The Lonely Captain by nander

[raw]
made by nander for LD 38 (COMPO)

Capture.PNG

About

This is a little game in which you control a vessel in a strange world. It's a game about enjoying a downtempo mood, with a (hopefully nice) story.

Installation

For windows, download either the 32bit or 64bit zip file, and unzip. Then run the EXE file.

For Linux, install Love2d 0.10.2. Then download the .love file, and run it using Love2d.

Controls

Control by clicking on the compass, or on the options. You can very much navigate when outside the control room.

Doesn't have a pause feature (on purpose).

More explanation will follow soon.

Downloads

https://github.com/LD38-nanderv/LD38

http://nander.net/assets/TheLonelyCaptain.love

http://nander.net/assets/TheLonelyCaptainWin32.zip

http://nander.net/assets/TheLonelyCaptainWin64.zip

Credits

Game made by Nander Voortman

Audio made with a Yamaha PSS-570

Game runs on Love2d.

Ratings

Given 8🗳️ 1🗨️

Feedback

tdennist
01. May 2017 · 22:58 UTC
This is a great interpretation of the theme, and I like the mystery of the environment you're dropped in. I assume the intention was to remain minimalistic, but a little bit more graphical depth would add to the story I think. I did really like how the audio indicates your proximity to obstacles, although I am still a little confused about how the obstacles work, since letting numbers run to 0 does not always cause you to crash. Anyway, great entry, I'd be interested to see it developed more!
Avocadosan
02. May 2017 · 03:05 UTC
I really like the audio work in this game! :D
rinberd
02. May 2017 · 18:20 UTC
Cool, the little beeps gave a weird urgent feel to the game!

Writing was nice, good vocab, but the ending was really anticlimactic (especially after those space things referenced in the story) :D But yeah, can't have much writing in 48 hours
voxel
03. May 2017 · 11:15 UTC
Very nice. Took me a while to work out how to get into space but I made it eventually ;)
euske
03. May 2017 · 11:57 UTC
I liked the setup, but didn't really get what to do with the numbers. Are these the other "lost" compasses?
🎤 nander
03. May 2017 · 11:58 UTC
@voxel you troll..

@euske These are distances to objects you die if you collide with them.
g12345
03. May 2017 · 12:04 UTC
The intro was very effective. Took me a while to keep me alive, and then I could read all the text.
It was a lot of writing in a short time.

Ending was a bit meh, but has lots more potential.

I'd still consider it to be kinda text-adventure, or at least, CYOA.
amras0000
03. May 2017 · 12:35 UTC
There's a part of me that would have really liked this to be written in curses, not love, and played from a terminal. The graphical inteface felt just a tiny bit more than neccesssary for the game.

That thought aside, I loved this experience. A minimal control scheme which distracts you from a text adventure is not something I've seen before, and I do adore it. Every other instance I've seen of a game merging long text narratives and action gameplay, the two have had a solid dividing line. One has always been paused while the other was going. But this merges the two in a really satisfying manner. Great work on that.

One concern about the story: after all the dialogue is finished and I'm on the ending screen, I get to keep playing. Based on how the story ends, my course of action is obviously to aim for something to crash into. And what I'm expecting is a final piece of dialogue that accepts death as the final solution to the predicament.
While the story's still unresolved, I'd be ok with the death scene being "I didn't want to die. Press space to try again", but once the story implies I should kill myself, I want a longer paragraph accepting it.

Some more nitpicks about the mechanics: I wasn't too clear on what the 3 red numbers meant. I didn't know if their order mattered, if the objects were some distance to my left/right, or directly in front of me presented in random order. Also, it seemed like sometimes I'd be getting really low numbers (~300), then turn a couple degrees and suddenly get really large ones. I just wasn't sure how to map the numbers to the actual map I was navigating, which meant avoiding obstacles mainly came down to clicking around the compass until the numbers got big again.

Maybe that was in line with your narrative though.

Still, I really enjoyed this game, and would love to see more like it, with the act of reading and absorbing information itself a realtime gameplay mechanic. I'm looking forward to seeing more games you end up making.
🎤 nander
04. May 2017 · 09:39 UTC
The three numbers are dstances measured in directions; 30 degrees left, center and 30 degrees right. Since the world is full of concave polygons, you can easily go from even 20 to no measurement.

I kind of purposely didn't fully explain the mechanic, because the character doesn't know what's going on either. I didn't want to 'ruin' the story by having to explain mechanics.