Massive Relay by gltovar

[raw]
made by gltovar for LD30 (COMPO)
Current state:
Unfinished!

Basically drag the yellow square (represent jack plugs) to the grey squares above (represent jack sockets).

The color above the sockets represent its state:
grey: off, yellow: someone calling, green: connection established.

When you connect to a jack you get a transcript card. With this card can see who they are trying to reach. In this iteration the only thing you can do is connect the other jack to the star they are trying to reach and it will clear them out.

The windows and HTML5 versions can be a bit more buggy that the flash version, just FYI.

==== The Full Idea ====
A good mental reference game would be Papers Please.

My goal was to create a switch board operator game where you are contacted by beings, and it is your job connect them with who they are trying to contact. You would have to connect though multiple level of operators and manage multiple people at once as you have to wait for responses every step of the way.

Each planet's beings would have different personalities and you would have to communicate knowing their traits, example one race could be extremely polite, so you would have to decorate your responses with polite phrases, where another is very rude. Things would happen as the communications fluctuate in quality so you might have to guess certain things or ask for clarity.

The basic story was: Ever since first contact a central hub was created to facilitate communications between civilizations. The reason for the 30's style switch boards is that no civilization feels completely trusting that they will not be blatantly recorded. So a Massive call center Relay was constructed with representatives from each star/planet. The space building was going to be modeled after a an old style 60's phone on its base, with the receiver and ear piece being satellite dishes and the rotary dialer being the windows.

Ratings

Coolness 0% 2202
Overall 2.19 1198
Fun 1.69 1197
Graphics 1.67 1195
Innovation 3.00 677
Theme 3.47 385

Feedback

Tanner
25. Aug 2014 · 05:44 UTC
Nice game! It was quite hard to realise what's going on.
juakob
25. Aug 2014 · 08:11 UTC
Nice Idea! Thank good machines do that job today it can get out of hands pretty fast
BadgerPriest
27. Aug 2014 · 19:05 UTC
Yeah, took me a bit. I like the idea - my team had a similar one at first - but right now I can't picture how you'd keep up with so many at once unless the interface and controls were a lot more helpful, like when a call is connected and cleared the wires reset automatically maybe. Just a lot of clicking to deal with.
stvr
28. Aug 2014 · 00:41 UTC
I like the concept, but it was a bit hard to tell what you were supposed to do.
mrexcessive
29. Aug 2014 · 17:49 UTC
Hi there. Interesting idea. Seemed to be a huge number of calls inbound very quickly. Nice graphics and feel. Shame no sound. Good job!
Dining Philosopher
03. Sep 2014 · 10:08 UTC
The only thing that seems to matter is reaching the right system? (Sol, Gliese or Alpha Centauri) The ring-back-, ring- and listen-buttons didn't do anything for me. The idea could probably work somehow, but I think it's hard to not make the game overly chaotic.

For the next LD I would advise you to go for a minimal working example first (before e.g. adding a lot of names for the planets), and to join the jam instead of the compo. Submitting a finished game is so much more satisfying.
commanderstitch
08. Sep 2014 · 01:48 UTC
Very hard to figure out what was going on. That made the experience very kind of difficult to understand who was contancint who. I did recognize that it was a switch board. :D