A Bind on Titan
A downloadable game for Windows
Our submission for GMTK Game Jam 2020 with the theme of "Out of Control". You play as an AI system tasked with maintaining a colony. You will assign each of your tasks to a key, but be sure to remember what you choose, because the game won't tell you it again! How long can you go before the humans tear you apart?
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Install instructions
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Comments
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Almost as good as Cory in the House for the Nintendo DS
Hi, interesting game, well done on the game jam.
On my only attempt after 100+ population, it bugged and started giving me warnings about cities I don't own (like "Europa" or "Crescendia") - https://ibb.co/fnd8BPG - , and creating sectors also became bugged so those 2 might be correlated since it creates but doesn't show the sector or something, I only did 1 try, do I can't confirm this happens everytime after you get x population.
Besides that, everything worked normal and the concept was interesting, I would've liked to see more visual cues like the people getting red or the spaceship going off instead of just text for most situations and getting punished by pressing the wrong key would be more balanced and create a better feel on the theme "out of control".
But well done whatsoever!
This is an incredible game! It required a lot of thinking,will this ever be made into an even bigger game? that would be so cool, Having a few more inputs to make it more frantic and better indicators of problems in places as well as the names of sectors being on the buildings themselves would've been nice, but great job, fit's the theme quite well
RavenBane, thanks for the feedback! By the end of the game I think there are maybe 12 or 13 inputs. We originally wanted to have all 26 alphabet keys required, but we ran out of time to implement those. Now that would have been interesting! We might make a post-jam release but nothing is set in stone right now. It would be nice to go back and fine tune the pacing and difficulty, for sure!
Cool! What engine did you use?
Thanks! Game Maker Studio 2!
Lasted about 40 minutes until a chain reaction of bad stuff ended me (it was fun just deploying medics to treat the symptoms and not the underlying problems at that point). Colonists being red for serious stuff helped clear things but things like janitor/tech stuff kind of got overlooked once things got really big. I never located one sector that had bad stuff happen in it. Oh well.
Pretty fun little game with some good humor. And while it was kind of cool and crazy, it won't bring my father back.
Also, not sure if this helps you, but here's an unlisted video of gameplay for it:
Because this reminds me somewhat of Suspended you need the awesome creepy cover of that game box to show up.Best of luck with your submission!
Yeah, I think once you build too far out, you can accidentally create a phantom sector that gets affected but can't be seen. Thanks for the video, and I'm glad you had some fun with it! Maybe one day we'll find you father.
Good game though a bit too chaotic, would want to pause so I can see what I have to do and where I have to go. Names for sections could be more interesting too. Cool management and decent jokes, I would probably play a lot!
Also, who is the person who tells the jokes, what are his motives, why is he here?
The game jam theme was "Out of Control" so we tried to create a game that makes you feel like you are losing control. Sectors are actually named after the other moons in our solar system, so they are a bit weird.
We were going to characterize the AI and Marty a bit more, but we didn't have time to really flesh out all the details of their complex and compelling backstories.
Overall very solid and fits the theme well. But one glaring oversight is the lack of a punishment for pressing the wrong key. That means you can just wait for a red human icon to appear and then mash all the keys until you hit the right one, completely trivialising the game. Adding a small penalty to morale for calling the wrong function would fix this. I also had the misaligned sector names/hazard icons issue another user pointed out, so combined with the aforementioned exploit there really was no point to even look at the command module.
The dark humor is brilliant by the way.
We were planning on adding a punishment for spamming keys, but decided to leave it to give players some slack. I'm bummed we didn't get the text alignments right. Glad you liked the humor!
This was great! The gameplay loop was enjoyable and satisfying, and the little touches of the eye following the cursor, the dry humour of an AI and the craziness of realising i'm messing this up made a fantastic package! It got funny when I thought I was being clever, assigning roles to the first letter of them (G for guard for example) but when I had Therapist AND Tech, I knew I was in trouble and burst out laughing.
Wouldn't mind some more visual or maybe even just audio feedback when you hover over a sector to see what i'm missing, would make a great hard mode if they announced events and you had to find where they were.
Overall, a promising and enjoyable game I was laughing at and having 'aha!' and 'ohhh nooooo' moments with!
Glad you liked it! We had some extra visual effects we wanted to add in but ran out of time to get everything implemented. I'm super happy to hear you enjoyed all those little touches. Writing the AI dialogue was really fun for us.
Very interesting concept, but for some reason the names of each sector didn't line up properly for me. A pause or escape button would also be nice
Hmm... an escape key would have been good. Were you playing in full screen or a window?
I was playing in full screen
Gotcha. Any resolution not 16x9 probably won't display right. Thanks for playing though! I appreciate it!