THE INNER CIRCLE by backurio

A game made for the Ludum Dare N47. The theme was "Stuck in a Loop" and the game was made over the course of 72 hours.
Take on the role of an ordinary government worker who has lived most of her live with the knowledge that she has been IN THE LOOP about information that is not accessible to the public. After finding a shocking correspondence from her superiors that revealed to her how much she did not know about, she decided to act!
Will you be able to successfully navigate through restricted areas of the government building and obtain incriminating material to expose them?
How to Play
- Use WASD to Move the character
- Use Shift to sneak
- Use E to Pick Up and Interact
Team
- @onecrispycookie Thomas Stadler - Game and Level Design, Story
- @calidor Guido Prodnik - Game and Level Design, Story
- @backurio Sebastian Uitz (https://firetotemgames.com/) - Programming
- @karathan Philipp Auer - Programming
- Veit Isopp - Programming
- @polylabs Manuel Santner (https://polylabs.org/)- 3D Assets
- @kauaikayote Alessandro Chiovoloni - 2D Assets
- @merlinnsound Michael Steinkellner (https://www.merlinnsound.com/) - Music and Sound Effects
Voice Talent / Voice Actor: * Julia Daniczek * Rhys Seeburger * Sam Teale
Changes
- v1.0 - 06.10.2020 - First Version
| Youtube | https://firetotemgames.itch.io/the-inner-circle |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/the-inner-circle |
Ratings
| Overall | 1264th | 3.161⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1341th | 2.823⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1543th | 2.468⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1558th | 2.565⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1089th | 3.242⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 625th | 3.375⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 663th | 2.87⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 984th | 3.217⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 39🗨️ |
there are a few things I want to adress:
after picking up a confidential note, in the upper left corner of the building (my task was to print documents) I stopped playing.
The Lighting wasn't very good; I did not see the shredder at all the first time it was mentioned and I only saw the plants because they had a yellow outline.
At first I did not know that there where keycards lying around, so I thought these doors are locked for the day.
I also took quite some time to realise that I have to go through the guarded areas to get to the conference rooms and where they were located.
I have to admit that we overshoot with the target a little bit and that we ran out of time to properly communicate the story. The level was way to big and you don't know where to go.
I would appreciate ZQSD support (like double bind W to Z and A to Q). Anyway, great and clean realisation.
Btw. controller support was planned for the game, but unfortunately dropped to low priority due to other issues popping up. The post-jam version will have both, AZERTY compatibility and controller support.
I also have to check if there is an easy solution with the new Unity input system.
The line of vision mechanic seems to be a little bugged, many times I got caught by someone who was on the other side of a solid wall.
· Didn't quite get the theme.
· I didn't know what to do after the third day, didn't seem to find the correct door.
· Overall nice entry, there are a lots of things in the game for such short time.
Thank you very much for your feedback. I'm really impressed that you made it so far into the game, because as some of you mentioned, the game is too slow paced for the short attention span of game jam players :laughing:
Yes, the game has quite some features, a lot of assets and a (too) big map with few stuff to do and playing "Where's Waldo" with keycards :see_no_evil:
We put our goals too high and although having 8 people, we missed the role of a project manager that would have defined milestones within the project and make everybody focus on completing them. We had a very stressful last day, where we put everything together and didn't find much time to balance and playtest the game. But, we learned that this role is crucial with this size of a team and we won't make this mistake again for the next jam.
Btw. We are already working on a post-jam version, because we want to show off our skills and have a game that we can be 100% proud of :sunglasses:
Checkout my twitter if you want to see some sneak peeks of how the game should have looked if we had a better organization and a little more time https://twitter.com/FireTotemGames
Here are few thing I could think of
- A mini-map, you can have a stylized take on this, maybe our protagonist can steal a blueprint in an early mission, or have a guy steal it for you and you need to collect it from him ( so you reveal the map slowly)
- The enemies could sometimes see though the wall, not a jam breaker, but something to fix.
- Make the objects and places a bit more clear, use the environment to name blocks, rooms and all.
- Add sneaking, something I wanted badly so if far off or behind something, if we sneak we shouldn't be detected.
I like the voice acting and the humor was right up my alley! ( I wonder if the janitor was as inside joke :P)
The music was pretty good and I would suggest you to try adding vertical and horizontal music, really helps in a sneak em up!
As for the artwork, It was pretty good for the mood of the game, the environment felt lived enough but had a lot of dead-ends( avoid them at all cost) make your levels like Swiss Cheese, holes to navigate through easily, I can see that you guys tried that to an extend, but the developers hand must do some more magic to help the player!
Congratulations to the entire team and I wish you all best of luck for the future projects!
Big thank you to all of you. Your feedback means a lot to us, especially because we are not 100% happy with how the game turned out. We again had a very crunchy finish and a lot of polishing and balancing tasks were not finished. It is nice to hear that you guys still had fun playing the game and hearing the voice acting.
@kaafirookie Maybe it was an inside joke. Maybe not.
We are already working on an updated version to really show off the awesome artwork and the missing voice lines that unfortunately didn't make it into the game. Additionally, some bugs will be fixed that caused the game to freeze. If we are really motivated we will also update the map and objectives to make the levels more interesting and to avoid getting lost with no clear indication where to go.
Stay tuned and follow my Twitter if you want to get updates on the game. You can also follow me on ldjam if you want.
https://twitter.com/FireTotemGames
I found it quite difficult to work out what to do, or how I was supposed to achieve it. The detection felt a bit unforgiving too - a couple of times I thought I would make it out of the detection zone in time but got stopped in my tracks.
There was times when the instruction prompt would get hidden by the ui because of them both being white..
My only critique. Good game..