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I made a mediumish-sized but still rather experimental game over the past couple of weeks.

Windows (http://ded.johnmarkkearney.com/~locus/operaomniawin.zip) (6.4MB)
OSX 10.5+ (http://ded.johnmarkkearney.com/~locus/operaomniamac.zip) (6.4MB)
Source (http://ded.johnmarkkearney.com/~locus/operaomniasrc.zip) (114KB)

Feedback would be very much appreciated; I'm still open to changing things about.

EDIT: oops download was borked (level 3 was broken :(  ); just reuploading fixed

EDIT: RELEASE BUILD UP

"so what did cause it?" and it crashed or was that the end?  once i clicked the third episode it closed.  i'm running on vista, btw.

this is an extremely original work.  of course it was confusing at first, but the first episode cleared everything up.  then after i completed the second thesis, i sensed something creepy, as if the historians new what had created these awful events.

the graphics fit well.  if i had to nitpick i'd say i didn't like the blue streaks of the menu's background.  and rather have that more formal and minimalist like the rest of the gui.  the storyline i didn't get enough of (only 2 episodes) but it was well written (i.e. no engrish/minor punctuation errors).

nice work ;D :handthumbsupR:

[edit] ah, lemme try again.

also, at one point in time i accidentally exited the episode and had to restart.  might there be a way to skip the dialogue?

This is fascinating. The way one has to use backward reasoning to deduce which dynamics might have produced the current state from some "desired" initial state I find completely unique and requires some serious adapting from our usual pattern of forward "action-reaction" reasoning.

I enjoy both the setting in academia (which is something I'm just getting involved with IRL now) and the Orwellian overtones of rewriting history.

I'm stuck at the Gypsy level right now (6 I think) and really have to get some sleep, but I'll be sure to return to this.

EDIT: Interface may be slightly clunky, though I should try with a real mouse instead of a touchpad first I guess.

I have never played it with anything other than a touchpad, heh.  What do you mean by 'clunky', exactly? (even one particular example of an interface mechanic you think could be unclunkified).

I figure I should probably add some interface sounds at some point. (button clicky sounds, for instance).

Prof Dead, does the '[edit]' mean that you downloaded the updated version and level 3 worked?

Also, you can press escape to skip the dialogues.

yes, it's working.  ah, escape key, thanks  :beer: i didn't look at the readme  :-[

I don't think I said anything about it in the readme  :D

...

I really like the concept, especially how all the levels are based towards proving only one of many possible interpretations given solely the present state. This goal based method lends itself really well to the puzzles.

Got up to Level 17 before calling it a night. (The one where you have to spoiler)

My favorite so far was level 13, where you had to spoiler.

The only things I could think of to improve it would be the UI. It feels backwards at first to select migration routes by choosing the destination first and then the source. Restarting by quitting the level is fairly clunky. It would be nice to see an undo/redo button for more complicated levels. It'd also be helpful if there was a counter of the total number of members of a group at any one point in history, since a good number of the objectives use this statistic.

ouch!

That's probably not going to change.  It's sort of part of the backwardsness.

Yeah.  I'll include a restart button in the menu, along with a "review briefing" button.

I'll add an undo at least.

Yeah; I'll add that.

I've been playing it and thinking about it some more, here are some suggestions:

• Using the left mouse button for both setting start time and deleting routes (by dragging) is confusing. Use right mouse button for deleting routes (since it's unused anyway).
• Once you have set the start time for a route, it's impossible to set its start to an earlier point in time. Perhaps make the routes more like bars on the time line and make their start/end points draggable?
• Use Home/End keys to go to time 0 and end time. In general, some keyboard shortcuts would be appreciated.
• Have some statistic which always shows you the total populations at t=0, wherever you are on the time line. Right now this information isn't available in any other way but going to t=0 and manually summing up (as far as I can tell).
• The scaling of the little squares representing population seems a bit disproportionate at times, 100,000 seems almost indistinguishable from zero...?
• Use a thousands separator. Mentally parsing a number like 1000000 is quite annoying.

