itch.io

Hi! Thank you for playing and for taking the time to write a review, we really appreciate it <3

We are working on an improved monster AI that will make the game much more fair, giving room for more strategy and making it really fun to play.

Thanks again!

Hi! Thank you for playing and for taking the time to write this review <3

We are working on an improved monster AI that will make the game more fair and fun to play. We are also considering an improved gameplay in which either the turns are very explicit or they disappear entirely.

Thanks again!

Hey there! Thank you for playing and for taking the time to write a review <3

We are aware of the control scheme, and we're working on an improved monster AI that will make the game more fair and, consequently, more fun to play.

As for the audio, could you give us some detail? Is it the footsteps? Or another audio queue?

Thank you!

Hi! Thank you for playing, and for taking the time to send us your feedback \o/

We absolutely agree with you, and walking in other directions while holding the flashlight in place is indeed something we are going to work on but have sadly run out of time for the jam, so it'll have to wait until the jam review period is over.

Thanks again!

Thank you for playing! And for the feedback :)))

The game is tile based and turn based, so you move through the house as if in a board, one tile at a time, and you are only able to move when it's your turn. But you're right: without that information, and without a visual way to understand that the reason you're not moving is just because it's the monster's turn, it can be frustrating. We'll look for ways to make it more explicit in a future version after the evaluation period of the jam is over, and maybe even try and experiment with different moving mechanics.

Again, thank you so much!

Thank you for playing! And thank you for your feedback :)))

(visible monster): yes. we'll fix it in a future version, thank you!

(controls): we totally forgot to mention (and to make it explicit) that the game is tile based and turn based. So you move through the house as if in a board, one tile at a time, and you are only able to move when it's your turn. We wanted to try and see if this would add to the tension, but it does feel a little clunky/frustrating when you don't understand that the reason you're not moving is because the monsters are - which is even harder to understand with no visual feedback and the fact that you can't see the monsters moving. In future versions we'll see if making turns more explicit will improve the experience, or maybe even experiment with other moving mechanics. Thank you!

(footsteps): ah, the joys of last minute changes :D We'll fix it in an upcoming release, after the review period for the jam is over.

Again, thank you so much!

O jogo é jogavel, mas só implementei o conceito do core gameplay até o momento, infelizmente não tive tempo de iterar sobre a ideia ou dar qualquer tipo de polimento. Quem sabe depois da jam? :)

Controles:

* esquerda e direita movem o tetromino
* seta pra cima gira o tetromino
* seta pra baixo acelera a queda do tetromino
* aperte a tecla Q ou escape pra sair

NÃO DEIXE OS TETROMINOS CAÍREM NA LAVA!

Thank you! I really appreciate it :)

Thank you!

Nice write-up, thank you for sharing!

It's not! It's a tiny .exe file downloaded from the Internet so maybe that's why your antivirus is worried about it. If your antivirus supports it, you can send the file to them for further analysis and they'll confirm it's just a false positive.

If you want you can also download the source code from my GitHub and compile it yourself - for Windows you will need any C++ compiler, like Visual Studio. The link is on the game page.

I really hope you get to play my game and let me know what you think \o/

Thank you for playing! The cursor keeps moving to challenge players who want to place barriers in precise locations. You can press the down key at any moment to stop the continuous movement. You place the beam to claim space on the line, and it acts as a barrier to the moving dots, who cannot enter any claimed space. Every time you press the spacebar it places a single beam (barrier) on the line, *but* if that beam clears a bigger area on the level, it automatically fills that cleared area with other spaces, to let you know that all that space is now claimed and no action can happen there. Whenever you claim 51% of the line, the line clears and you move to the next level :)

Hopefully that clears it up! Let me know if you have any other question, comments or suggestions \o/

I saw Poe too :)

Very interesting game, congrats!

