| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall Good | #1 | 3.700 | 3.700 |
| Gameplay | #2 | 3.800 | 3.800 |
| Overall | #7 | 3.533 | 3.533 |
| Graphics | #10 | 3.800 | 3.800 |
| Sound | #10 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
| Modifier | #12 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
| Overall Bad | #32 | 2.700 | 2.700 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
If you have implemented the modifier, how have you done so?
Theme, and it's mentioned throughout via text.
Any additional information for voters?
There is a SECRET that will take some effort to find. It's not required to win.
Maybe I'm getting too old, but I find reading the text very straining on the eyes. So much in fact that I don't have the patience to read through the entire text of the game and understanding it without the text seems very hard.
I'm sorry, but as interesting as the game sounds, I think I'll have to take a pass on this one for now :/
It's not mainly the size, but the fact that the font is not the most legible one combined with a relatively low contrast and the scanline effect. That being said, I gave it another go today and it seems a little better when my eyes aren't already tired.
So, what about the game? it's sort of fun. I do think it's brought down a little by one crucial rule of game design, though: "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."
Example 1: While it's much more fun to just left-click every square and there are more than enough health drops to be able to do that, it's clearly more "optimal" to first right-click every tile, then left-click it, so players will tend to do the latter.
Exampe 2 (though that might have just been my own silliness): The first time I clicked one of those end-game tiles, all green blocks exploded, revealing a lot of enemies that I had to take out quickly. This was actually the most fun part of the game. HOWEVER: What I "learned" from this encounter was that, since there are four colours of blocks, probably each of those end-game tiles would reveal one of them and I just got very lucky that the one with the least amount of tiles was revealed first. Clearly, the most optimal thing then would be to clear the playing field one-by-one and only then click the other end-game tiles in order to minimize the number of enemy spawns and not die so late in the game. So I spent the next 5 to 10 minutes clicking on tiles until I got so bored I decided I needed to just try to click the center tiles again, and look, it didn't even do the thing I was afraid of! That's a lot of time I wasted in the name of unnecessary optimization.
Anynway, apart from that, the game was sort of fun. I felt like the stakes were not super high, though, so maybe it needs a little rebalancing.
And a few more UX features I'd like to see:
After all that rebalancing, would the game even be SBIG anymore? Maybe not. But if you're not careful, it could turn into a SGIG game, which I guess is also an okay thing to achieve.
Hey! Thanks for the detailed feed back! Some of the features that you're talking about here are already in the post jam version of the game. Mines don't immediately explode, they show a bomb icon that flashes for a bit until it explodes. These explosions are bigger, and will set off bomb timers around them! This can make things more frantic, and put the abundance of health power ups to better use. I can always look at other fonts, that's an easy thing to fix.
Initially there was a penalty for clicking the wrong program, but that made the game too hard for those who play tested. It was too unforgiving for most, and I've found that difficulty for jam games can be hard to peg down. So I will often lean towards what keeps people playing over difficulty. It was hard enough to explain to some people how to play, as most people don't experiment anymore and expect directions on how to play, hence the tutorial. At a minimum, I could add some sort of audio feedback for the wrong program being used to start.
Overall, I just need to add some more feed back to the player on actions they take. There is some, but could use more on good and bad actions. I really appreciate the detailed feed back and recommendations! Thank you for taking the time to play and rate the game!
Said I'd make sure I tried this out and man I'm glad I did!
The gameplay is great, a nice mix of rock paper scissors and minesweeper. Though I admit I played in a very boring way for a good chunk of the game because I just kept right clicking everywhere and slowly grinded my way up the first couple keys lol. But once I got to the green keys I started actually engaging with it more and it was really fun! Especially nice clearing out all the enemies after I got the true key and beating the game.
The graphics are beautiful pixel art, combined with the emails (I'm so happy Kokoro and I got in as spam accounts btw) it really gave off the hacker vibe! And the emails were pretty well written and I love how they evolved as you progress.
As for the audio I think it fit quite well, but due to my mixture of boring playstyle at the start plus the constant clicking did lead me to eventually just turn off the audio and play YouTube in the background. But I fully appreciate any jam game that has actual settings, and quite frankly I end up turning off music in most games after I think I've heard it all.
The tutorial I think was a great addition, though I'm not sure if I missed something at the start but at first I thought you had to have that square crosshair over things to interact rather than just the cursor. I did figure it out within the tutorial, but from my own experimentation rather than being informerd through the tutorial. But that being said, part of a tutorials purpose in my opinion is to allow experimentation with mechanics, so it definitely nailed that aspect.
Also its really cool that you got to make a sequel to a previous SBIG entry you made! It actually seems to be something of a common theme this year lol. I got to do it partially once with my game last year, and even certain parts of Thesmothete, but no proper sequel/reboot. I haven't played the original but from what you posted in discord you've really come a long way!
