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Decipherism's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Innovation | #2 | 4.346 | 4.346 |
| Gameplay | #7 | 4.231 | 4.231 |
| Overall | #8 | 4.231 | 4.231 |
| Audio | #51 | 3.654 | 3.654 |
| Graphics | #63 | 3.885 | 3.885 |
| Theme interpretation | #280 | 2.654 | 2.654 |
Ranked from 26 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
GitHub repository
https://github.com/quasilyte/decipherism-game/
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Comments
Cool game, great concept. Was fun to figure out the puzzle. I definitely got a little confused more than a couple of times. Love the graphics (especially the notebook stuff for instructions), and sounds are great too. Played as part of the GitHub Game Off live stream:https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1712660556
Congrats on top ranked too :)
Very nice puzzle game. I suck at these kinds of games, but I still enjoyed it!
The graphics are very fitting and clean, I particularly appreciated the hand-drawn pencil style of the menus. I can see there's lots of puzzle variety aswell, and lots of scope to add more levels. The actual gameplay is very polished too. I can see you spent a lot of time getting the puzzle just right and adding features like the debug console kind of screen.
For improvments, I'd mainly suggest sound design. In particular, I'd say the main game music, while slammin', does not fit the aesthetic of the game. Also, it would be nice if your choice of game speed saved between levels (stops you having to change it to your preferred setting at the start of every game)
Overall, very strong entry. Good job!
Really fun puzzle game, also great for education! Would be awesome to have a editor and being able to share it :D. Music can be a bit repetitive after a while tough
This is why I made it possible to disable it from the main menu. :)
I used Tiled to create the levels. So it’s pretty easy to provide a custom level support. All you need is a tileset file to open in Tiled and then you’re golden.
Tiled is great. :)
Ah i see you're a man of culture as well
You don't know how much i laughed when i saw this ahahaah
Ok Back to the Jam! It is great game, very good on the cliche' side ! It stimulates your mind!
Very interesting game, I finished all 6 levels but can't find how to access the extra ones. Anyway, I played it for much more time than I thought! It's entertaining and engaging. I would have made the "manual" accessible from in-game, like the console, with page markers for faster access. The music fits really well for me, reminds me a bit of Hacknet. Congrats on your game, very polished!
Congrats on finishing your game!
These sort of programming games don't quite land for me and I can't figure out why. I love the problem solving aspects, but a lot of the times I don't feel like there's the right amount of information. The handbook/rules thing here was way too much information upfront, but it seemed essential for figuring out how to even play the game. And not being able to page back through it was frustrating, especially when unlocking more pages. I wanted to trial and error thing, but the '?' blocks kept throwing me. Do those rules change every time? It felt like this game was asking the player to re-solve for the same problem every puzzle, instead of letting me build on previous knowledge to feel like I'm learning or progressing.
The music in the menus was great, but the actual gameplay music was way too distracting.
The art and presentation were nice though. The sketchbook vibe was a nice touch. The monochromatic display portions were a little hard to figure out... I can't tell if I was missing important information or not.
I feel like I'm being too harsh. This sort of puzzly game is really ambitious for a jam, and you clearly have a ton of content. Perhaps testing, refining, and making the learning curve easier to get into would have helped me stick with it more than the first two blocks.
Keep making games!
Very very cool game, I played it until it was becoming extremely hard, which i think took me several hours!
GGs, very cool game! I would have loved some ambiance sounds on top but hey, it's a jam, there's not always time for everything :)
EDIT : ok so my browser was muted the whole time... oopsie. The music seems to take a lot of place, if I had it from the beginning i would probably have muted it so that i could concentrate on deciphering more
"I would have loved some ambiance sounds on top"
"ok so my browser was muted the whole time... oopsie."ahahaha my Man almost complete the game without sound enabled!
This is what i call Dedication!
me playing without audio :
Very well thought out game! The graphics look amazing, both the retro green-on-black CRT monitor vibes and the handwritten notes (with the hand drawn memes in there as a bonus).
I am not quite sure that it is possible to deduce what the branching nodes are branching on. Usually I just assumed it would go a specific way, find out what the input would be for the encoded answer and try that. Perhaps it is meant that if that way gives you an input that is not a word then you should assume it will go the other way? I am curious if I am missing something here.
The only criticism I can find is that the arrow keys work for component selection, but not on the map or in the main menu, so if that is all I can find that means it is a very polished game!
Well done !
The branching is the only unknown part of the encoder, so they’re there to make things less obvious.
There are several ways to deal with them:
Unlock the branching info upgrade and use tab to toggle the terminal; you’ll see the conditions list (it doesn’t reveal the exact condition, but rather its kind, like “contains_letter”).