Anyway, the more I play this game, the cleverer I find it. It may just be one of your best works so far (or at least it appeals very much to me personally). May I ask where inspiration for this came from?

Also, out of technical curiosity, did you use ODEs to model the populations?


EDIT: I'm wondering.... should "homogenious" be "homogenous"?

Macbook doesn't have home/end keys, nor a (convenient) right mouse button, fwiw.  I'll make a note about having home/end be shortcut.  Though, once i start introducing shortcuts, where do I stop?  Maybe I should just work on getting the mouse-interface working well.

It is possible, just awkward.  What you do is go to the exact cutoff time, relay the line, and place a new endpoint.  Not exactly convenient, though.

I won't do this, but I will have it show the total population at the time you're currently looking at.

I scale the side-lengths instead of the areas, which might contribute to that effect.

I thought about this a couple of times, but for whatever reason haven't gotten around to it.  I'll make a note to add it.

I have a friend who works on ww2 musicology; he pointed out to me a couple of times the way musicologists under the nazi regime focused to some extent on showing how, say, french music was really just a derivitive, inferior version of german music.  And this research was directly used in propaganda efforts.  (This is based on a rough recollection; I haven't done too much reading in this field myself).  I thought it might prove an interesting starting-point.

finite difference.  It works okay, producing a very slight amount of slowdown occasionally.  Integrating analytically would probably work just as well, but it was pretty much an unnecessary headache.[/list]

Okay, proper release done now


DOWNLOAD

Windows (http://ded.johnmarkkearney.com/~locus/operaomniawin.zip) (6.4MB)
OSX 10.5+ (http://ded.johnmarkkearney.com/~locus/operaomniamac.zip) (6.4MB)
Source (http://ded.johnmarkkearney.com/~locus/operaomniamac.zip) (114KB)

Changes:
undo button
shows overall population
'reset' button on briefing menu
right-click a migration route to delete the 'starting point' directly before it, if there is one.
population scales with square area instead of side-length
fixed a typo


hope I didn't introduce any new bugs...any problems, lemme know.

Can't figure out what this game is about. Will try it later.

Tried it again. Can't make sense out of it. I guess I'm tired.

Care to describe it in a little bit more detail?

NOTICE:  OOPS THE 'RELEASE' BUILD WAS BORKED, I'VE FIXED IT NOW THOUGH (ALSO LEVEL 17 MIGHT HAVE BEEN, IN FACT, UNFINISHABLE, SO I CHANGED IT)


I don't know if it's a very appealing prospect, but as you asked, I'll give a go at summarizing the mechanic:

The idea is that you are some sort of historian/demographer.  You have control over migration routes between cities.  You work backwards though.  In each level you have access to the current demographics of the region, and you have to set up migration routes in such a way that certain goals are met at a particular time in the past.

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

Congratulations!

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 (http://ded.johnmarkkearney.com/~locus/operaomniawin.zip))

and: cheers daniel :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Worked, thanks!

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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?)

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. :gentleman:

Late-game spoilery comments

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

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.

Works on XP64! Don't have time to play it now, as I'm late for work, but I'll check it out later.

Thanks for the typo-finding zaphos.

that's intentional.  migration speeds for each race change on a level-to-level basis.

great!  will have mirror stage done later on today, then.

I just got round to trying and finishing the game, the ending feels a little cut short, and it seems like most of the time I can just arrange migration at the end and it will sort out in the beginning. e.g. I can just migrate everyone straight from an end city to a beginning city... Or is it the other way round?

Also a lot of the time the logic doesn't seem to add up to me, for example in the one where famine follows the migration of the others, the famine only happens after they leave and they can't have been exposed to it, so how exactly can there be famine for nobody? Although maybe that's intentional.

there can still be droughts and the like, or famine-conditions (were people to move there, they'd starve).  maybe I should have spent some time looking for a more generic term.

That is true.  It was intentional, but I can't quite say what the intent actually was behind it.

I just did a review for this game on http://indiegames.com/blog in case anyone is interested. Hopefully everyone won't hate it over there.

Love it! It was a little crasheriffic when I played it, but it really is pitch-perfect in execution. Aside from the initial barrier caused by the slightly unintuitive mechanic, I didn't find the UI to be much of an issue. Particles could be a help, but I thought the gradient and directing lines from source to destination made things pretty clear.

It's nice to see an impression confirmed; by remaining abstract they both make the dialogue seem like the only link to reality, which makes its distortion all the more oppressive.
Thanks for posting it on IndieGames, rinku, I'm in self-imposed exile from TIGS until I get round to making something, so I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise!

Love your games Stephen, and this one is in my opinion your best.

 :beer:

really?  could you give some more details? (in particular if, after a crash, there was anything left in the stderr.txt or stdout.txt files in the applicaiton directories (they reset after each launch)).

It exited cleanly last time :\ I've played around with it a little again and haven't managed to reproduce the crash, I'll let you know if/when I do. Both times it had hung, rather than strictly crashing to desktop. If it's helpful, I was alt-tabbing a little, had it running for a while and had made a habit of escaping to the episode menu rather than using the menu button when checking constraints or retrying.

Cheers :)

can you remember if there was anything you were doing that might have caused it? (making a route, selecting a level, &c.)

Once it happened just when I'd laid the last route for level 16, and before the simulation had been run. The other time, I can't remember, but I'm fairly sure both times were in-level.
EDIT: (This is in vanilla XP, by the way.)

I really liked this game. Totally stuck on 7, though - can't figure out any way to reduce the initial population at all, which makes me feel stupid, but oh well

If there are famines (green stuff) you can reduce the initial pop by making sure the famines do not affect people. I.e. move them away from those spots prior to (in the past of) the famine happening. Famines grow population if you think backwards.

It's taking me a while to come to terms with the ideas here, but I'm getting there. Great stuff.

18. What?

make sure you have the more recent build (i.e. not the first two I released).  in the initial build, that couldn't be finished.

Wow, that was a very haunting and disturbing game, especially Chapter 20, where you see how the historian's work was used to plan the usage of nuclear weapons / weaponized plague / intentional drought / whatever was used to artificially cause the famine. I wonder if the game was based on any particular real-world region, like Kosovo, Israel or Iran? I seriously hope that modern social sciences no longer work like this, and that we have today successfully marginalized those who say that certain cultures or races are superior.

Well, of course social sciences today usually aren't as extreme, but in art it's often good to take things to an extreme for purposes of clarity. Historical revisionism in general for political purposes is very real and prevalent, though.

For those of us in the US, one familiar example: most people in the US believe that the US won the revolutionary war, mainly through rebels and minute men. That's actually quite false -- it was France that won the revolutionary war for us, even to the extent of training our troops. But France's role is downplayed since it's convenient to believe that we won a war against Britain. There are tons of examples like that, each country has their own particularities.

Oh, and if you ever want to see it really taken to an extreme, look at North Korea. The official history of dear leader Kim Jong Il has him being born under a rainbow on a legendary mountain -- officially.

I look forward to Opera Omnia 2, featuring a 'Deploy Rainbow' button.

Is that more recent build available on the Mac as well?  I also can't finish level 18 with the most recent Mac build, although I seem to have satisfied all the stated requirements (no individual city with more than 1 Other population)..  I generally have a total 'Other' population of 2, but only have one city showing a single Other population, with all the other cities showing zero.  I'm assuming some rounding's going on somewhere, maybe?

I think you actually have to get a population of 0 in every city.

I'm playing the mac version, and I can't get level 17 to work either. I meet the victory conditions and it doesn't register a win. I double-checked that I have the newest build.

Your link to the source files doesn't work.

After playing it for a while, I agree that this is your best game.

The way I got 18 to 0 population is this: keep in mind the migration rate depends on the DISTANCE between cities, cities closer to each other migrate faster. Therefore you can't just make a link to each of the 4 other cities and hope it splits evenly, you have to actually stop and start the migration lines at different times to ensure an equal split. After the original city is 0 and the population is split nearly exactly equally, there will be 0 people at 0 time.

