpoint, a second TV after the first splitter, but you don't actually need to activate it, most people neglect to. T w T
you make some salient points!!! i'm definitely addressing them when i develop more for the game. i was just crunched to hell as the only coding dev. :'3 i was doing all the 2D art and acting as director/producer for my team while supplementing their own work in music and 3D as well.
Oh, I mean on the audio waves timing/animation: add around 1 or 2 frames of animation right before they flare up or got down, that way player can be a bit cautious on when to time passing through. The way it is now is okay in timing wise, but small visual animation cue can help player to get ready to make the jump more managable ;)
On the save, it's okay. It's small things hahaha. Consider checkpoint placements if you plan to update this game after the jam. But even as it is now, it's already a pretty solid game! Good job!
I think the visual are very well done in both 3D and 2D, it's astounding work!
Excellent job with this all around! The whole theme is unique and interesting and I'd love to play this as a full fledged game. I also really like the Baba Is You style mechanics on the second puzzle. Music was very nice and didn't feel repetitive, art and settings were all great. Well done!
aw thanks dude! yeah, i hope the full release can take it even further. :] never seen Baba Is You though, so i might check that out for inspo. part of the music gimmick is in using a filter sweep, which is common in the genres i listen to, so having to fluctuate it actually changes the energy and flow of the music and plays the part of how people actually use them in composing electronic music. if i had more time, i would make the volume challenges ideally modulate the fliter in such a way to actually make it feel like you're making dance music when you're nailing the course, but i didn't have time for that lmao. the full release won't really be that music heavy. :p
Oh my goodness this needs to be a whole-ass series with different characters. Phenomenal job, cute little puzzles, great atmosphere. My only gripe would be that some of the dialogue text went away before I noticed it/could see it since it was kind of small on my monitor and my eyes suck. But aside from that, 10/10. Or should I say 5/5/5/5.
yeah, i did all the cutscenes on the last day of the jam, and i didn't have enough time to make it so they were in sequence and input-based 😫 but that's a must-have for when i develop the game further. my friend also playtested on his 2k TV and yeah the size is irrespective of resolution and i gotta fix that haha. thank you so much though! i'm definitely going to be working on a full steam release at some point. it will probably just focus on Teleco and the Channeler, but of course i think it's a compelling narrative for someone whose job it is to capture ghosts in haunted media.
Really love this one. The graphics and vibe are great, the music jams, and the story is fun. There are some quality jokes in here too (the idea of all ghosts being part of a haunting MLM sent me). It took me a little bit to realize that the volume controlled how far the little bridges go, but once I did I had no trouble finishing the game.
You mentioned you were considering polishing this into a full release, and I definitely think you should. My one piece of feedback would be to maybe zoom in on the TV for the full release. As nice as the console looked (and it looked nice as hell), it takes up a lot of screen space. I could see that becoming distracting in a longer game.
Also please tell me how you did that window pass-through thing at the end. That was awesome.
Really great job on this one!
haha, yeah, i came up with the jokes pretty quick but i thought it was a fun jab at the concept. i mean Sadako literally has you passing a video tape to a friend, who then has to pass it to two friends, and so on and so on. "gotta keep my weekly metrics up" (because she has to kill someone every seven days 😏) in particular i thought it was funny to refer to how "they" told her how to do pre-crawl stretches, on multiple levels. ghosts have to do stretches, and they do them so they can get out of the TV to kill people, and there's some organization of them that has instructors for it. it's funny how much you can imply in one line :3
i set up a camera system such that each camera added itself to an array of them sequentially to tween between them, and one of the things i didn't get to implement was looking at the TV straight-on. since the game is really meta in its diegetic mechanics, i don't think i want to include things like a first-person HUD or have the screens shown as-is in engine, but looking at the game more directly was a planned feature. though in playtesting, it didn't take long for me to stop registering that i'm looking at a screen inside a screen, which i hope is common enough that people get even more psyched out at the ending.
godot actually has transparent window options and they're pretty easy! you can check a box for it in the window config and do whatever you want with it. that particular part does crash the game under some circumstances, but i think it has to do with the dogshit way i made the game close itself at the end haha. thanks so much for playing!!!!