This Metal Heart Still Beats by QueenOfSquiggles
Help your robotic partner, Ava, complete some basic tasks around the house!
I recommend playing on the ItchIO page, because it has a fullscreen option and can save your progress. The sandboxing on the ldjam page prevents this. But I still embedded it in case you'd rather play it here <3
Story
Your robotic partner, Ava, has been removed from Long Term Support (LTS). And because of the company's business practices, is no longer able to perform many basic functions. Luckily you are a highly skilled engineer and are able to change Ava's circuits to help them perform basic tasks. Unfortunately, Ava cannot fully power down without losing their memories, but they can go into a low power mode, where they only update their logic every ten seconds. It's up to you to help Ava complete tasks!
Screenshots
Mechanics
The node graph is where you place different nodes that connect to perform certain sequences. Ava will produce different events that the code can react to. Actions are propagated all at once, and then performed in a queue.
Node Breakdown * Event nodes trigger when Ava produces a named event. There can be more than one event node for a single event, but execution order may be unpredictable * Action Nodes (Move, Pause, Interact) will be performed when triggered from the left, and will trigger any connected nodes to the right * The Notes Node is just there as a bonus in case you want to take notes
You can force the "tick" event with the "Force Tick" button. Otherwise Ava will automatically create the "tick" event every ten seconds. This is there mainly as a frustration prevention measure, because I imagine only having something happen every ten seconds would be incredibly frustrating.
The system is intentionally simple. I wanted to ensure that non-programmers would have an easy time picking it up, and maybe being inspired to take up programming using a visual system like what I made.
Problems / Help
Make sure to read the "log" it will highlight "warnings" in yellow and "errors" in red. These will tell you things like when Ava fails to complete an action, and when an event is "unhandled", which means there is no Event Node that received the event.
Specific Feedback Request
Playing the game you can probably tell that Ava's "circuits" are somewhat similar to Unreal Engine's Blueprints. I made this game intended to be a simple puzzle game, but it really inspired me to try and create an addon for Godot that provides an elegant visual scripting solution. This is especially interesting to me since Godot's Visual Scripting language is being removed in version 4. So if I can make a good one, it would be really useful to the community that uses it.
I plan to spend some time learning Unreal Blueprints (for the first time), so I can get a feel for what the professional solution is. But I would also really appreciate any feedback or recommendations that you could provide! My social circles are 99% other Godot devs, so hopefully I can reach some experienced Unreal devs through this!
Tools Used
- Game Engine: Godot 3.5 Stable
- Art: Aseprite & Krita
- Audio: Jsfxr & LMMS
- Planning: Focalboard (Kanban style), and Obsidian (Notes)
- VCS: GitHub
- CI: GitHub Actions
- Love :two_hearts:
Technical Notes
I used GitHub Actions to do Continuous Integration (CI), so you can play earlier versions of the game from the GitHub repo linked below. The version naming is automatic, so it's not terribly pretty. But there should be timestamps for each release. The latest release is automatically pushed to the ItchIO page, so you can play it in your browser over there.
If you think that I have anything missing feel free to let me know. I'm not sure that I can change much after the jam, but I'll do what I can
Rating Opt-Out Explanations
I opted this game out of "Mood" and "Humor" because I feel that this game doesn't really have a very good mood, and isn't trying to be particularly funny. I did try to put some humour in the game, but that's not the game's focus so I'd rather not be judged on it. If the humour I did put in made you laugh, I'd love to hear about it!
Ratings
| Overall | 142th | 3.659⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 350th | 3.024⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 32th | 4.024⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 106th | 3.95⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 246th | 3.432⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 330th | 2.762⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 5🗳️ | 10🗨️ |
Love the fact that you used Godot to make Unreal Blueprints!
I'm myself trying to learn UE BluePrints, and I can say your layer is very nice and well thought.
In its stade, it's clearly a game made for developers. You would need a bit more instructions to open it up to "casual" players.
But again, overall I really liked it!
I was struggling a bit at the beginning understanding how to get Ava to move. Maybe entering the event name is supposed to be an "aha"-moment, and if so, that is fine. Otherwise I would kinda suggest having a static tick-event node in the middle as you start. Maybe even indicating visually when it ticks. I think that would let a none-programmer easier get into it.
Also, if you expand on this concept, then I think the 'Aha' could still come later when seeing another event name and entering that into the mix!
I do wish it was easier to make effective use of longer chains of commands, but I'm mostly just astounded you managed to do all of this in a weekend. <3
The audio really let it down, it was distrcting and annoying. But the concept and implementation are amazing!!
I liked the art style; the minimalist look worked very well given that the players attention was meant to be focused on the coding side of the screen (Which I REALLY appreciated being able to scale to see more of the area around AVA.) The Interface of the project was also easy to read and once I had my coding epiphany, I was writing logic strings with no difficulties.
The Music was pretty nice; put me in a Minecraft-zen kind of mindset whilst I was learning to code and helped me push through the initial (albeit brief) frustration of struggling with the basics of coding to get to the fun bit of actually seeing my code play out in real time. I think some of the sound effects grew a little grating after a while, and I feel an option to adjust the volume would've help alleviate that.
The story was also a really cute little addition; would've been really easy to just have a single line of text explaining AVA but the choice to make the 10 seconds tied to her not wanting to experience "death" hence the 10 second time limit on the tick was a really clever way of integrating the two.
The overall feel of the experience is very polished, and I would consider it a huge success to get someone like me, who codes as well as a Gibbon, to engage with the core coding mechanics I would consider it a huge success.
...And then I realised that this was a Comp entry and that this was made in 48 HOURS? I am honestly blown away by the scale of what was created in such a short length of time. My metaphorical hat goes off to you for the sheer scale of what you managed to create in such a small space of time.
You deserved so many more ratings and attention for such an ambitious and well realised project. I wish you the best of luck with your future endeavours because if this is anything to go by you are destined for amazing things. Well done and keep up the stellar work <3
@yword, @odakine, @rubiia, you and the others who didn't comment pushed me out of the danger zone! Thanks so much. Your comments brought me to tears. I really appreciate this <3