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[Daniel Benmergui]

A question...

Are updates allowed after the deadline?

[Daniel Benmergui]

Secret of Software 64 is done.

I only wish I had the idea before 3 days ago. Ask for divine intervention if you are playing this game.

It's very short. While getting to the ending, please let me know if you break it. I found 2 ways of doing that already.

Good luck with 64.

http://www.ludomancy.com/blog/secret-of-software-64/

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

Dropping two things into the.. middle upper hole makes only one thing come out. (First level/screen).
Besides that (appears to be a glitch), can you make a move that prevents you from winning? Interesting.. trying to figure it out.

[Noyb]

I powered up the machine to the left, got a ball that can't survive being put in the lava twice, and a bird left over from a fairly non-intuitive puzzle. I can't figure out where to go from there at the moment. I'll pound at it some more later.

Oh, and you can melt the tower before pounding the ground or melt the power generator. Those seem like fail states, unless I'm heading down a red herring path.

[Daniel Benmergui]

Feel free to put up spoilers.

If something was unintended, I'll try to fix it.

I'm sorry about the intuitiveness of the puzzles. I was not aiming for an adventure game, but an exploration one, and fell into a middle ground.

I'll try to assemble a better concept in the near future.

I am really curious about what do you make of the ending...

[Noyb]

I sort of finished the game. Sort of, because I can't quite figure out what I did to cause the bird (well, it kinda looks like a semi-robotic metroid now) to morph into the octopus creature. I retract the non-intuitive part of my earlier post, the rest up to that point does make logical sense in retrospect. 

Partial Walkthrough/Explanation Spoiler: The tower pounds down the cracked ground. The hidden, shiny, green ball is really an egg, which hatches when it's near the heat of the lava. The lava pool reprocesses material: metals into ingots, the eggshell into an empty egg. The light green balls are empty eggs, which can be fed to the bird, including the dam on the bottom of the screen. Breaking the dam provides power to the dry riverbed. The machine up top creates rotary generators from ingots, which can be placed on the gold river to power up the three lights below the generator, which powers the generator itself. That generator can be placed into the machine to the left. *Something I don't remember and cannot recreate* causes the bird to morph into an octopus, matching the symbol on the machine to the left. Placing it on the machine morphs it into a sphere, with the number 64. Placing that on the conductor triggers the ending.

I liked the ending. The brief flashes of the aftereffects might be a little too short. (I had to use ctrl + printscreen and timing in order to see it clearly). And I had to go back to the introductory words in order to try and understand the significance better, since I did not finish it on my first playthrough, and skipped it on my subsequent attempts.

Ending Spoilers/Attempted Interpretation:After downloading software 64 into the main powerline, it made the world one of nature, with the industrial bricks replaced with green grass, and the golden conductor replaced by a flowing river. My view is that it's a statement against artistic oppression. The poet in the intro has tried to create life, a thing of beauty, but the nameless voice that runs the system does not like the way it looks. Ironically, the antagonists' world isn't one of life, but cold, inhuman steel. Through the player's actions, the natural code is discovered and reactivated, bringing nature back to the machine. Maybe the software is seen as a virus, despised because its intermediary step is a hideous octopus on its way to a perfect sphere. A virus that consumes its unborn brothers, dangerous because the potential to change the landscape into an unfamiliar natural vista.

Oh, and in a game where you have to look for what changes in the environment, shifting movable items slightly when you mouse over them might be a little too distracting.

[Daniel Benmergui]

After downloading software 64 into the main powerline, it made the world one of nature, with the industrial bricks replaced with green grass, and the golden conductor replaced by a flowing river. My view is that it's a statement against artistic oppression. The poet in the intro has tried to create life, a thing of beauty, but the nameless voice that runs the system does not like the way it looks. Ironically, the antagonists' world isn't one of life, but cold, inhuman steel. Through the player's actions, the natural code is discovered and reactivated, bringing nature back to the machine. Maybe the software is seen as a virus, despised because its intermediary step is a hideous octopus on its way to a perfect sphere. A virus that consumes its unborn brothers, dangerous because the potential to change the landscape into an unfamiliar natural vista.

For a moment, I though you almost make it.

I really enjoyed the interpretation anyway...you rock, Noyb.

I'll fix the unintented stuff today.

[moi]

nice mystery game,very well done, but: Is the ending an error message or what?

[Daniel Benmergui]

nice mystery game,very well done, but: Is the ending an error message or what?

To be continued...

(or maybe restarted)

[Daniel Benmergui]

Did anyone manage to find the minidump?

[superflat]

I like the abstract nature of this one, didn't find the minidump, whatever that may be.  But I really need to know... What is The Secret of Software 64?  No really, what is it?

[siegarettes]

i got to the part where it tells me to go look in the root for minidump.log, do i need to do anything else?

[PHeMoX]

i got to the part where it tells me to go look in the root for minidump.log, do i need to do anything else?

It wouldn't be a secret anymore if he told you... 

[Eclipse]

Nintendo 64 sucks.

GO GO COMMODORE!

anyway the game graphic style is much more amiga

oh and.. i think the game is bugged, because you can drag'n'drop two of that strange thing with the shield (including the broken one) but not the third that's visible on the floor

EDIT: no that's not a bug, only a bad design decision :D anyway, thanks for the "poem" i wonder if it's the end.. maybe not? i saw it have a proper header and binary stuff inside... but i'm too lazy to try to decode it... also i don't want to spoiler too much, but for who's playing that game, it not ends to the flash game

i got to the part where it tells me to go look in the root for minidump.log, do i need to do anything else?

definitely was better to say "my" root instead of "your"

[Daniel Benmergui]

EDIT: no that's not a bug, only a bad design decision

It probably is...tonight I'll set it free.

Update: fixed this and a couple other bugs. Fixed some parts of the ending.

[Lim-Dul]

Found the minidump.log. ^^

This game kinda reminds me of Growcube and other games of this type. I liked it. ^^

[skaldicpoet9]

Very strange yet somehow addictive...

I was slightly disappointed that their weren't more levels to this one

[Daniel Benmergui]

Expect some more stuff in the I was slightly disappointed that their weren't more levels to this one

I am , too!

But I expect to fix that soon...

Thanks for trying SoS64!

[Pacian]

I like this - the organic nature of it, the way that it doesn't have traditional game elements.  I liked the gameplay as well, trying to understand this strange world and figure out how it ticks.

I'm not a very puzzle-solvey person, so it took me quite a while to figure it all out, especially the minidump bit (Eclipse's hint really helped), but that kind of made it more satisfying when I did. 

[Daniel Benmergui]

Thank you very much, Pacian