Earth Assimilation Readiness Protocol by PurpledArtFrog
NOTES FROM THE DEV: "This ended up being more of a janky prototype to demonstrate an idea - rahter than something playable - balancing issues very likely. Not a jam friendly scope."
Use ITCH.IO - seems to use the correct resolution - 1280x720! Or download the Windows build
PostJam: https://frogboxcreations.itch.io/ld59-earth-assimilation-readiness-protocol-postjam
EARTH ASSIMILATION READINESS PROTOCOL

You are not here to save humanity. You are here to preserve it.
Orbiting Earth in a silent, unidentified craft, you monitor a fragile world on the brink of self-destruction. Nuclear signals flicker across your systems — some real, some false, some… uncertain.
Your mission is simple:
Keep Earth intact long enough for the fleet to arrive.
A signal appears over Eastern Europe.
A radiation spike. Unclear origin.
You initiate a scan.
FAST STRIKE: 22% UNAUTHORIZED DEVICE: 65% FALSE SIGNAL: 35%
It doesn’t add up.
You scan again.
Movement detected. High velocity. Long distance.
Your system tightens its prediction.
Time to impact: 01:12
You hesitate.
Do you fire — risking exposure? Deploy ground units — risking failure? Or scan again… and risk being too late?
EARTH ASSIMILATION READINESS PROTOCOL is a real-time signal interpretation game where every decision costs energy — even time itself.
📡 Scan signals to reduce uncertainty (but lose precious time) 🚀 Identify threats based on behavior, not certainty ⚡ Act under pressure — laser strikes, ground intervention, or time freeze 🌍 Protect global stability — too many failures and the operation collapses 👽 Play as the observer, not the hero
No pauses. No perfect information. Only signals… and your judgment.
How long can you keep Earth alive?
Ratings
| Overall | 269th | 2.806⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 274th | 2.444⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 193th | 3.153⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 143th | 3.708⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 211th | 3.122⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 137th | 3.313⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 181th | 2.121⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 251th | 2.75⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 47🗳️ | 50🗨️ |
I will look in to the issue - it does not work for me either.
It should be able to run now... but holy moly some game breaking bugs....

As for the game, it wasn't super clear for me which signal on the map I was scanning, sometimes more of them had the red circle, and which signal in the bottom is which one on the left. like missing the association. but other than that, its a pretty original idea and I almost made it to 100% :D
Thanks for giving it a whirl though
The concept is interesting and a good fit for the theme. It's just very hard to understand the goal and how to achieve it (at first I shot lasers at ever radiation scan and kept losing)
I think this game would benefit from just a few screenshots and a base explanation of the goal.
I don't want to discard the game, since there's some interesting ideas about investigating and following a lead that's neat.
@trav Sorry.... I've tried deleting the embedded ... It does not allow it :(
Did you make the music that plays with it? Sounds great!
I would suggest making it possible to select the events on the map with the mouse. I ended up not looking at the map at all, since the map didn't really make any difference anyway (except for setting the mood).
However, I can totally see the strategic depth here, and it’s a lot of fun! I believe you can make it even better in the post-jam version!
My first time, I also struggled with everything I tried erroring out. I read through the text and it described like what the goals are but not actually how to play at all. Despite trying for a while and clicking everywhere and pressing every button I couldn't get anything to work :/
I was so excited based on the art and vibe and music but the gameplay was just too hard for me to grasp.
Incredible entry anyway considering the obvious complexity in such a short time!
haha, that's true :D
It took me a while to understand what is going on
nice idea!
I'm considering making a few adjustments... but it would make it a hybrid between bugfix and postjam version.
There seems to be a consensus emerging in the comments that the scope of your project may have been too ambitious. While I can see that point of view, I'd like to be a contrarian and pursue a slightly different approach. I think your scope was ambitious but I also feel like you achieved ~%90 of what you needed to achieve for a quick Jam/demo game. In that context, I think your scope and its ambition was just fine. You clearly have skill and what you have so far is already impressive for the short time frame.
I feel like the weakest aspect of your game was the user experience. That might seem like a weird distinction to make, but I'd argue that in an alternative universe, you could have reduced the scope of your game by removing some game-play aspect, but that would not necessarily make the game easier to get into. I think that would require re-prioritizing work on how information is presented. Please allow me to bring up an example
When the events pop up they get a red circle around them to let you know you should pay attention. Nice! You have to cycle through them by using the next key. That is less intuitive than just clicking on the icon, but that's ok on its own. Maybe programming the clicking would be too time consuming or maybe the frantic cycling between the points of interest is an intentional design choice. Your selection indicator on the map is also a red circle. You stop to read the signal info panel which is small and easy to miss. You look back up. Now there are new events and their red circles look identical to the selection indicator and you can’t tell what’s what. A new player is fighting an uphill battle at every step of what I described
I’d like to end by reiterating that my experience with the game was very positive. On the 4th or 5th try I felt like I had the information to know what I was doing. At that point the game was not too hard or complicated at all. The theme was great as well. I like the idea of an overworked alien having to look after earth as he is downing a cup of space coffee and sweating profusely.

However, I feel the idea is pretty cool. The music is just superb, and while the letters were a little too small for me (or the color made them difficult to read), I dig the aesthetics. Congrats on the compo entry!
God mode now shows the incident type in the text in the bottom.
Movement of incidents better reflect object type (speed and trace).
Camera movement improved when switcing incident has beeen tweaked.
Cleaned up the UI a bit.
I haven't put up the PostLD version yet.. I hope to do so in the coming weekend
I have been way to busy - my daughter have been moving out (again) during this week .. so sorry for delayed response....
Thank you very much for playing ... I will go over the comments a bit more this weekend and include fixes for some of it - and hopefully put up a post jam version. Feel free to try it - but keep in mind that scoring should be based on the "real" version.
Thanks for trying though :smile:
