I had a hard time getting people to rate this. It was still relatively popular, so I’m guessing a few people downloaded it but didn’t rate it.
Anyway that’s really not the genre you’d expect in a jam. It requires patience and investment from the player, and it can take A WHILE. I also didn’t want to break immersion in the presentation, so that didn’t help.
It still got 4th in immersion and 5th in innovation, which is pretty cool.
This game was inspired by the In Memoriam games by Lexis Numérique. In those, you had to give your email address to get updates from game characters and alt-tab constantly to search fake websites to find information.
My goal here was to force people to play “outside” the game, so I made an email address for it and included text files. The periodic table thing was here to make something obvious enough that would force the player to use google. Then I knew I could use various codes and google map, which was at the core of my idea.
As for the theme, it’s kinda hidden, but it was here from the start. Outside of the fact that you can’t die and the victims aren’t dead, the idea behind it was some kind of apocalypse (as “new beginning” more than “end of times”).
I didn’t have time to get people playtesting the game, which is a shame for a puzzler. The only thing I “tested” was the missing file which wasn’t clear at all because it didn’t have a square around it.
I also missed a few occasion where I needed to add alternative answers.
Few things I realized after the fact:
- GMS resets "keyboard_string" when you alt-tab
- people aren’t that familiar with the concept of elysian fields or morse code
- Google Maps translation is weird
The banner is made with some free stock photos. For the ambient music I knew I’d just modify it so the choice wouldn’t be that important. I took Lonely Troutman II by Will Rosati because it’s free and pretty good. And for the country outline, I used Wikipedia and GMap screencaps as base.