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A jam submission

Deus HeistView game page

Find the documents in this Text-graphics DOS level.
Submitted by GRG — 1 day, 6 hours before the deadline
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Deus Heist's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Gameplay#43.5713.571
Overall#63.4293.429
Graphics#93.2863.286
Audio#101.2861.286

Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

I love that the whole map is isn't shown at once, it kept the mystery alive. Nice work.

Submitted

It seems to only work in DOSBox 0.74.

I like the idea (though the movement felt a bit slow) and having the display be a rough map of what is actually there (it kinda reminds me of Thief's "rough" hand-drawn maps and i guess such an idea could be explored more). I think having a bit of more randomization would help. Are there only two levels? After beating the first level i had the second level repeat, though it looks largely the same as the first minus the cameras (...wouldn't that make more sense as the second level? :-P) and i think some bushes are moved differently but it looks largely the same.

In general i found it a very cool idea, even though i'm not really into stealth games  :-).

Developer

Thanks!  I've got a FreeDOS machine it works on as well, but yeah, I've definitely duffed something up.

Submitted

It's a small game finished in 5 mins, but I like the visibility effect idea. Nice text based rendering too.

Developer

Thank you!  At the minute I'm still learning DOS development so almost all my dev time went into getting it working at all.

Submitted

At first I thought there was a roguelike in store for me.  I liked that there's an actual strategy to winning the game, and that I couldn't just walk in and take the documents.  I thought at first I'd have to take the documents back to the start or something else besides finding them.  I would have liked if the documents were in a random location each play through and there were patrolling guards so that the player always has to be on guard.  Great start to a game!

Developer

Thanks!  Yeah - I really wanted to make it more than just finding them too.  Definitely a lot more can be done!

Submitted

The game mechanic has so much potential!, and the presentation is simply lovely (especially the building layout being show in the fog, as some kind of war intelligence). With enemies and different gadgets, can be a really cool game.

Developer

Thanks!  I can't claim the building layout display idea as my own - it was copied from inspired by Monaco

Submitted

I tried to run this game on two retro-PCs, a pentium with DOS 6.22 and a pentium3 with whichever version of DOS came with windows 98 SE. I even tried it under windows 98 in a DOS vm86 window, but everywhere I got a blank screen. It wasn’t stuck, exiting with ESC worked in all cases, but it failed to show anything other than a blank screen. I also tried both VGA and CGA modes.

I played it a bit in dosbox and I love the sight mechanics. The fluidity of dynamic “fog of war” is really cool. But it’s a shame I can’t run it on the real machine. Let me know if I can do anything to help debug this.

Developer

Dangit!  I really need to invest in some proper hardware to test these projects on. :(

Must be something to do with setting the 8x8px character graphics mode.

I'm glad you like the sight mechanic!  I'll get some real hardware set up and get it fixed.

Submitted

Plus it’s much more satisfying running what you wrote on real hardware :)

I have an alternative to suggest however. PCem is a very accurate emulator, and indeed I just tried your game in PCem and exhibits exactly the same issue as the real computer does. At the start of this jam a couple of months back, I posted in the “community” section, a handy archive including a PCem disk image with DOS 6.22 and a bunch of devtools pre-installed, as well as a PCem binary I compiled for GNU/Linux: https://itch.io/jam/dos-game-jam-2/topic/692522/disk-image-with-dos-devtools

Developer

I've still a lot to learn about DOS development!  Weirdly, it works fine on a FreeDOS machine I've got, but not on Win98 and PCem shows up the problem for me too.

Thanks for the offer of help - I'll try stripping it back to narrow down the problem, and pull together a larger collection test environments, starting with your PCem tools!