Thanks for the comments guys. 

okay.  there are a couple of things I have to check out, evidently. I'm busy today working on something else, but will spend tomorrow debugging this (and some other projects).

(in terms of objectives, 'should not exceed' should read 'should be less than', which probably matters most in level 18...)

(source link fixed)

Should be less than 0?  Really?

It says "should not exceed 1 at" the moment.  At least on the mac version.

Now I'm really nitpicking, but the menu bar says 'Mirror Stage' when you boot up the mac version, and the Readme in the source directory is the Infidelidad readme.

hah, yeah; I always get readme files mixed up.

menu bar stuff...I'm generally not to bothered about, but I'll make a note and fix it tomorrow.

Have you fixed this yet? I want to see what happens after level 17!

I worked on it a little, along with some other things, but got sidetracked/deflected by some totally off-the-wall errors someone else found in something else. 

Are you able to reproduce the bug on level 17? Or describe it in more detail; was it that you were very close to the constraints, or that they were totally out?  (i was able to play through it myself just fine, though i recommend waiting until the new version because level 18 isn't going to make sense as it is I think).

I'll do a release tomorrow, regardless.

thanks for calling me on this; having a slow week...

On level 17 I was well within all of the victory constraints. I double and triple checked it and even cross-referenced against the Lua script.

I'll try it again tomorrow and see if it can be reproduced.

I'd love to write about this for TIGSource, but I'm stuck on level 7.  I think I get it conceptually, but I'm having trouble making things work the way I'd like.  So I went back to level 2 to try to figure it out, but now I can't even beat that level. :(

The problem is that I can get people to leave before the famine, but for some reason can't get them to go back.  I've set the migration route, but they just won't budge.  Can't remember how I beat it the first time (which may have just been luck).

Nevermind, I figured it out!  This is a really interesting game... it's working my brain in a new way!

Can't really say much about the game, as I haven't played it.
Could you compile it for 10.4? I tried but it looks complicated. Anyhow, I'll try again and report back.

Ok, I can replicate the problem on level 17.

Move the timeline quite close to the earliest point in history - maybe 7 pixels away. Then draw migration routes from Hlafw to the top four towns, and from Wlafu to the bottom four towns. Advance to time 0, and you get:

Our population Hlafw: 390,000
Their population Hlafw: 10,000
Our population Wlafu: 390,000
Their population Wlafu: 10,000

... or thereabouts. And it doesn't register a win.

Thanks  lot for that, Bennett; I really appreciate it.  I'll have a very close look at it after dinner.

As a rule I don't concern myself with versions pre-10.5.  I can send you the xcode project files/makefile if you want to give it another go. (needless to say, if you do compile something, I would be cheerful, and happily redistribute it with your permission).

ok, bennett, i tracked down the bug.  turns out I was testing the win-condition at the penultimate time-slice instead of the last one (confusion with array bounds...my fault entirely).

I've uploaded the newer version there.  It should work now.  You might want to back up your config.lua file though...

Aw man. I really want to play this awesome looking game, but I am getting a blue screen immediately on running the program.

I am on Vista 64x, but haven't really had any problems with indie games like this before.

You haven't, but I have (though never on my machine).  Apologies.  I think I might have fixed it now (i accidentally put something in this build that was causing xp64 crashes in previous releases)).  Could you download it and try running it again?  I understand it's a pain if it causes a bsod again, but I would appreciate it.

Oh hey look spoilers, my thoughts and constructive criticism of the game, and such things.

If my post looks small, that's because all of the text is between the abbr tags.

Works for me now!

I cannot figure out how to get the spoilers in that post to show!

I'm sorry to ask this so late, but is it possible to make fullscreen optional? I tried fixing this myself, but couldn't seem to find the files to linking lua.

Empyreal -- I think you're taking the ending at face value, when most of its strength lies in its use of understatement and unreliable narrators.