Excellent work!
Gave this a playthrough, really love the aesthetic! It's nice to look at and I LOVE the minesweeper combat. The emails were a nice touch to give players tips on how to play, and the spam was funny to read (thanks for making me one of the spam e-mails hahaha!)
I did notice sometimes clicking on tiles didn't react immediately? I would try to right-click to check for mines but it didn't work, and left-clicking didn't always work either, unless it is built into the game to not always react? Not sure, could have been on my end (I was using Firefox to play since for some reason it say my Chrome is out of date lol) Also, it would be nice if on full screen it doesn't remain at resolution and actually enlarges, it made it hard to read the text at times.
Sadly I unfortunately encountered too many mines and died lol, but gonna give this another playthrough soon and I just really enjoyed it. The graphics, the emails, the minesweeper, I am not sure what WASD is for since I saw nowhere I could move around unless I am missing something? But all in all, a very promising and fun little game, perhaps too good in some cases, it has a really nice concept to be a truly good game! Definitely gonna play the original when I have the time ^^
Thanks for the feedback! Ya know, I only tested it out on 2 browsers (Brave and Chrome) and I noticed on certain streams of people playing the game that things would sometimes display differently depending on the browser. I do my development in Linux, but it shouldn't matter since the game itself is technically HTML5. Perhaps I need to start testing things with other browsers to see if it makes things wonky...
Either way, I'm glad you liked the game! It's a great deal better than the original CYBERHAX, and it's also a testament on my progress over the last few years. It's buggy, (like most of my games, lol) but it's thought out and polished enough that I'm proud of it! I have a few ideas to change the gameplay once the Jam is over, so I'm totally going to do a Post-Jam update shortly after voting ends. Again, thanks for taking the time to play and rate the game!
Wow this is so extremely fleshed out! I really like the gameplay loop here! It's actually pretty cathartic and I could see myself playing this for hours to be honest! I loved the story and email system! It all gelled really well. I also thought the tutorial was very helpful and made it all clear!
Real well done with this one! As someone who described the original CYBERHAX as "Clearly not-quite-finished", THIS is a beautiful, complete product!
Yeah I enjoyed this, I'd play even more of it if I could! Well done!
That's great news! Thanks for taking the time to drop some feedback. I really wanted to test myself a little and see if I could make something better out of the original idea, but also just to see how far I've come since the 2018 version. Thank goodness that I was able to squeeze in that tutorial in the last 2 hours!
Thank you again so much for the feedback, and thank you for putting this Jam on over the last few years. Looking back, this was the 2nd public Jam I ever took part in. If it weren't for Jams like this one, I'd never have gotten this far with my "hobby". Thanks Ned!
This game has a very unique idea and the gameplay is very enjoyable, Its good that you've added tutorial cause I think I would have difficulties without it
Well, this takes me back. I vaguely remember the original CYBERHAX. Is this the SBIG Jam for throwbacks?
The style and presentation of this game is really cool, in fact it's almost too good for SBIG Jam. The retro style is fantastic, the flavour text adds a lot of character to the game, and the injokes/references definitely are worth some points. The title coming in with the guitar chord I knew about but actually seeing it in game was something else.
I can't help but feel too much time was spent on the flavour and style and cool stuff and not enough on making the core gameplay work well, though. I could not for the life of me figure out how to play this game. I clicked on some stuff, some stuff happened, I didn't know what it meant, and I quickly gave up.
I read all the messages but I was totally at a loss as to how to actually start hacking. Eventually I figured out how to start the actual hacking game; I forget which button it is, but it's one of the ones along the bottom. But then I wasn't really sure what to do. There's a square marked exit, but the rest is just a sea of squares, and I don't know what the different colours mean. There's a bar, and a tortoise number, but I don't know what either of those mean. I tried right-clicking to scan for mines, but that didn't seem to do anything. Clicking on the squares displayed icons, but I didn't know what they meant. Some of the UI implies you have multiple powers or tools, but I don't know what they do or how to switch between them.
There are some weird glitches with this game. It's quite small and the text is VERY hard to read at the default size, but zooming in totally breaks the graphics at some zoom levels. The game also didn't start the first time I clicked start, or maybe had a very long delay.
The type on effect is cool the first time but I wish there was a way to skip it.
All in all, there's lots of cool stuff in this game, but I couldn't figure out the game itself, and it's almost too nice to be SBIG.
EDIT: Looking at the page now, I see movement keys are listed. I thought this game was played entirely with the mouse.
Thanks for the detailed feedback! I often forget that people don't experiment as much as I do with games, so maybe I need to add a basic tutorial to show people what to do. I hope I have time left! EDIT: I've added a tutorial to the game that explains how it's supposed to be played. Thank you so much for providing feedback!
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