So tense! I loved the perspective shift, playing as someone who is "safe", but also feeling the responsibility for the one in danger. Got me  hooked, only wished it was longer \o/

Also... what's 9418008? It's killing me! :D

Thanks! I really appreciate it \o/

Hi Jammers! I'm new to itch.io so apologies in advance if this is not the preferred way to do things, but I was inspired by @yangamedev's posts and decided to give it a go, too. Hope you enjoy it :)

When I first heard of the Terminal Jam I got really excited. I usually spend a lot of my working hours looking at terminals, so switching contexts and thinking about what sort of game would I be able to design on that limited space got me out of the autopilot and started changing the way I thought about the command prompt. So much so that I decided to follow the "create an ASCII game" description to the letter and limit myself to actual 7-bit ASCII characters. No colors, no ncurses, not even the 128-255 so called "extended ASCII" characters.

I started thinking about classic terminal games like robots, Zork and, of course, MUDs. My first idea was to make something story-driven. It makes a lot of sense for ASCII-based terminal games, and I'm a huge fan of RPGs, but it would take a lot of time to make something good and unfortunately I only had a few hours to spare. Besides, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to push the limits of my own personal challenge and move even further away from my comfort zone. What if I made an action game? An actual action game, on the terminal, without any special libraries and using only ASCII characters. Would that even be possible?

I kept some ideas cooking in the back of my mind. To be as true to the "terminal" as possible, I decided the game should be playable without clearing the entire screen, to pass a feeling that it was just another terminal command like "cd". You called it, played it, then moved on to the next command. But to make an action game I would probably need to refresh the screen somehow, and the only way (that I know of) to do it without clearing the screen is to carriage-return and replace a single line. So, to recap: action game, running on the terminal, ASCII only, and all the action must happen in just one line. Felt like I was sabotaging  myself by making it too hard.

Then inspiration came.

I remembered playing Xonix when I was a kid (yup, I'm that old, in case you haven't realized it from the other references). Now that was a fun, addictive and action packed terminal game! But it was too graphical, and I didn't want to clone it anyway. What if I could grab the essence of what made Xonix great in a single line? The concept was simple enough: fill up space to score points, and don't let the "enemies" hit you while doing it.

A fired up my editor, cooked up a simple game loop in C++ and tried to make a small dot bounce around a line on the terminal. After a couple of glitches (like having to hide the cursor) I finally got it working, and it looked promising. Then I put a small "_" to represent the player, and mapped the arrow keys so the player could move its character around. Like Xonix, the character would slide instead of moving a single space on every keypress, to keep players on their toes. But I also made the down key stop the character from moving, to allow some fine grained play as well.

Ok, but how would the player claim the space on the level? Contrary to Xonix where you move on a 2d space leaving a trail, I had just 1 dimension to play with, so I had to think of another way to capture the moving dots. I picked the spacebar to create a barrier of "|" on the line that would make the enemies bounce. In the spirit of conquering space, every time you place two barriers on the screen without any dots between them, all that area fills up, giving you more points. And whenever you fill more than 50% of the screen with barriers, you go to the next level, with the same horizontal space but with one extra moving dot to deal with. And if you tried placing a barrier right where the dot is, well, it's game over for you.

Thus, Xonitix was born \o/

Looks simple, but it's fun and it gets really hard really fast - specially if you don't maximize your window ;)

Now that I had a working game, it was time to make it portable in order to reach as many players as possible. To port Xonitix from OSX to Linux I had to change exactly zero lines of code, but Windows is a whole different beast and I had a lot of fun doing it, specially since I'd never written a terminal game for Windows before.

There are still some minor issues lurking around. For example, your score is related to the actual number of "|" on the screen, not the percentage of the line you filled, so a bigger terminal window means a bigger score. Also, if you make your terminal smaller while playing you'll likely break the game, because it relies on the "carriage return" ("\r") character to keep printing on the same line and if it wraps to 2 or more lines the carriage return just won't go back to where it was supposed to.  Maybe I'll fix those in a future version, or maybe I'll just leave it like that as a homage to all the other glitchy terminal games of the past ;)

Anyway, that's Xonitix, my entry for the 2018 Terminal Jam. I hope you like it and have fun with it. If you do, please jump to Xonitix game page and leave a comment!

Thank you! I wanted to keep it simple in the style of old ASCII games, and I also wanted to explore the concept of having a complete action game in a single line. If you have ideas to improve the game while keeping it true to its core, let me know \o/

Also, many thanks for your help on the other thread. The new version now detects the terminal size so the bug you reported previously should not happen again!

Thanks! I really appreciate it :)))