Man, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this...I think I'm about halfway through...the idea is intriguing, but I'll need a few more days at least to say anything intelligent about it. :P

However, I do think the instructions could be a little clearer. Maybe the guy giving you instructions could talk about how the computer extrapolates backward in the past based on your constraints. Also, there was a bit talking about the interface that I found confusing...The guy is talking about how to set the beginning point of the migration routes, and he says something like, "Set the time on the timeline and then click on it". And by "it" he actually means the migration route...To create a migration route, first you click on its ending point on the timeline (closer to the present), then you draw the migration route on the graph, then you click on its beginning point on the timeline (closer to the past), and then you click on the migration route itself. It took me a few minutes to figure out that last part.

All in all, I think it's good that you have the "tutorial-like" section included in the game, but I also think it would be nice to have a document included with the game that explains the interface...that's just my personal feeling, though. ;)

there isn't a lua option for it, but...hmm...ok here (http://ded.johnmarkkearney.com/~locus/oowindowedbinary.zip)'s a binary compiled in windowed mode for windows...just for you, baby...

Empyreal: I really liked the ending. It seems to me that almost every game ever made ends with a 'bang'. But there are many good endings in other mediums that just 'fizzle'. Even though games are probably very much more conducive to a 'bang' ending, it's great to explore other possibilities too.

Just quote him?

I just got to the ending. I don't mind having a subtle ending, but I think it would be cool if the character acted a bit like the man in 'an artist of the floating world': he should angrily deny that his historical theories had any role in causing the war. He should kind of hint that he is haunted by feelings of responsibility.

Thank you. Hopefully someone else will find it useful as well.

I haven't finished it yet, but so far it's really great in a lot of ways. Thanks again for making the windowed version.

Ah yes, good man. I would be grateful.

I'm fascinated!  That was fun.  Difficulty all over the place though, so while it makes narrative sense, it weirded out my gameplay sense when some levels were literally one-click trivial right after a hard one.  I expected to see more options, too--like the ability to tweak wars more directly than with migration routes.  Like, the ability to mark a city as being a battlefield between times X and Y.

That and when I saw "Future" in the levels, I have to admit I expected either time travel, or something where you were actually planning things INTO the future directly for the war effort, possibly not knowing that's what you were doing at the time.

It was a very fun change of pace!

Yes, more options / a sequel would be nice. It seems like this mechanic hasn't been fully explored in the 20 levels given.

I just tried finishing level 18, but couldn't seem to do it... (mild spoilers perhaps, though with people spoiling the ending outright, who am I trying to kid :-X Seriously, Bennett, spoiler tag, please?). I managed to get all towns to show the others' population as zero at t=0, but the overall population panel still showed a population of 2. I'm guessing there's some weirdness with rounding errors going on?

yeah.  easiest way to do it is to make sure they all have a more-or-less equal population when the populations are still high.  So, say, try to divide them into four groups of 4k each, or something along those lines.

'kay, thanks for the hint, I'll give it a try. Have you considered rounding the population to the nearest integer for checking goal conditions? Because I guess 0.31 of a person doesn't make much sense.

yeah, I have. I should change it as well.  I'll...make a note...

My partial understanding of the mechanics were that people on the move don't have the time nor the resources to procreate. So for Level 18, just link up all the cities in a circle at the beginning. The Adam and Eve of the Others will never have had an opportunity to meet.

Throughout the game I understood what I was supposed to do, and I admit I...took to the task rather readily. For me, the Others were marginalized to the point of being really nothing more than numbers and squares, which may have been your intention in the first place. Perhaps they really weren't the "violent savages" they were professed to be, but as far as I was concerned, they were just a variable standing in my way.     

I downloaded this and played it last night - I found I got confused perhaps more than I should, and I had to re-read the briefings several times to figure out what to do.

But still, I looked up and it was an hour or so later and I'd got to level 12, so something's definitely going right :) I think the core concept is brilliant, but I must admit that only a couple of levels have clicked for me - by which I mean reached the point where I'd internalised enough of the rules to go and set out the solution without trial + error.

I do wonder if it would be easier to grasp if the mechanics were discrete rather than continuous (one block of population moved per one bar of years) but then you wouldn't have some of the fiddly but interesting optimisation you have to do on the levels with tight constraints.

