- Review -
The game was super fun! I love the idea of what you're going for, and I can appreciate how much effort it took to get all of this working. Granted, it took me a shaming amount of time to figure out what I actually needed to do to win, but, the game was always keeping me moving and thinking! Really well done!
- Issues -
It would be a lot easier to understand how to win if the manual was easier to read and also wasn't as long as it is. I understand that there is a lot of information you wanted to convey, but most the information wasn't really relevant to the gameplay. (Though I do love having it there, it shows you put thought into the details!) I think it would be best to find another area to put that information, like a command that allows you to view logged information of the entities instead?
Secondly, the spider was way too easy to ward off. The door took a lot of energy to use, but the turret basically didn't take anything at all. So it made more sense to just let the spider roam free, and just leave the turret on. Either way I would have to keep powering the generator, but with the door never using power, it gave me more time to focus on the other entity. This basically made it so the spider was never really a threat. Finally, the sat "setup" command is shown in the "help" command. But I couldn't find a use for "sat setup [x]" anywhere. I probably missed something, but incase it was meant to be important I thought I'd mention it.
- Overall -
Honestly one of my favorite games played this jam so far. It takes inspiration from games such as FNAF and the SCP foundation, but, the added ability to control the facility using console commands is pretty cool! I hope you make this a fully fledged project!
Viewing post in SecureOs jam comments
Thanks a lot for the review!
Part of the idea with the manual was that it was very shitty and sloppily put together on purpose, with only a few bits of useful information (that is easier to read) spread throughout. Due to time crunch and most of the work happening near the end, the actual mechanics in the game are Slightly different from how they where in the manual, and also some of the things that where meant to be relevant just simply ended up not getting implemented.
The setup command is actually needed to get the game's ending after completing the calculations, it even directly tells you to run it when completed. So I'm not sure if you misremembered that or if there's some other bug.
The game definitely could've done with a bit more balancing, and maybe at some point i can add more "shifts" to add some extra mechanics, but I'm super proud of what we managed to do in the time we had, especially since this is my first finished game lol.
As for making this a fully fledged project, I'm actually working on a game with a similar premise called BIOS (puzzle horror game with a technology theme) that will partially use the terminal mechanic (alongside a bunch of other stuff, its way bigger in scope), and its actually what we originally made the spider model for! I'll probably start putting the alpha versions of that on itch at some point in development.