Well done to all

tundish on 2011/09/17 16:28 of The Web is dead. Long live internet messaging!
— edited on 2011/09/18 16:34

Spent the afternoon trying to fix the issues with my game on Windows, but it seems this might be a Ren'Py thing. So this year it's for OSX and Linux users only (tested on Leopard and Ubuntu 10.10).

Still, better than my first two attempts, when I didn't have a working game at all!

So, I just want to say, well done to everyone, whether you've finished, given up, or still madly coding during the final hours. Hope you had fun!

To play; download The Web is Dead. Unzip it. Open up the directory twid-all.

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Comments

Cosmologicon on 2011/09/21 05:14:

Cool, I'm really liking the feel of the game! But I can't figure it out. I pull up the browser page which keeps getting populated with pages for places, and they all have fax numbers, but none of the fax numbers ever seem to do anything. Can I get a hint? How will I know when I'm making progress?

tundish on 2011/09/21 11:23:

If you click the fax icon in the main window, you should get a prompt to enter the number. If the number's valid, you should hear a dialling tone. Otherwise, you get a recorded message telling you it's wrong.

If you've successfully deployed the medicine, you should see an entry in the log page confirming it for that area. From then on, the spread of the infection in that area starts to be suppressed.

I'm really pleased you liked the atmosphere, Cosmologicon! What platform are you on; Linux or Mac?

jerith on 2011/09/21 11:55:

As far as I can tell, there's no win condition. It also seems that the infection starts slowly (leaving me with nothing to do), and then spreads faster than I can send out faxes.

Some kind of map with areas marked on it would be handy, even if it's just a static image. That would let me focus my efforts on the more densely infected areas and try to control spread rather than randomly sending faxes to everything that arrives as quickly as I can. (Because I can write a little shell script that does the latter.)

Am I missing something?

tundish on 2011/09/21 12:39:

Hi jerith,

Thanks for taking the time to play! The pattern of starting off slowly and then becoming overwhelmed is kind of what I was aiming for.

The illness spreads most rapidly in populated areas, so you have to stop it getting to those places. This means squashing it in the neighbouring, more lightly populated areas, which get infected more slowly, and sometimes never take off at all. The group pages give you population statistics, but not geography, so maybe the game could indeed do with a map.

If you click the rightmost (circular) icon it gives you a sort of score. You get points for how long you've stayed online, and there's a signal strength which reflects the state of your network. As the nodes drop off the net, this figure goes down.

I was hoping to have sound effects from the radio which increased the tension and reflected the mood, but I ran out of time. Originally as the signal strength fell I was going to have the network fail more and more frequently, so that you couldn't read the log. But I thought this might be interpreted as a buggy game, and didn't do it in the end.

So, as it is, there's no terminal condition, which I regret. Sorry about that.

Your comments are really appreciated. Also, I'm glad you mention shell scripts. I think it'd be cool to interact with a game in a programmatic way. The architecture of TWID is something I'm going to develop a bit if I get the time.

jerith on 2011/09/21 12:53:

I eventually reverse-engineered the "send a fax" query (yay tcpdump) and brute-forced all the group pages to collect fax numbers. Then I periodically dispatched teams to every location in the hope of getting to a conclusion.

I was considering writing a more intelligent script that would watch the event log and dispatch teams as required, but then I looked at the list of games I still have to judge and sanity prevailed. I may get to that later, though.

tundish on 2011/09/21 12:57:

See, that's the kind of thinking that could save the world. :-D

tnelsond on 2011/09/21 15:04:

@tundish, my computer doesn't have a default browser set up, so your game doesn't work for me yet :(

tundish on 2011/09/21 16:43:

In that case, after you start the game, just launch your browser manually and point it to:

http://localhost:8080/log

You should be okay from then on.

cyhawk on 2011/09/24 16:04:

I think I tried to save and got this exception:


Full traceback:
  File "renpy/execution.py", line 261, in run
  File "renpy/ast.py", line 630, in execute
  File "renpy/python.py", line 974, in py_exec_bytecode
  File "common/_layout/screen_load_save.rpym", line 17, in <module>
  File "renpy/ui.py", line 236, in interact
  File "renpy/display/core.py", line 1656, in interact
  File "renpy/display/core.py", line 2230, in interact_core
  File "renpy/display/layout.py", line 711, in event
  File "renpy/display/layout.py", line 711, in event
  File "renpy/display/layout.py", line 711, in event
  File "renpy/display/screen.py", line 297, in event
  File "renpy/display/layout.py", line 711, in event
  File "renpy/display/layout.py", line 174, in event
  File "renpy/display/layout.py", line 711, in event
  File "renpy/display/layout.py", line 174, in event
  File "renpy/display/behavior.py", line 623, in event
  File "renpy/display/behavior.py", line 204, in run
  File "common/00screen.rpy", line 1046, in __call__
  File "renpy/loadsave.py", line 157, in save
  File "renpy/loadsave.py", line 46, in dump
PicklingError: Can't pickle <type 'cStringIO.StringO'>: attribute lookup cStringIO.StringO failed

It came in a pretty ingame dialog that I could dismiss. That's a very elegant way to throw an exception :).

tundish on 2011/09/26 10:03:

Hi cyhawk,

I should have disabled that menu; you can't actually save the game at the moment. In fact, there's no actual client state to save, it's all in the server.