Red Shirt Engineer by Noxbuds
Shortly after a scientific expedition arrived at an interesting spatial anomaly, hostile ships start warping in. Without any communication whatsoever, they open fire, and target your ship's systems, and many crew members are injured. You, the enigmatic engineer wearing a red shirt, must repair the damage done to each system, and pilot the ship to safety.
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HOW TO PLAY:
Unfortunately I didn't get any time to write a tutorial really, just some tooltips. So here's one.
W = Move forward
A = Turn left
D = Turn right
Left Arrow = Fire left railgun
Up Arrow = Fire forward railgun
Right Arrow = Fire right railgun
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The button on the top-left of your screen will take you to see the panel that's been damaged. Once viewing the engineering panel, everything is fairly self-explanatory. At the top, you have a selection of logic gates you can place, a tool to connect them, and a button to return to the original ship view.
Each logic gate has 2 input terminals(except the NOT gate, that has 1), and an output terminal. The blue circles are inputs, the red circle is the output, and the cross above the output is to delete the logic gate. The same colour scheme applies to the panels' inputs and outputs (left and right terminals respectively).
Once you click a terminal, you will start dragging a wire. You can right-click to drop it. Each input can only be connected to one output, and each output can only be connected to one input (though the panel terminals on the left can be connected to multiple terminals). Note: I have seen some bugs with this, if you connect an input to multiple outputs or vice versa it probably won't work... you might have to restart the game even ;)
Remember - some circuits are connected to machines that generate a lot of heat. If these are allowed to get too hot, your circuit could get damaged!
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DEV NOTES:
Quite happy with how this turned out. I would have liked to have added another system and some music, but at least I got some sound effects so that's great. Not entirely sure about the background when flying in ship view, it should probably be a scrolling background of sorts, but oh well.
In terms of bugs, it's playable. I've double checked that it's possible, but there might be a bug or two still. If you find one please tell me :)
If you're curious, I made a kind of manual for the circuits. They won't tell you the solution(s), but they go into more detail about what each input/output does and the implications of certain sets of inputs/outputs.
Have fun!
| HTML5 (web) | https://noxbuds.itch.io/red-shirt-engineer |
| Windows | https://noxbuds.itch.io/red-shirt-engineer |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/red-shirt-engineer |
Ratings
| Overall | 434th | 3.237⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 523th | 2.961⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 188th | 3.658⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 308th | 3.671⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 517th | 2.816⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 466th | 2.4⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 414th | 2.441⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 398th | 2.943⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 47🗳️ | 32🗨️ |
Something that really bugged me was that it was really difficult to get the guns firing precisely in the right direction. Perhaps larger colliders on the enemy ships, or some kind of subtle aim helper would improve this.
At first, I thought that only being able to connect one wire from the output was annoying, like with the railgun's overheating sensor. However, having that limitation actually lends to the feeling of an emergency fix, which is pretty cool.
Also I have just built a web version and created a page on itch.io for it:
https://noxbuds.itch.io/red-shirt-engineer
Also I suspect what you're talking about with not moving forwards is that the background is misleading... it really needs some kind of scrolling. What's probably happening is the enemy is moving at the same time and direction, and since the ships move at the same speed it looks like you're not moving. I'll definitely look into making a scrolling background which seems appropriate :)
right key -> or gate -> right thruster, and the same for the left thruster; no different from connecting directly. I figured if both thrusters were firing, we'd move forward.
Cool concept, keep coding :)
It took me a while to figure out what was going on (and I can read electrical diagrams... I just didn't understand what the goal was) but when I understood the point it was good fun - the pop up dialogs could get a bit annoying when trying to wire things, but other than that I think this was great: really worth fleshing out!
Apart from that, this was great! It had been a while since I'd used those symbols.
https://youtu.be/10y6Mij3ee8?t=24m31s
Then came the logic design for the weapons system; I'm guessing you have to AND the user input with either the inverse or the non-inverse of the overheat signal, depending on if it's active high or low, which you find out by trying and then redesigning if you did it wrong? Honestly I couldn't get past this part as there was too much information to handle with the current UI; when a node tooltip closed I immediately forgot what it was about -- a label next to the nodes would be great so you can see what everything is. The mouse is constantly moving back and forth between the nodes, the main design board and the toolbar to do things and switch between nodes, which gets a bit tiring.
With smoother UX this would make a great game!
I would play it if gets expanded in the future. Well done!
It definitely needs that the player knows something about logic gates. For further versions a sensible tutorial will be a must to become reachable for all gamers.
A couple of more levels would have been amazing. Also the fact that the puzzle don't have to be 100% completed, just to make work the necessary needs to the ocation granted that feeling of "hackery" so satisfyng. Destroying your enemy with a fast repaired ship is really rewarding.
Congratulations!