Terminal Espionage by Frib
Use your terminal inside your super secret bunker to control radio towers and perform clandestine operations! This is a puzzle game completely played from an in-game terminal.
Play in your browser here!
More instructions and the steps needed to solve the first puzzle are on the itch page as well!
Post-jam fixes: Fixed a hard crash in the web build. Thanks to kristinamay for reporting!
Made in 48 hours for compo. Tools used:
- Unity - the engine
- Rider - the code editor
- Krita - for the beautiful walls and sprites
- Blender - for the gorgeous screens and furniture
- Cubase - for the atmospheric music
- Servez - for locally testing web builds
Developer thoughts / post-mortem:
When the theme was announced, I had an idea to create a game where you're in a bunker and using various radio related equipment to do sneaky spy stuff during a hot cold war. This would include audio listening and manipulations. After a couple of hours, I learned that this wasn't doable for web builds, as one of the features for in-game audio manipulation isn't supported. But I decided to push on with the idea, there are other fun ways to make it work.
Early on I imagined that there'd be various devices in your bunker that you could control with knobs and buttons, plugging wires in the correct holes to connect devices, etc. But I realized that building/modeling them all and adding all those interactions would eat up a lot of time. So I went all-in on the terminal based gameplay. Some of the remnants of my early decision are still there (like being able to look around) but after half a day I scrapped all that and focused on the terminal.
I had various ideas in my head for puzzles. But as I was working on the most basic of basic puzzles (triangulation), I learned that this game would be very complex to understand and control. Ideally I'd add some off-screen instruction manuals for the player to look at. I also added support for different command screens (like the starting tutorial) but I never used them for anything else so the terminal is all you get.
Creating some easy puzzles turned out to be challenging, so there's only one proper mission. I had ideas for various other puzzles and devices (like a missile silo to blow up stuff, a mobile radar for advanced scanning, encoded messages coming from multiple sources that had to be combined, various audio related puzzles, shifting frequencies and moving locations, hacking into enemy devices and issuing commands, etc etc). But the terminal-based gameplay made some of these ideas difficult to implement. So even though there's not much actual content in the game, I figured the game is complex enough already without all that :D
I didn't expect to create a game like this, but I'm quite happy with the result. Thanks for playing and I hope you enjoy it despite the steep learning curve!
Ratings
| Overall | 183th | 3.313⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 264th | 2.604⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 92th | 3.583⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 77th | 4.08⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 112th | 3.64⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 119th | 3.38⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 169th | 2.217⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 41th | 3.94⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 25🗨️ |
I did the tutorial, then I looked at the instructions on the page, and some things happened on screen. But I don't know if it was good, and what to do next.
Sorry!
Seriously, I was having sooooo much fun until I tried "c cipher set key june" and then it blew up with an exception that I am so sorry I did not capture and paste. But it's okay I should move on to testing other games anyway :)
I love puzzles, I love terminal games, I love feeling like a cool spy. I was mystified until I read the tutorial below (I tried reading it in game but I couldn't scroll back up lol). Having it written on paper below the screens would be great since you can look around at your cave.
But anyway, this is definitely my favorite game so far this year, I played it for like a half hour, I would 100% play a full version of this with more of a story and more refined initial experience. Also I almost said "amazing work y'all" and then I saw that this is a compo game so I'm even more impressed. GREAT JOB!
@drtizzle Very understandable! by the time I was halfway done with creating the very first mission I already knew I had way too many commands and that this wouldn't be easy to play :') I'm glad you gave it a try, though :D
@hotaloca If you want, you can disable the glitching with "degauss". I like the idea of the command window being somewhat immune to the glitching, good idea!
@chomby hmm... Did you have the right frequency? Also, was this the target that you were given the details of, or was this the hidden other one that you need to find? In any case, I'm glad you made it that far :D
EDIT: Oops, this is a bug. Luckily it's one of the final steps in the game. I put a workaround on the itch page but you've essentially completed the game, congrats!
