itch.io

I sent you an e-mail a while ago, but didn't get any reply. Did you receive it ?

I'll add more information on the game page, but I failed to make the game communicate its mechanics to the player.

The game fails (I failed) to communicate important information to the user. Feel free to feel smart again !

Thanks for taking the time to try the game.

I'm aware that the game is confusing and doesn't communicate well what is expected from the player. I still chose to submit the game, and try to make it a "polished" game, as I have failed to properly finished game in other game jams.

While writing this, I found a typo in the code that caused the display of one of the computers on the last stage to be wrong. It was still possible to figure things out but it would make it even more confusing.

I'm going to explain things here, just in case somebody can't progress and want to go to the end (there is nothing special at the end).

There are 5 "stages", each level is 5 turns: you need to succeed 5 turn in a row to progress to the next level. On each turn you need to press a direction, and if you pressed the correct one, you progress to the next turn. If you don't, you "loose" one turn, but you'll never go back to previous stages. The game display 5 directions at the bottom of the screen which are the output of the 5 computers of the shuttle. On each stage (not turn) the 5 computers will change how they work (the idea is they are hit by a solar flare, and don't function properly).

So each stage you need to figure out what direction to press based on the output of the computers. The "strategy" is to figure out the pattern of 1 computer and interpret its output to get the correct direction to press. There might be several computer that produce useful information, but except for one stage (4), there is no need to use several computer to figure the correct direction.

- On the first stage, the computer give the correct direction.

- On the second stage, one computer always give the same direction (not useful), and the other computers always give the inverse direction.

- On the third stage, two computer always give the same direction (not useful), and three computer give the correct direction on the horizontal axis, and the inverted direction on the vertical axis.

- On the fourth stage, the correct direction is the one that is never given by the computers.

- On the fifth stage, 3 computers always give the same direction (not useful),  and 2 give a direction at 90° counter-clockwise.

I just watched the video were you try to figure things out, and I feel bad because I made a mistake.

The error message above contains two messages, it seems that the WASAPI message doesn't contain a new line, and might just be a warning with no real issue.

The second message is "[04-03-24 18:20:26] Exception thrown at 0x00007FFF040D19BE: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF." and that one is an issue in the AMD driver (I have a old Radeon RX580) it crashes somewhere in atio6axx.dll or sometime in a ntdll.dll called from the AMD driver.

It doesn't always crash at the same location. I also tried version 0.2 and that one crashes right away, but I believe it's in your implementation of Assert because it's writing 0 at address 0.

` mov             dword ptr [0x0], 0x0`

So its probably more a graphics issue.

I tried your other game "Dungeons Of Alhebra", and that one run just fine.

Also sometimes, I manage to go in the game and play it (I died a few times before it crashed), but the sound is wrong, I can ear the music and sfx, but it doesn't sound good. And it reminds me of an issue I got with WASAPI where if a user had vsync forced off in the driver (which I don't have), the frame rate could be faster than the minimun latency needed by WASAPI (I was using the delta time to compute how much audio data to send to the audio buffer, and it wasn't enough data). An quick and dirty fix for that was to always send a minimum of 0.16ms worth of sample to wasapi, until I did a proper implementation of audio.

If you'd like more information we can continue by e-mail.

The game crashes for me. It displays the title screen, some times I can go ingame, but it quickly crashes after that.

In the output window of a debugger I get

"avcore\audiocore\client\audioclient\audioclientcore.cpp(1501)\AUDIOSES.DLL!00007FFEEC3574E5: (caller: 00007FFEEC334FD5) ReturnHr(1) tid(2490) 887C0030 [04-03-24 18:20:26] Exception thrown at 0x00007FFF040D19BE: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF."

The sound is really bad, like it doesn't update quick enough (lots of noise and clipping).