A minor nitpick: I think the story tips its hand a bit early on - mentioning the Romany people is a bit of a clue as to where things are going/what kind of a place your country might be.

Now I just need to finish the game :)

[edit] Finished now, I did much better today than yesterday. I guess I must be a dyed-in-the-wool coder since level 18 immediately felt like a rounding error trick :) That was probably my favourite.

Not sure about interpreting the ending, I don't think I would have made the inference others did, but then maybe I'm too thick to draw my own conclusions. I wonder if this was because the protagonist has my name (yay!) and therefore it was hard for me to ascribe genocidal motivations to him?

Cheers and thanks for making this, certainly very different to my usual fare!

Will

I finally got the chance to wrap my head around this. It was pretty baffling at first, but enjoyable once I got it.

Surprised this wasn't written in haskell like some of your other games. A game about satisfying constraints seems like a natural fit. And would explain where you came up such a strange idea. If you were in a functional mindset, it might seem less unusual.

My brain is still currently refusing to understand how this works! I've gotten to level 7, but the effects of my actions don't quite make sense to me yet. I'm guessing I just need to sit down and think harder about what's happening. I'll let you know how that goes!

Man, my computer must hate whatever it is you do because this game gives me a blue screen too.  I notice at least one other person has this problem so I don't feel like such a freak anymore :V I didn't have any problems with rara racer.  Any idea what it is?

Hey!

So, I've picked up the game, played around with it for a while, here are a few comments...

I don't know what should I do. In the first episode, I passed the challenge but I'm not sure what I did. I simply placed a line and then I pressed a button. The second episode has me all confused on how I can play this game. Perhaps if the game offered some kind of simple, inmmersive tutorial. I dunno. I just can't get passed the second episode cuz I have no idea what I need to do. It feels like the dialogue is telling me the answer but I have no idea how to actualy do it.

I felt like the objective "VILLAGE_NAME population should exceed 600 000" was a bit too vague. Like, should it exceed 600 000 during famine? In the present? In the past? A bit more info would be a good way to help clear things up.

It would be nice that the reset option form the menu would not replay the dialogue. perhaps adding a "replay conversation" or whatever would be nice.

In all cases, I feel like I would need to sit down with you and chat a bit about what you want the gameplay to work so I can spot where I'm confused cuz right now, it feels like it would be a lot of fun but I can't seem to understand it. Sorry. But I want to understand it so I'll probably try it again later :)

It says up the top "Constraints at time 0". So whatever objectives you have apply to the earliest possible time. But I also found this confusing because your eye is not drawn to that line very well.

At last I played the final version of Opera Omnia. I'd been vacationing at an aunt's house in the US for the past month, so I haven't really had much time to sit in front of the computer and play involved games such as this one, but now I'm back home.

As for comments, let's get the nitpicking out of the way first. The very concept of the game is to get the player to think backwards, which I love, but wish that learning curve was not quite as steep (level 2 is quite a step up in difficulty). I also wish that the dialog offered more hints every now and then, like in the case of level 18, which I had no idea how to solve until I read one of Paul Eres' comments in this thread. The interface could use being more transparent (in the timeline area, especially), because at times it's quite hard to read and utilize, but that's the least of my problems with the game, really. I think that the game should, in general, be more transparent and nice to the player in the first few levels, and have a stronger narrative hook at that time to keep the player interested (give a bit of a promise of things to come).

The ending was quite anticlimactic. I get the point, but I feel like the text could be a bit more dramatic, hint a bit more at what's behind the words.

All that aside, I think that the game is successful at what it sets out to achieve. I feel like it's one of those few games that actually communicates an interesting message with the format that cannot be done any other way quite as powerfully. So, yeah, I enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you for making it!

FWIW, I released a small update to this, with some of muku's suggestions added, some typos corrected, and that nasty bsod error gone (updated all of my other sdl games as well just there, hopefully bsods shouldn't be a problem now)... .

I'm curious ... what was causing the bsod error?

It seems that debug builds (which I was releasing, for some reason which I cannot fully justify) were combining badly  with SDL on Vista(BSoD badly).

