itch.io

Thanks for the feedback. I think I was going too much for nostalgia with this one. The interface is quite retro, originating with the Commodore 64 games Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken from the 80s. The UI is probably most similar to The Secret of Monkey Island from 1990, shown below:

Something like that is what I was going for, but I know that games haven't used something like this for 30 years.

I ran out of time a bit with regards to what the goal was. My plan had been to have an intro of some kind that explained things. In the end I put that Note in the inventory that explains things to some degree, but I know it wasn't perfect.

Regarding the levels looking the same, there are two reasons for this: The first is that I ran out of time. I did plan to make the rooms look a bit different on each level, at a minimum maybe change the hue as suggested in one of the comments. The second is that after realising I probably wouldn't have time to make them look much different from each other, I went with the idea that this was deliberate, that this is a deep space colonisation spaceship filled mostly with humans in cryo sleep pods. The engineers had no reason to make the levels look different from each other, since the ship would be travelling for a 100 years without anyone walking around the halls. 😊

Thanks for the kinds words. Regarding having to reload the page when you die or win, to be honest, when I woke up on the morning of submission day, I still didn't have the death scenarios or win scenario coded. So the final 5 hours was a bit of a rush. There is a lot in my original vision for the game that I didn't have time to finish, but I wanted to give some kind of end, or multiple ends, to the game. Adding a restart button would have been one of the next things on the list.

Thanks for the feedback!  Yes, very similar to the start of Space Quest, but with an early SCUMM-like interface. I was a big fan of the SQ series. The game is also influenced a bit by the TV show "The 100".

Yeah, you're right,  the main reason that all the rooms look very similar is due to time constraints. I did plan to make each level look a bit different, but it was a matter of juggling my time and trying to decide what was more important. I thought I should have a few puzzles and a few death scenarios rather than just something to walk around in. In the end there isn't really much of a game but for 13 days it wasn't too bad I think.

Did you walk into Level 4 or Level 2? Those are the two floors that have sustained damage. Level 4 has a gas leak, and Level 2 has a power outage, so is nearly completely dark. These are the maintenance issues that the note in your inventory says you'll need to fix. If it was Level 4, then there should have been a dirty brown gas filling the hallway. If it was Level 2, then it would have been much darker. On level 2, you can only walk back into the elevator. If you try walking anywhere else, you'll trip over and die. I was really rushing to finish at the point that I added these death scenarios, so didn't put much time into explaining exactly what happened. The character says something like "Ahhh!! I tripped over" then he falls over and dies (maybe due to a broken neck, but that isn't obvious). On Level 4, you die immediately as a result of inhaling the poisonous gas. I think the character says something like "Ahhh!! The gas is killing me", after which he falls over and dies. There is a puzzle in the game that lets you walk around this Level with a breathing mask, but if you go down to Level 4 without it, then you'll die.  It is also possible to walk around Level 2 if you've restored power to that level, and its possible to walk around Level 4 without wearing the breathing mask if you've vented the gas already.

I haven't seen it freeze like that after a specific time, but the game does have a user input mode that is either on or off, depending what is happening on the screen. The cursor changes to a spinning wait cursor during those times when the user isn't able to interact with the screen, which means it will ignore clicks. There was a bug at one point where it would end up in that mode and never come out. I thought I'd fixed that though. Does it happen every time for you at 2 minutes? If so, has the mouse cursor changed to a waiting cursor?

Something that might be happening around the 2 minute mark is the background music finishing. At that point it sets the position back to the start and plays it again. I guess it might be possible that this hangs on some browsers, on some machines. I'm using a JS library that emulates the OPL2/3 chips, e.g. as used in the Adlib/Soundblaster sound card from 30+ years ago. It generates the music on the fly with a web worker thread.

What browser were you using? I only tested on the latest Chrome to be fair. I know that some of the css effects don't work too well on Firefox. Also older versions of Edge lose a lot of the css effects. The newest releases of Edge that use the "Blink" engine handle things better.  It works reasonably well on Chrome on mobile phones.

One of the death scenarios is the 10 minute countdown timing out. I ran out of time to make it more obvious what was going on. I was going to build a small intro but in the end I went with a "Note" in his inventory that explains things to some degree. The spaceship has sustained damage due to asteroids. I assume that you hear the computers voice every 10 seconds saying how much time was left until total system failure? What that is intended to convey is that everything will fail at that point and the ship will explode. I made the countdown only 10 minutes since its possible to finish the game in 5 minutes and I think it adds to the urgency of the situation.

Yeah, I spent most of my time working on the engine and css effects rather than the puzzles. There are a few puzzles in there though, and for a while some were right there at the start to do immediately, but given its quite short for an adventure game, I decided to make the few puzzles a bit harder to find. There's a lot more exploration now, walking around the 48 rooms trying to find items. Not saying there are many though. :-) 

There are 3 ways to die, and I'm guessing most of you will see those quite a few times before finding the way through to the end.