**Dimension 1:** 1/5, not enough bloody dismemberment.

**Dimension 2:** 4/5, wizard make blocky men move on magic screen, using only letters in tubes.

**Dimension 3:** pi/5, needs more system bell.

**Dimension 4:** N/A, occupants devoured by scorpions.

**Dimension 5:** 3/5, Fun game, needed a bit of conflict or lose condition. Endless mode bugged out pretty quickly, obviously trying, but failing to insert character into our dimension.

Fun game with lots of character, telnet throwback was great!

The technology used here is really impressive and... kind of weird I guess? :D

I liked it though, good work!

@endlessplumber Thank you for the detailed feedback and the screencap! Completely agree on the dismemberment.

@ironchest: Thank you!

As a MUDder, huge fan of the throwback graphics and telnet. Nice work, though at times the next step was confusing and I think I got through the first 2 parts by pure luck.

I really want to play this, but I don't have the ability to use any of the platforms involved. I'd love to see some video of it running.

Just tried to connect to ld38.timeless.net on port 23 through putty, but not responding, not responding to ping either. Shame, this looked interesting

Really cool to see a terminal game in LD! I eventually made it look somewhat correct using UTF-8 mode in PUTTY, but maybe that wasn't quite right either, It mostly worked. I also had a creature outside of the navigable area (In Dimension 3) so I was unable to proceed. Would have been neat to have multi-player features on such a game, but nice work.

I played this on stream at: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/141022066 - Starting at about 2:15:45

Pretty interesting concept, I haven't played a terminal based LD game before.

I never thought of using telnet for a game jam, full innovation points!

Wow! I'm blown away! Way to go. First terminal game I've played in an LD. IMHO- full stars just for that! Played twice. The first time I got lost with a scorpion in my pack. A painless experience the second time. Simple. Fun. And, funny! Great job you two!

Haven't played a terminal game for LD before (or ever, for that matter). Fun text as well. Good job!

First terminal game for me, and that's awesome!

The story was really fun and the design quite interesting when you understand it!

One of the most original entry, congratulations =)

oh must have been forgetting to choose telnet before. Fine through putty with telnet and Window Translation UTF-8 option. Played til the end. Haven't played many terminal games so this was a fun change. I was expecting there to be a mechanic of you can't carry certain combinations in your pack because they eat each other or something, following the classic river crossing puzzle, but seems not. Fun anyway. Full marks for humour and innovative use of the terminal as small world theme. Sweet

A terminal game! I used to play NetHack a long long time ago. You guys did a great job on this one. The design was great, and I like how the monsters were represented. The quibs from your employer added a great bit of humor to the game and were placed nicely.

I would of made the player move more space per move, and maybe added a countdown timer option for solving the puzzles, just provide a sense of urgency. You could even added a scoring system based on how well of a job you did.

Good job, very unique game!

Telnet was an awesome choice! Definitely made it easy to play since I could just paste the command in a terminal.

Props for the technology used, i hadn't seen this being used on a gamejam before. The game itself could've used some challenge, as you basically just have to go to the highest dimension then back again to the lowest to win, but the premise is interesting and the presentation is pretty entertaining. Nice work!

Nice game.The tegnologie is nice and I like the fact thats a terminal game.Maybe nexttime you can add / improve some audio.
I would also aprichiate it if you check out my game. I just need a few more votes

Thanks everyone for the feedback! I'm playing all of the games left by commenters that I can access (please put your game link in your profile description if you're not a team leader). If your platform is Windows-only I'll play your games on Monday/Tuesday.

This was a fun cute thing! As others have said, I've played telnet based games in the past but it's been a long time. The game itself seemed like there was no game (unless I played so perfectly I didn't even see obstacles?). I did wonder if the space time tears were just bugs you decided not to fix :p

I loved the humor.

Nice work!

This is pretty neat. I'm a bit of a young'n, so I've never used telnet before.

Was there supposed to be a difficulty in capturing the monsters? I managed to just grab them by walking into them, but I got the sense I was supposed to be fighting for my life.

Oh, and I loved the text snippets throughout. I cracked up at "There's probably a skeleton in your house right now. No, you can't go home and check." Nicely written :)

Amazing. I've seen telnet games in Ludum Dare before, but this one really goes all out with it rather than just being a plain ol' text game. Well done!

Gameplay is a bit slight - it'd be nice to have an actual threat to the play from the baddies - but there's good humour here and it was fun playing through just to see all the content.

Like @endlessplumber, I also got stuck off on the side when I made it to "endless mode" - and oddly enough, it was also in dimension 4 (on my way back).

Great job!

Well, telnet is certainly an interesting way to write a cross-platform game. I ended up playing this 3 times. The first time, the game bugged out and I got stuck in the right margin on an early level and had to restart. The second time, I was interrupted by something I had to do and got timed out while I was AFK. The third time, the game bugged out again and I got stuck on a later level. I decided to quit trying, since I had gotten pretty far and it looked like the gameplay wasn't going to change for the rest of the game.

As others have mentioned, there's not much to this game. Each level has the same solution: walk to the last dimension and then back to the first, picking up any creatures you can along the way. The only substantive change between levels is the number of dimensions and what the creatures look like, and the lack of challenge and variety lends itself to boredom, and can feel like you're doing a chore rather than playing a game. The controls are weirdly unresponsive (probably due to using telnet as the medium, if I were to guess). The portal hitboxes seem too large. And, for some creatures (especially the cyan ones on the first level), the number can be hard to read due to lack of contrast with the background, at least in the mac terminal - I suppose colors may be different for other platforms.

Still, the game's written text has a great sense of humor, and gets full points for that in my book.

Pretty cool that you made a telnet game :)

I think as other have said, the game itself didn't have that much going for it though.

Great concept, what language did you guys use in order to make this?

@wtoa We made the game in Python 3. It's running on an Ubuntu Amazon Lightsail instance.

Woooow, I haven't had to use telnet since back in my MUD-playing days, so thanks for the nostalgia blast!

Alas, I think I'm destined not to see the end of the game though. Here's my first run on the 5th job:


I couldn't get to Skele-1 due to the collision boxes.


This time I came back through from D6 and spawned outside of the playable area? I couldn't move left or right from here.

Bugs aside, bonus points for innovation for the BBS-style game. Plenty of humour and mood, too.

Edit: I just went back for another try (I *will* get to the end). Broke it again!


Edit 2: Yay, finished it on the 4th try :D

It's very impressive that it is a Telnet game, it does add to the atmosphere as well.

The collision detection and movement in general does feel a bit wonky though, and the overall goal is a bit too unclear for me - though that could definitely be 'part of the charm' I guess.

Dig the unique usage of terminal. Little msgs from Boss are cute. Theming pairs great with the terminal setting.

Some small issues: I wasn't able to collect a creature and had to reset. When moving diagonally but doing it through zig/zag, it feels a bit awkward.

Nice game! Thanks for sharing.

Never really played a game like this before. Cool use of technology. Not a whole lot to the game but still a real cool idea, keep up the good work :)