Glitch report, also level 18 spoilers, I reduced the Other population to zero in every city, the game, however, did not recognize that I won. I tried again with the same result. Here's to hoping I didn't accidentally download the wrong version or something...

EDIT: got around to browsing the thread, looks like I did. Sorry.

NOT EDIT: Interesting game though. The mechanics never really made sense until level 18. I mean, on some base level I understood what was happening, but I guess it just never "clicked".

er- no pun intended.

EDIT AGAIN: On a side note, for future idiots like myself it might be kind of you to post a link to the most recent version in  your original post.

Also, I really don't want to have to replay all those early levels again, is there any way to pick up in the new version from my previous save?

The link is always the same.  I should probably keep a log of when it was last updated there, though.

there's a file called config.lua in the levels directory that stores save-data

Ok, so that would mean I did download the latest version, in which case, I'm either doing it wrong or the game is doing it wrong.

So level 18 must still be glitching somehow. As I stated earlier, the game does not recognize that I've won even though I reduce every town's individual population to 0... although the overall population is still 2, I hope I don't have to reduce that as well? I kind of think my solution should also be valid.

Make sure you clear your internet cache. Sometimes if you download the same file at the same url twice, it'll just use the old file even if the file has changed. Which is why I never actually replace files on my server, just upload new versions under different names.

nah; if it's saying that the population must be 'less than 1' instead of 'less than 0' (or, alternatively v1.2 in readme.rtf) then it's the new version.  i'll look in to it.  I thought I had that fixed. (I think I'm going to leave in the disparity between the global/city population figures)

Hey stephen, congratulations on the custom title!

Good game so far though I'm stuck on level 10 at the moment (hints welcome).

I did notice one problem (I assume it's a bug but perhaps I'm misunderstanding something), if you right-click a route to restore it to full length the game doesn't seem to recalculate the populations.

I actually downloaded it once this page reached about page 6 or 7, so I doubt there's any chance of this. I did clear cache and re-download though, and the problem persists for me anyway.


The readme says v1.2, the game, however, says 'less than 0'.

Ah yes, that be a bug.  Thanks for alerting me.

Hmm.  Maybe I didn't bother updating the version number in this release.  I'll release another bug-fix release later on tonight; I'll post here when it's fixed.

hmm.  okay, there were a bunch of weird things with the last release.  I think...they're maybe fixed now?  (I was able to play through all the levels just there, so)

Don't know if you noticed, but Opera Omnia got RPS'd on Friday:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/03/20/prologue-to-history-opera-omnia/
Some major derailing going on in the comments!

I think I've got my brain around how things work now. Stage 7 was the main one I had trouble with, and once I figured out where I was supposed to be placing and removing the migration paths, it sort of clicked for me.

You maybe did see this? But the Onion AV Club reviewed Opera Omnia and rated it highly! (http://www.avclub.com/articles/opera-omnia,25485/) The AV club reviews very few games and they're not easy to impress.

Finally got around to playing this and I have to say, it's a great game!  ;D

First of all, the petty criticism! For some reason I found that the second level was the hardest of them all; I still didn't quite get the mechanics and the wording in the briefing is rather confusing. Also, while this may seem intuitive to everyone else, I didn't instantly understand that year 0 was the time most in the past. Also, level 18 seemed to me like I was exploiting rounding errors, which felt odd. You should also explain somewhere that distance influences migration rates. I had no idea!
And in really minor criticism the music did annoy me, but not too much  :P I found the loop too short and the notes played too dissonant.

With that out of the way I can only restate that it's a damn good game. At first I did think that the mechanics were poorly thought out but when I wrapped my head around it and started thinking more in the terms of "What must've happened so that from the initial conditions we got to the current ones?" I enjoyed the game to it's fullest and had a great time.

I think I agree with this.  I spent about 20 minutes on this game and didn't make it past level two at all.  I kept rereading the description at the start and retrying it, but no dice.  I should probably go back and see if I can figure it out this time.  It really was like staring at an opaque wall and trying to figure out what's going on behind there.

The download link is broken, can someone make a mirror?

It's still available on Increpare's site: http://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/