Troubleshooter: A Drag and Drop Adventure by Phlip45
Welcome Troubleshooter! You are on a deep space flight to Alpha Centauri and are the sole troubleshooter on the mission. As a troubleshooter, your job is to make sure nothing terrible happens to the ship. You are equipped with a handy Time Shift Device™ which allows you to go back to the beginning of the day should something go wrong. Not that anything would go wrong! All the crew are in cryosleep and the ship pretty much runs itself.
Use observe at the last place that exploded to find where to investigate. Don't forget to fix things again when you go back in time.
For the tutorial I really should have added, push the help button when you first start and play Observe for your first 3 choices.
Your job as Troubleshooter means you have to use your wits to get you through the day. But also your sweet action cards. They are as follows:
Observe lets you watch and wait to see what is happening in your current location. It can be useful to give you hints on what to do next, or next time.
Investigating your current location will help you to find useful items that might be needed to smooth over any small inconsistencies.
Move to a new location. Luckily this ship is equipped with the latest in state of the art teleportation pods. Instantaneous teleportation means that moving does not cost you any time to use this card.
Your handy and very expensive Time Shift Device™. Using this card will send you back to the beginning of the day along with whatever you are carrying. No need to worry about pesky time paradoxes, those were debunked years ago during the doppelganger wars of 2048.
You may find items along the way that will help as well.
For those who get stuck:
First:
!> Engines explode at the 3rd hour
Second: !> Fabrication has a bad thing at the 5th hour
Third: !> Navigation has a bad thing at the 7th hour
Fouth: !> Labs has the final bad thing at the 9th hour
NOTE: Please play in chrome.
Edit: Fixed some small spelling errors and a bug where
Tools Used:
Vanilla JS
Text Editor - Atom
Images - Aseprite/Paint.net
Sounds - Audacity
Music - FL Studio
Ratings
| Overall | 257th | 3.5⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 390th | 3.1⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 335th | 3.24⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 352th | 3.48⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 357th | 3.28⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 39th | 3.94⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 89th | 3.48⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 193th | 3.44⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 33🗳️ | 24🗨️ |
Sound was good, the ambient track is really subtle and the voice acting is well done.
I like the pixelated gradient on the cards and the particle star field background.
Obviously including a menu is some next level polish in a jam game haha.
Awesome entry.
I think keeping objects once you have used them would be better as it is kind of boring having to restart the day by going to different rooms just to get the objects back(it feels like artificially trying to make the game longer in my opinion) but that is a detail. Even smaller detail because only people who will limit test will go through this: you should lock the ability to take an object that you already have in inventory to avoid having 10 flamethrowers in it.
Overall enjoyable experience with the righting pulling up the gameplay: more variety in cards and more complex problems would upgrade the game but it's easier said than done, especially with the time limit of the game jam and you have a really good start: I would like to see it developed more after the jam
Well done!
@vivien-fargette I was initially intending that you would have to loop with an item you could only get later to have to fix something a bit earlier in the timeline. Something like getting something you would need to light while the engines were on fire to stop something later in the timeline. I decided later on to opt for a more direct timeline which I thought more people would actually complete. So while it isn't a bug, it is useless.
Thanks for the comments everyone!
2 opportunities for improvement I would suggest is to use a font for the card text which matches the pixel art feel of the game throughout. Also, consider keypresses for card play to simplify play without a mouse.
Great job.
A really interesting and polished title, with detailed voice acting, and all in 48 hours? Well done!
(And to think the first idea I scrapped from my 72h jam entry was voice acting for the narration...)
The UX could use some improvements, for example the card concept feels a bit forced - I think it would be more straightforward if the move/inspect/investigate options were just standard commands for any location, and you had a separate inventory to use items. But maybe you started out with a different idea in mind, and just didn't have time to pivot?
I beat the game, but I didn't manage to figure out what is the green-red bar on the right, and if it is important or not.
Also, it seemed like I had no use for the manual time reset option. Since the items stay with you after a reset, it would be a fun mechanic - for a post-jam version -, if you needed to get multiple copies of the same object, which you could only achieve by using the time reset before the ship explodes.
Anyway, just some food for thought, congrats on a very enjoyable entry!
The music reminds me of metroid.