itch.io

Totally fair and I do appreciate it. It is absolutely complex in unusual ways, and you were on the right track. There's alot happening in the background.

The easiest way to explain trace is that "The more it fills, the closer the boss will the spawn enemies" and not try to fully understand it. At low stages the boss will spawn enemy tiles randomly across all the floors, but as it fills it'll narrow down towards your current location, down to the specific tile you are on. By moving to a new floor, it loses track of where you are and spreads out the attacks again. 

"Peer" is just the camera enemy's attack ability, that increases Trace. So, some enemies attack you directly, while others send data back to the AI to either track you down or allow it to gain its own growth XP. So, there are lots of minigames are happening all over the place so I totally understand the confusion. 

I'm not sure what would have killed you on the 4th floor like that, but I'll have to take a gander. I do appreciate you giving it the college try. 

I appreciate it and totally agree on the concerns. It sounds like the mapping needs some rework and I might entirely redo the confusing map.  I'm glad I didn't make it even more confusing as I'd originally intended with lots of ups and downs :D

The computer is actually running a bit of a minigame in the background that causes it to level up. Every 10 seconds or so it's taking a turn that can add security and/or work on evolving itself. Lots of little things that happen throughout the stage influence the speed of actions and leveling up, but mostly it can just be thought of as an evolution timer. Over time, it spawns more powerful enemies, more often, or gets better at tracing you... though each game it'll develop down different paths.

Changing floors is absolutely the intended strat, though not exactly as I'd wanted.  The idea was that if it sees you on Floor 3 and you leave... it'd search floors 2 and 4 actively. So, you can keep moving around and causing a ruckus to draw away security. I didn't trust my UI feedback or level design for the jam, so I set it to a full reset instead.  You're encouraged to jump floor often and play keep away, but it's not extremely strict or time-wastey. 

So, yeah, there's lots of crazy stuff happening in the background.

For a short list: For firefighting, Check out "Ignition Factor" (SNES), Firefighter FD18 (PS2), and Real Heroes: Firefighter (Wii and PC). For natural disasters: Disaster Report (Lots of games on many system), Fire Heroes (PS2, has more rescue than firefighting), and I know you mentioned SOS (SNES) which also has a sequel on PSX "Septentrion: Out of the Blue". There are so many neat obscure games that tried unique things :D

I appreciate you giving it a shot and its definitely useful feedback. Using the map with potential spawners was absolutely a case for confusion. As for the teleporters, they are just a "Stairs up (Green)" and stairs "Stairs Down (Red)" mechanic but I was worried that the "Towers" stage (One floor with four disconnected zones) would lead to confusion. It sounds like it did.

You may NOT have missed a soul and encountered a bug where the AI loses an item while spawning the chests. I'm sorry for that because it is an immensely frustrating bug as a player. I THOUGHT I'd identified the cause and ensured that SOUL wouldn't be eaten by the AI, but it sounds like it still outsmarted me. 

If you ever do want to beat it, nothing is actually required to beat the game except to defeat the boss on floor 6. Each soul you collect just makes your "Soul" program cheaper.

Yeah, the map is literally the one I load and generate a level from instead of a real-time map. It was a compromise for "Getting something working for the jam" where I wanted a Rogue AI mastermind to be my major mechanic experiment.

The blue spots are "potential spawn points" the AI is looks at. There's a "gamemaster" system behind the scenes tweaking the map, locking doors, shuffling/hiding items, placing enemies, etc. Ultimately though, I disabled soft-lock risks (Locks and Keys) and ensured made the AI place things conveniently. Even the map was supposed to be an active program, but I wanted it approachable.

I'm glad people seem to appreciate it though, this was a particularly rough jam for me. I had like 10 ideas that I wanted to play with that the theme's conveniently dodged. I had zero inspiration and this was all-hard earned steps. (Fun Fact: Everything about Rogue AI was inspired by Hans Grueber in Die Hard which I'd wanted to make into a dungeon crawl)

This is a really cool concept and one I'd like to see more of. I like that the office gave you a chance to play with the tools in a safe environment. The experience of looting places and escaping on time worked well and could definitely be built on with some more variation, and I almost felt the puzzles such as the truck undercut the thrill of the heists a bit but I had fun. 

The only area I felt a bit underwhelmed was the louvre itself just because of the size of the city. I felt like I barely got inside the building before I felt I needed to start running for the exit. If the exit was a little closer to the heist I'd have felt far braver about rushing inside and exploring some. But with time constraints, it's totally fair and the visual spectacle of the full city was nice.

I had some issues with mouse controls and keyboard worked great. But it would be helpful to have an on screen indicator for the keyboard keys next to the left/right arrows or remapping the interaction keys to ones next to one another because I kept getting confused which is Left and which is Right. 

Overall though, I really enjoyed the proof of concept. This was clever and I'd love to see what you can do with it.

Oh, definitely appreciate that. "Shipping" is an art form and you did good bringing it to life. I look forward to the later product.

I loved the "Climb", "Jump Down" and "Lead Across" mechanics. The verticality created a really good feeling of a big, real, complex world that I rarely see even in big budget crawls. I like how you handled a lot of the puzzles too. Overall, just moving around the world and exploring was top-notch here.

Definitely powerful. I was afraid the minesweeper-y mechanics would chase people and being a short jam, I wanted to make EVERY skill over-powered. So ANY 2-3 skill and you've got a good shot at the finale. The original plan wasn't to have natural regen and it would force the stealth/dodging. But ultimately I chickened in to let people play with the systems instead of needing to master them. 

That was fantastic. The visuals were stunning and the overall feeling of the game was spot on. About the only feedback I'd offer is to raise the accuracy of the player characters in combat or add an accuracy bonus to some weapons. Overall, the game felt great, but it did feel like I was lacking control over many of the battles.

This was a really cool one. Visually, it was pure nostalgic joy and the mechanics were unique enough that I was drawn in. It could have used a couple of tooltips about spending energy, dying and respawning... but once I understood what was happening, I had a blast.

I've always been a sucker for firefighting game's so this was a cool one to see. I particularly liked the burning animals that move around because it changed up the formula a bit. Cool idea.

I like the concept a lot and I played through the full dungeon. I would have like to have seen the different songs have different effects whether it was a little more range, or status effects. Having 3 damage types that different enemies are weak too just undercuts the "You're a bard!" feeling that the game built towards with the combat minigame.