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[Daniel Benmergui]

I think this is your best game so far...

Congratulations!

[increpare]

I've just updated this with a statically linked version of lua.  I think it should work for xp 64 users now.  It would be...enormously helpful...if i could get some confirmation either way

(direct link)

and: cheers daniel

[Bennett]

Let me have a go at describing it more appealingly, if you don't mind. Let me know if this is too much of a spoiler, but there's a balance to be struck between making a description spoilerish and making it too dull.


The state has hired you to be the official government historian. You are given the demographics for present-day cities, and it is your job to come up with hypotheses for how those demographics came to be. Did your government indeed exterminate the other racial group, or did they just migrate away to another town where they starved to death? Your boss tells you the 'facts', and it's your job to come up with 'proof' of those facts - or at least a plausible account of how the present demographic reality arose from past migrations.


Hmm, I still haven't quite done it justice.

[Paul Eres]

CAN'T BEAT LVL 18 I NEED TIPS

I managed to get the others down to 1, but can't figure out how to get them down to 0. I tried splitting up the 1 but it still stays as 1.

[Paul Eres]

Oh, also:

Only 1 exists, but it says "2" in the totals (I'm assuming cause partial others exist as fractions of a person).

Also also:

The game crashed for me once. Not sure why, perhaps something to do with video incompatibility. I wasn't doing anything special, it just crashed while I was looking at it and told me my video driver had crashed. But it restarted fine.

[increpare]

CAN'T BEAT LVL 18 I NEED TIPS

I managed to get the others down to 1, but can't figure out how to get them down to 0. I tried splitting up the 1 but it still stays as 1.

try spliting the original population into four (or whatever) equal parts near the start (this level does constitute a (possibly cheap) play on rounding-errors, I know).

if you wait until there's only one left, it's too late; try to get four groups of 4000 earlier-on (or whatever).

video driver crashing...hmmm...if it crashes again, check to see if there's anything left in stderr.txt or stdout.txt.  hopefully it won't, though.

[Paul Eres]

Worked, thanks!

Suggestion: arrow keys to incrementally move left and right on the timeline?

[Paul Eres]

Finished the game!

Another suggestion: perhaps blue and red particles moving along the lines so that the migration is a bit more animated?

Typo: in the final mission, one of the first paragraphs, it say something like "this brought achieved victory" -- having both words there sounds a bit redundant to me, either one alone would make sense but both together are odd.

In general I felt it was a great game but the minimalist graphics may keep people away. It felt close in tone and style to Uplink and Defcon.

[increpare]

Suggestion: arrow keys to incrementally move left and right on the timeline?

I had thought about that. I can see the utility of this, but it's not really necessary for any of the levels (even less so since I introduced a use for the right-mouse button).  I wanted to make the game as mouse-driven as possible.  Though if someone suggested some cool mouse idea now I'd probably be just as 'meh' about it...

Also, yes, it seems like you found a typo; thanks!

Particles moving along the lines might prove quite effective.  I had tried a couple of different approaches, and was never really happy with the static-ness of the interface.  But, it seems I finished everything else and the interface is still static, and...I'm going to move on to work on something else, and hope to do better next time.

It felt close in tone and style to Uplink and Defcon.

The game I was toying about with directly before I started making this was Immortal Defense, actually...it undoubtedly influenced several design choices (the decision to have a dialogue-driven narrative being the most personally important).

[Paul Eres]

Ah, that's interesting -- one resemblance I can see is that there are a series of levels, each beginning with some dialogue.

As an aside, anyone know why Firefox's and Chrome's spell-checking don't like the word "dialogue"? It always comes up as a misspelling for me, even though it's clearly a word: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue -- is it that they prefer "dialog"? That doesn't give me a spelling error notice but it's the less common way to spell the word. I use the word enough that it's annoying that it thinks it's a misspelling, and I don't want to start using dialog instead.

EDIT: Ha, I wrote this before I saw your edit.

[increpare]

I had to wrestle with the chrome spell-checker when writing my last post as well, actually ... I have a funny feeling that setting the dictionary to British English would solve everything (as it usually does), but it seemed to always somehow reset itself to American English whenever I tried in the past.

[Bennett]

I don't mind the staticness of the interface - it helps it to feel sterile and divorced from reality (this was an idea they explored in 'Defcon' - shame that game wasn't much fun)

In fact, I was trying to think of ways you could make it seem even more sterile. I quite like the look you have, mind you. I guess if it was me, I'd add a pixel shader to make it look like it was running on an old TTY terminal. Like you're staring into a little vidcon in a small cubicle in a dark basement of a big grey building, blissfully unaware of what your research is being used for (many of my friends accuse me of this).

[Zaphos]

I think it's pretty confusing just to get in to this, but interesting all the same. I just started (got to episode 7, will finish it later), but the second level took me too long just to understand what it was asking for.  The wording was odd to me ... he says there was this horrible famine and then immediately says (apparently speaking about the famine) that everyone went to the city (... the way the sentences are structured it sounds like *during* the famine). Then he says they returned *after* the famine, which sounds like, they went there for the famine and then left when it ended?  Meanwhile there are interface things like, I wasn't sure when time 0 was, and where the direction of the migration arrows isn't 100% clear, which adds to confusion when putting arrows down in one direction has no effect.

In some later levels (like the migration routes one?) it seems like I can satisfy the time=0 constraints but still not be allowed to submit my thesis, until I match what he said accurately.

It would be nice to have a way to replay the conversation without clicking 'reset' ... (unless that's already there and I just missed it?)

[Noyb]

Finished it tonight. Again, awesome job. The writing did a great job of providing context to the gameplay, elevating this beyond a simple puzzle game.

Late-game spoilery comments

Possible Bug: In level 17 in the new version, your race seems to migrate faster than the others.

[Zaphos]

Playing it more, my confusion is gone ...

Typo in ep 12 dialog: "if they stayed int the east"
ep 17: "that's very interseting"

edit edit: finished it ... not sure how I feel about ep 18, but I guess it works with the plot.