Alone in the Unknown by jonnopon3000

[raw]
made by jonnopon3000 for LD22 (JAM)
Alone in the unknown is a first joint project by Jonno Allcock and Nathan Thorpe working under the name SevenSpace games. It's Jonno's second Ludum Dare entry and Nathan's first.

Timelapse of Jonno's screen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5zSoB9fVCI&feature=youtu.be

Controls: WASD to move, E to make an action, Enter to select on menus.

Aim: Complete the puzzles, find your way through the facility you find yourself in, try to escape and find other people!

Known issues: New Game option in pause doesn't work / Kitten Easter egg is always active (was going to be puzzle activated)

Thanks for downloading, we hope you enjoy playing, and apologies for the large file-size; our Easter egg was larger than we expected it to be and the audio resources are pretty high quality as it comes.

You can contact and follow me, Jonno, at the following locations:
Twitter: @jonnopon3000
Google+: https://plus.google.com/100416291177265133194/posts
Blog: http://jonnopon3000.tumblr.com

Thanks once again,

- Jonno & Nathan

Ratings

Coolness 41% 311
Overall(Jam) 1.85 155
Audio(Jam) 1.75 117
Community 3.00 129
Fun(Jam) 1.69 143
Graphics(Jam) 1.71 160
Humor(Jam) 1.38 122
Innovation(Jam) 1.25 167
Mood(Jam) 1.50 145
Theme(Jam) 2.38 85

Feedback

caranha
20. Dec 2011 路 01:48 UTC
Thanks for the game! You should make some sort of audio cue about how long it will take for a door to close after pressing a plate.
Robmaister
20. Dec 2011 路 09:15 UTC
This game was a lot of fun! There was a small bug after I died where there were two characters, but one just stood there. Otherwise a very solid entry. (I did find it a bit frustrating to have to perfectly time my moves from the buttons to the doors, btw)
wbobeirne
21. Dec 2011 路 15:44 UTC
Had some trouble playing this one. A few bugs, some less than responsive controls, the occasional lockup of the screen. Aside from that, there seemed to be some inconsistencies in levels. I had an occassion where I walked through a door, and where I had walked through in the other room, there was no door to go back to.
Dark Acre Jack
21. Dec 2011 路 18:53 UTC
First impression (and caveat, I just load the games without reading instructions or descriptions) couldn't figure out what I was being trained for. Had to drop out to figure out what the "action" button was, an on-screen prompt would have fixed that right up.

Went back in and got stuck in a wall. Retried and there were two of me and it loaded me into level 3 without passing level 2. Then it froze.

I think there might be a few bugs in there.

The ghosts were cute.
馃帳 jonnopon3000
21. Dec 2011 路 21:39 UTC
I did mention in the description that the new game option does not work. It *was* working, then I must've changed something in the level entity list handling that broke what new game did I pushed to fix it up in the last few hours, but failed after many furious attempts. Last time I checked, hitting new game initialises a completely unpredictable level, and adds a new Player entity to the level after the other entities on the map without removing the old Player entity, despite many of my own fixes manually performing that exact process. I never got a hang of exactly why it was happening, and I tried a lot of logical fixes to the problem.
As for wall sticking, that's a problem I couldn't predict I'm afraid. We worked to fix it on the two machines we had at our disposal and it seems that except for one or two cases it does indeed work.

I agree that there should've been some tutorial or prompt for controls, though; this was in the initial level design but on the last day I got caught up squashing one bug that stopped us from building multi-room puzzles and trying to fix the aforementioned new game problem.

The game is also very condensed with a high sanity curve because of the fact that for the time spent killing bugs, time to code levels was down. We wanted to show off the systems we had spent 72 hours coding so we designed three levels that incorporated as many as possible simultaneously.
SonnyBone
04. Jan 2012 路 13:11 UTC
I just get a white screen. :(
馃帳 jonnopon3000
04. Jan 2012 路 23:46 UTC
This makes me a sad panda.
The only thing I can think of right now to check is whether or not you have the latest version of Java installed. This might be a case of going to the Java developer's site and getting the Java 7 pre-release, as while I believe applications should be vastly backwards-compatible, it's possible that me having coded it in J7 might be locking it down to some versions or installations.
馃帳 jonnopon3000
04. Jan 2012 路 23:49 UTC
Wow, instinct typing there. I did of course mean "our having coded it..."
Not a one-man band on this one.
Andrew
08. Jan 2012 路 14:00 UTC
There is a slight discrepancy between where the walls show up and where they actually are. The game eventually froze when I collided with a wall and I didn't want to redo all those levels but what I did play had potential.