Power Grid Manager by cudabear
The Power Plant in town was hiring, and you needed a job. Surprisingly, they sat you down in front of an ancient computer terminal and told you to get to work. With technology like this, failure is inevitable! How long can you hold out?
INSTRUCTIONS FOR PLAY (also listed in game): - Press they key on your keyboard that is displayed under the house to refill its "power meter" - If a house gets a locked symbol on it, it has tripped a breaker and you must reset the correct one by clicking on the red or blue switch in the lower right - Occasionally, your key will break after pressing it. You must click on it to fix it, or just go without that one key until you need it. - You lose when any three houses loose power entirely and become abandoned.
Be sure to post your scores below! My best score was 20,090. How high can you get?
POST-COMPO CHANGE LOG August, 03rd, 2017: - Restricted required keys to alphanumeric keys. This should hopefully fix most issues around incompatibilities with a variety of keyboard layouts. - Increased number of starting houses from 1 to 3. This should make the game a little more fun early on. - Added a linear difficulty increase curve. Before, if you could hold your own with 16 houses on screen, the game would never get harder for you. Now, it will continue to get faster and harder as time goes on. - Dead houses will now be revived if 16 houses are already on the screen. Before, if you filled the screen with houses, a couple dead houses actually made the game easier. Not anymore. - Greatly reduced the frequency of breakers being thrown. They get thrown more often as the game continues, though. - Keys have a chance to break even if they are pressed when no houses are displaying that key. This will punish keyspamming. - Added the ability to mute the music while playing the game.
| HTML5 (web) | http://www.cudascubby.com/ld39 |
| Source code | https://github.com/Cudabear/ld39 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/power-grid-manager |
Ratings
| Overall | 91th | 3.8⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 97th | 3.68⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 36th | 4⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 16th | 4.36⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 138th | 3.76⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 186th | 3.24⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 170th | 2.92⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 209th | 3.25⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 29🗨️ |
Another interesting thing for the future, perhaps, is to put the possibility of other types of keyboards. In the case of the game, it uses the English standard, but I, as a Brazilian, had a bit of difficulty, but I also know that there are other standards in Europe that can make the game more complicated to play.
The art of the game is also pretty cool, but could have a better refinement. Something more technologous but without looking like it was done on a paper. With the exception of the tutorial, it was quite interesting to seem handwritten. Congratulations =)
As it was, I got halfway through the second row before I was terminated. Around 17k.
I also found it was often easier to just run my finger over every key on my keyboard instead of trying to pay attention to wish keys to press, there was no punishment for pressing the wrong key.
Loved the art and old computer setup.
Overall, pretty fun and a unique take on the theme.
Like many other people mentioned, the audio cues are superb. Once you figure out what to listen for, the game becomes almost like a rhythm game. I really got in the zone
**Overall game impression:** The game reminded me a little about the game "Don't touch anything" haha. Very cool. Took me a bit to figure out that you can push on the broken buttons to fix them. Sound effects worked good with the game. The gameplay is pretty unique. It's the 2nd typing game I played but this 1 is so much better than the other one I played, although it's not really a typing game but still, keystroke based game. Very cool and well designed! Good job! i really enjoyed it
**Suggestions and comments on improvement:** Allow using red and blue buttons with something other than mouse maybe? like arrow keys? I think that'd help.