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Surveillance States's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Historical Accuracy | #3 | 3.684 | 4.200 |
| Gameplay | #3 | 2.982 | 3.400 |
| Thematic Relevance | #4 | 3.859 | 4.400 |
| Overall | #6 | 2.807 | 3.200 |
| Audio | #7 | 2.280 | 2.600 |
| Graphics | #9 | 2.105 | 2.400 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Historical Accuracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_spies
I used this wikipedia article as starting point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenville_M._Dodge
I used the activities of Grenville M. Dodge as a particular inspiration.
Thematic Relevance
I included all the major battles in the civil war. The game focuses on getting information to the northern army's during the war.
Disclaimers
Some of the assets are edited versions of paintings and photographs from the time.
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Comments
Was hard to get into for me due to the info dump that one has to wade through in order to understand how to play the game (apologies on the lack of bandwidth on my part).
The UI was also bugging out for me, which made the game hard to play right.
The game looks graphically cool, and historically quite inclined. Looking forward to seeing more developments of it, if it ever happens!
Thanks for participating in HAGJ9!
Yeah, I get the info dump issue. I literally thought as I was writing the tutorial "I'm writing a book here". The UI bugging is annoying, because I released I've not used relative positions for all the UI elements. Which I would have seen if I thought to test on a screen that's bigger than my laptop. Live and learn I guess. Thanks for playing.
I enjoyed gameplay with the nodes and the american civil war seems like a very interesting topic for intelligence activity of the 19th century. The end result seemed a little too random, I think it could be nice for the intel piece to have a more pronounced effect.
Hi there, yeah the randomness definitely has a strong impact on the gameplay that i never quite got the right balance with. I'm glad you enjoyed the node gameplay, thanks for playing.
Nice game with a good tutorial. A bit easy in my opinion, and I never once had to really care about my operation points. I noticed that it is possible to stack intel, by moving intel on a tile already filled with intel, and then when moving them simultaneously into the north, only one point gets consumed and the other needs to be taken one step into the south and back north. I also would suggest to make it impossible (or more expensive?) to move intel multiple tiles per turn, as it is pretty weird to have information basically teleport within a single turn by moving it like six steps at once. I also was unable to read the end screen, as the last battle window, with victory for the unions, blocked it, and when I wanted to press away that menu, the game reset to the title screen. Not sure if that was an oversight or a bug I've found.
Because of the overabundance of operation points, it was very easy to just about half of the centers and have the other half spy, and then open a path for all the intel to flow. Afterward switch centers.
Hi, thanks for the suggestions. One of the issues I definitely had was that I didn't really have the time to balance everything. Like the operational points. I did originally have a limit to how many moves you could do with the intel, but since some of the battles happened so quickly after each other it made winning really difficult. So instead of balancing that, I decided to remove it and hope the cost of moving the intel would be act as a limit. I'm not sure what happened with the end screen. I've been trying to replicate it and I can't figure out why it did that. Maybe something to do with screen sizes? I'm not sure. Thanks for playing.
We could not figure out how to play the game properly, probably because of the images covering some of the buttons. Though the talking animation in the tutorial was nice.
Hi there, sorry you had issues with the UI. I did test the main game on various screens but tutorial was a last minute addition. Thanks for playing anyway.