@kristinamay oops! Yeah that cipher only accepts numbers as a key, and I guess I didn't properly sanitize its input lol. My bad! I'm glad you had fun though! I had so many wild ideas for this that I just couldn't fit in the two days available, lol
EDIT: the cipher should sanitize your input and I just tried to reproduce your crash. It's apparently the command you've given, which is slightly incorrect (should be "c cipher key 6", without "set". "set" is for setting the cipher type). I'll upload a fix for it soon, thanks for reporting!
Though like the others, I found the game quite hard to grasp, but I am getting there and will explore more after work. Post mortem actually explains a lot and makes me understand why did you go with these choices.
Though I agree that it feels very ambitious, so, it feels like one of the rare entries where it would probably make sense to focus on it fully after the rating period ends and turn it into a full feature game, I think it could be a very interesting one, and could find its specific audience!
The instructions in the game page were a godsend, and I wouldn't have got very far without them. I think if you'd have managed to get that level of tutorialisation into the game itself, people would likely have a much easier time. But alas for a compo entry, this is extremely impressive
I was able to get up to the point where I was hunting for the codeword for the enemy station in 1650. I had picked up and plotted 2 points on 2400, but I couldn't find a 3rd nor was I successful in listening on on that frequency at the intersection of the two points I was able to plot.
Despite not getting further that that, I still enjoyed sussing it out alot. Thank you.
@dzejpi Thank you! After any game jam I ask myself "is it worth it to continue working on this game?" and often the answer is "no", for various reasons. I've done a bunch of game jams over the last few years and this is one of the few where I think the answer is a "maybe". So, we'll see :D
@slippers Yeah I wanted to add that in the game but I just didn't have the time for it. Definitely needs a proper onboarding system or interactive tutorial. As for the puzzle, you're on the right track. If you want a hint:
!> That station is not broadcasting continuously, but it's on a 30 second interval loop. If you keep pointing at its location (which should be around -35, 24), you should see the message (on freq 2400 and with both the dira and the text on)
If you solve that, you'll have the final clue but sadly I managed to break the last step of the puzzle so you've pretty much completed all the content currently in the game :D
Play-through with more thoughts: https://youtu.be/kDc-UfJ65BU
Near the end you were on the right track, but you assumed that the outpost would be sending text constantly. It isn't, it only sends you a response if you transmit the right codeword, either unencrypted or encrypted with the right cipher. You managed to do it once, but at that point you had two radars listening to text, which is why all the new displayed text was doubled. As for the cipher, at this point you were supposed to use the caesar cipher with the current month (in-game, top right).
The lack of in-game feedback really hurt your progress, because it was hard to tell if it was part of the puzzle or a mistake on your part. I definitely should've added more feedback when entering invalid commands, so I'm sorry that you had to go through all this :') it really revealed the flaws in my game right now. And I also spotted some bugs that I was unaware of :D
Thanks again! I learned a lot from your playthrough, and I hope you enjoyed it despite the (completely justified) frustrations <3
I usually don't call it quits without beating an LD game but after an hour of not having cleared the tutorial I had to give up ;_;. The concept and overall presentation is cool and I understand the obscurity is necessary for immersion, but I strongly recommend uploading a video walkthrough.
@metalim the technology to press up just wasn't there yet :') and yeah, tutorial not resetting is a bug. Thanks for playing!
@fnelix yeah I scrapped a lot and had to cut a bunch of corners and now the players are suffering :') thanks for playing!
too complicated for my taste though, i needed a little nudge to get going and couldnt get to that point myself.
execution of the game is impressive and the idea is really cool i just didnt "get it"
!> obscurity
and I assumed clearly I should use this with a cipher that accepts a key (vigenere) before I listen to the base... Then I used that and transmitted some code but I assume what I should have done was transmit the key in plaintext and that would have told me the next step? :/
PS: the date localizes xD
The mood in the game is really great, I love the attention to detail in the weird hovel you're playing from, and the monitor effects really add to the immersion. The audio reminded me a lot of Papers Please in a good way. I managed to beat the game, and it was very satisfying becoming more comfortable with the console commands over time.
One small hitch I hit very early on was that I selected a device before using "help control" for the first time, and the "help control" with a device selected doesn't mention the "on" command you're told about if you enter that with no selection. It took me quite a while to figure out what I was doing wrong before I realised how to turn everything on! Very glad I stuck with it though :)