Peter OS by Brandsma
Description
In Peter OS you'll get to play as Peter as he is spending some time on his phone. Peter has many interests among which the curation of meats, clicking of eggs and much more. He also has an active social social life so you'll get to meet many of his friends. Sadly, he has a slightly outdated phone (don't we all...). So along the years he has accumulated many applications and even some malware along the way. So much so that many of his apps crash regularly and that using his phone is a constant RAM usage optimization game.
As soon as Peter gets too many notifications his phone crashes and with all those apps he seems to be getting them about every ten seconds. Of course he has installed some widgets to manage his RAM and keep track of the time, but he still tends to be overwhelmed from time to time. Can you get to know all of Peter's friends? Can you unlock all of his phone's secrets? Can you even keep the phone going for long enough?
Goal and Theme of the game
The goal of the game is to explore Peter's social life whilst keeping his phone alive. Just about every ten seconds you'll get notifications of apps installed on his phone or from his friends chatting or making plans. We've taken some clear inspiration from games such as Emily is away, idle games and of course our smartphones nowadays.
Bonus for the avid readers :)
We decided to challenge ourselves with a more story-driven game this time, however as is tradition: making all mechanics and such took up most of the time. Therefore we feel that some of the stories are a little less fleshed out than we hoped, but nevertheless you'll find there is plenty to learn! Pro tip: If you play your cards right you can get recruited by the FBI! ;)
About us
We are a team of three friends from the Netherlands who love making games and programming. We wanted to make as much of the game on our own as we could. Just how much we did you can see below. We hope you all enjoy our little game, and maybe, just maybe, if you enjoy our game leave a like/comment. We also love to hear feedback! :)
About our game
- Built with Unity
- All textures are fully custom made!
- All sounds, tracks and other audio effects are taken from other sources. We do not own the rights to the songs we play and we do not intend to use any of this in any commercial form and ask our players to do the same. By playing and downloading our game you agree to these terms :)
Controls
You're phone is old and on the verge of crashing. Every 10 seconds you get a notification. Each notification might have side-effects if not handled well.
Don't get more than 10 notifications to keep your phone running! To get rid of them, click on them or their app and have some interactions where possible. Similar to your own phone the notifications should mostly disappear when you handle them logically :)
If you encounter any bugs feel free to let us know!
Thanks for playing!
Check out our Itch.io page as well
Installation and Tips
When running on macOS or Linux you may run into some trouble getting started. At least for the linux build you'll have to add executable rights to the main executable.
To do this on linux run the following command: chmod +x ./Peter\ OS.x86_64
To do this on MacOS run the following command: chmod +x ./Peter\ OS\ MacOS.app/Contents/MacOS/Peter\ OS\ \(TM\)
and then open the game with ctrl+click > open
Changelog & Bugfixes
- Calm down dad
- Patched some of Peter's OS. It looks like the game freezes less now
- Fixed a bug where multiple apps would open and you couldn't click anything anymore
- Fixed a bug where SMS would send many duplicates of the same message
- Fixed a bug where ignoring someone wasn't handled
Ratings
| Overall | 174th | 3.934⭐ | 70🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 486th | 3.485⭐ | 69🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 75th | 4.051⭐ | 70🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 125th | 4.191⭐ | 70🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 82th | 4.42⭐ | 71🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 74th | 4.052⭐ | 69🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 166th | 3.955⭐ | 69🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 48🗳️ | 72🗨️ |
This was a cool concept, although I'm not sure what I was supposed to do to stop the notifications from killing me. The SMS app was easy (except for dad lol), but none of the other notifications would go away. I guess that's just part of the shitty phone life. :shrug:
Graphics were really good, and that boot animation was awesome.
...also I noticed that the game includes a spotify app with some full songs. I'm not a lawyer or anything, but that seems like maybe not a good idea.
Aside from that, loved it. Wish more of the apps work but it was so much fun just to goof around jumping between windows really quickly trying to stop the flow of notifications
@okshirl For some reason the WebGL port is giving us some troubles. We should have functional versions for Mac, Windows, and Linux available (For Linux (and possibly macOS) don't forget to add executable rights to the main executable. On linux this means `chmod +x ./Peter\ OS.x86_64`). So maybe give one of those a try instead?
@ale and @killerI isn't it beautiful when you have to ask yourself: "Is this a bug? or a feature?" Let's just say that we'll be patching some things in Peter OS along the way as we are dedicated to allow Peter to get more life out of his phone than is currently possible. The first patches have already been applied so maybe you could try them again for a better experience :)
@ale about the songs: yeah we know, but as stated in the description: we do not own the rights, have no commercial purpose and by playing/downloading you agree to not do that as well. On top of that we've cranked down the sampling rate in such a way that the quality is awful enough to not entice any sort of infringement :)
But yes it very much does, you should see it run in the editor in Unity xD
It does however gives you ample time to read the little prologue which accounts for something I guess.
Did you see all the functional ones?
Music Player, Netflix, Noodle Egg, Noodle Meat, Email, SMS, Snapcat (for now)?
Somtimes you do somthing compleetly new This is one of the games i would like to play a full version of .
Really loved the message mini game ! The message were really fun :)
A pity that the game had some issues after a while... I couldn't click anything anymore all of a sudden... But at least, it really had to the feel of having an old phone !
Good job~
You're always overwhelmed, the concept work really well !
After a while it becomes impossible to click on some notifications, and I wasn't sure these were bugs or were on purpose, to show that the phone is dying lol. That part was a little frustrating but I guess this is the point of this game haha! Overall great entry, good job!
That probably means that I can run the same tip on previous entry not working on my system!
But at some point the apps don't recognize clicks :(
The pixel art you made by yourself is awesome.
The game is very well made good job :)
Ran into some bugs - people would spam me with a lot of messages, sending each message twice and at some point clicking on anything stopped working so I had to quit.
This was genuinely so much fun to play. It was relatively easy to understand, polished, funny and just overall a really, really cool game. You guys really NAILED this. I only rated 4.5 because I'd typically get stuck on the "this app has crashed... return to screen" whenever I played (sad little bug).
Also "Über den Wolken" is a nice inclusion even though I'll probably lose my twitch channel over it now.
For all of you that are still wondering. We heard you about the bugs! As per Ludum Dare rulings we have been bugfixing a few major ones as to not limit the experience without altering the gameplay. Not all bugs have been patched from Peter OS, but at least the most obvious freeze one should be fixed.
If this was a big problem for you, maybe have another look! :smile:
Cheers
Great entry, I enjoyed it!
Was a few bugs with SMS, not sure if it was "in-game" or the actual bug, received some of them twice.
Sometimes the game will stop getting input from the phone screen but maybe it's a feature to prevent you from taking bad choices :D
Those people in the messages are very much how it goes in real life sometimes haha
The idea is very fun, the graphics look great, and the sound design works well.
Gameplay wise, it would be really fun if each notification would make you do something specific. I guess it's what was intended, looking forward to see a post jam version then!
Also game is quite full of bugs, but it goes well with the "crappy telephone" setting haha.
Nice job!