Usually, a condition is either simple or too hard to be guessed intentionally. Every level should be beatable with backtracking the result even if you don’t know the branching; you would need to compute the parallel branches simultaneously though. If it’s hard, like fnv_hash_even, then you just can’t reliably infer it.
Some elements apply a transformation that excludes the other transformation, so it should be possible to reduce the number of branches you need to calculate (e.g. 1 instead of 3).
Some levels form an algorithm like a switch or a binary search tree. If you understand the algorithm, you usually don’t even need to follow the algorithm, just apply the direct transformation (so instead of doing N steps, do 1 or 2).
I haven’t found a way to make conditions better. Maybe an icon could make them more understandable, so branching info upgrade is not needed for that. I wasn’t sure if it would make the game more fun to play. I still don’t have the answer. :D
Had a lot of fun with this one. Its a great brain training try to predict the output from the nodes. Didnt quite understand how some branching nodes work. Great job!
Very fun puzzle game! Feels polished, and the gameplay got me hooked from the first time I got that 'Ah, I see!' moment! GG.
I enjoyed your puzzle game a lot. I spent more time on it than I thought I would. Great art style and great music. Amazing work!
Great puzzle game! Nice artstyle. I had a lot of fun playing
Hi!
I really liked the game (at least the part I played -I'll continue as soon as I have time), it has great looks, a very fitting soundtrack and simple but effective game mechanics.
I'm not entirely sure I follow the cliche` you refer to -I only know a couple of movies that show hacking, and typically they just show random code and a loading bar- but it may just be outside of my sphere of experience.
In any case, it's a great entry!
Wow, this game is super polished, you could totally plop this on steam and I would've never known, really impressed with the graphics, right in the starting menu I was like "damn, that's such a creative idea to use a notebook style for the menus" and then I saw the rest of the game and wow.
The only thing that I wished for was that backspace could delete more than one character.
I gotta be honest this is not necessarily my kind of puzzle game and yet the couple of levels I tried it were certainly ejoyable, I'm impressed!
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll try out your game tomorrow (or day after tomorrow, depends on the amount of free time I’ll have).
It’s possible to use
ctrl xto clear the input. It also saves the text to the “text buffer” (a clipboard) if it’s unlocked.ctrl vwould insert the copied text back (ctrl cwould work as expected too).I think it would be better if backspace could remove more than 1 character if the key is being pressed for extended period of time. I’ll implement that after the game jam code freeze will be over.
Thanks for the clarification!
Great game with cool gfx and intuitive control.
The graphics fit the game perfectly
Very interesting game!
I liked solving the puzzles, tho I gotta admit I skipped the tutorial parts, read them very fast, and was just eager to start the game, so I just went into first level, entered letters and checked the output, and tried to work my way back from the output, it was fun, at times I understood the level logic, at some times I just brute force some results, and I even went as far as checking GitHub repo source for some answers! :D Did not finish, as dont have that much time now.
Overall good, only thing maybe holding backspace could delete letters, or there's a reset button, or any faster way to clear input. Or its just that I'm used to not tap backspace that much.
There is a
ctrl xcombination, which is available from the beginning. It only clears the input from the start, but it will also save the text into the “text buffer” (a clipboard) after more stages are cleared. If clipboard is unlocked, you can usectrl vto paste it back to the input (ctrl cwould work as expected too). :)Thanks, didnt even thought of that!
Игра действительно выглядит как игра. Вы проделали очень хорошую работу, чтобы ваши игроки ломали головы.
Very good and solid entry, it feels like a full game instead of a jam game! I'd say that this is the best game I've played this jam (and I've played mine 😜), it has almost no negative aspects and it feels incredibly polished! Great job!!
The graphics are very well worked out, you really feel like some kind of hacker with your notebook and your green terminal hahaha! 🤣
The puzzles are a little bit confusing at first, until you start catching de ciphers and then it just clicks with you. It's like entering "the zone" where you start understanding everything and it just works! I also like that the words that you have to guess are real words, that helped me in some puzzles where I got stuck hehe 😛.
I have to agree with @Cosmo about the interactive tutorial. It's better to show how the game works in an interactive way instead of making the player read the mechanics. A new player like me can feel a little overwhelmed at first.
I have no more negative points to say about the game, you made an excellent work that can really work as a full game if you add more levels and release it! I'd definitely buy it if you released it! 😁
I'll try to complete it when I have more time hehe 🤗.
Excellent entry, keep up the good work!
Game should have an interactive tutorial rather than a 3 page document, but other than that it's really good. Felt like a Zachtronics game
The game has 20 manual pages, you unlock them by solving the puzzles. :) It tells you about the new aspects of the game when you encounter them.