edit: Ah ok, if you view-source it mentions Candy Box as an inspiration.
- Wait until you have 60 candies (new options appear)
- Click the cowboy hat 4 times
- Buy the wooden sword
Edit: Oh, and also Fallen London [5] and other StoryNexus games. In fact, in terms of mechanics A Dark Room is probably the closest to Fallen London of all the games of which I can think.
[1] Sadly, the HTML sample at http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/pmaf/hypertext/aft/ appears to not work in modern browsers. It was created in a pre-HTML hypertext system called Storyspace; you can see what it is supposed to look like on its native platform at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djIrHF8S6-Q.
[2] http://www.eastgate.com/VG/VGStart.html
[3] http://www.ryman-novel.com/
By the way, and if you're at all interested in the history of hypertext fiction do watch this video: http://vimeo.com/15561443. The speaker in the video talks about a fascinating parallel culture of hypertext writers and readers who paradoxically seem to resist the idea of putting their creations on the Web. Instead, some of the authors choose to disseminate their works on physical media: floppy disks, CD-ROMs and now flash drives.
If you're in the cave, and something attacks you, at the end if you press "eat meat", sometimes, exactly at the point when you want to click it, the buttons become "leave cave" instead, and you accidently press that. Then, a next fight may begin, and you're at low health.
Please provide some consistent way to heal yourself before a next fight.
If the combat action buttons didn't self organize, but rather sat in the same spot (perhaps in order of discovery?), then combat frantic clicking could be consistent.
Also, sometimes the tooltip that shows the cost of a "shoot" hangs over the "eat meat" button, leading to unclickable death if you're almost dead. Clicking the tooltip doesn't shoot, nor does it yield increased health. Either behavior would be preferable to nothing.
Then later once you're maybe 10 minutes in you can switch away for extended times if you want to wait for the continuous income, no need to press buttons, no 'intermittent rewards'.
It could be changed but it's not actually depending on any kind of psychological tricks. The delays are just a minor throttle at the start.
Edit: Actually, to be precise, you only have to stoke the fire once. It's just a deliberately paced cutscene. No psychology there.
Yeah, interesting call, that. When I played Candybox, I was told "before you dismiss So what it, wait until you get 60 candies, then shit gets real".
So, what does a self-respecting hacker do, when faced with 60 seconds of "literally nothing to do" ... except the challenge of opening the JS Console to see if I can make that counter run faster, preferably in less than 60 seconds? ;-)
(answer: yes, it was in fact fairly easy)
http://www.indiana.edu/~p1013447/dictionary/sked.htm
Edit: I got bored quickly anyway, probably because I just don't find computer games to be a satisfying way to spend time. Never have.
window.Engine._incomeTimeout = setTimeout(Engine.collectIncome, 500) // default 1000
IMO it's not a cheat, because it just shortens somewhat tedious waiting early in the game, but doesn't alter it otherwise.
function pushButtons(){if(!$("#gatherButton,#trapsButton").hasClass('disabled')){$("#gatherButton,#trapsButton").trigger('click');}}setInterval(pushButtons, 1000);
Another tip for fighting: equip different weapons. I had only equipped the best weapon, as is customary in games, not knowing you can attack with all equipped weapons at once basically (each weapon has a separate timer). This makes a huge difference.
Even though it was surprisingly mostly playable on mobile (except: small buttons, tooltips)
Very addictive game.
1) Add keyboard shortcuts, make them discoverable via an underlined character
2) increase the amount of space between the buttons so the tooltips appear over whitespace.
That said, I played for hours before giving up! Had tons of fun, thanks for making this!
Love the minimalist interface.
Seems like there'd be a use for a way to "save" games by emailing a parameterized URL to yourself... Or just an alternative to arrow keys for all of those tablet users out there.
Still a great game, though! Next time I'm feeling like procrastinating on a 2007 vintage netbook, I'll know where to look :)
Some usability issues from memory for the next iteration (some that others have pointed out):
- The 'up' and 'down' arrows when allocating workers have a much-too-small clickable area. Compounding this was a slight offset between the arrow image and the clickable area
- Allocating workers & allocating the spoils after a battle both shared the problem of only being able to increment by one unit at a time. Lots of annoying clicking.
- When you hover over the worker allocation button when there are no workers allocated it doesn't indicate whether the various resources will be consumed or produced. You have to allocate at least one worker to find out this info.
- It took me ages to figure out that the 'gather wood' button is independent of the villagers gathering wood. I still don't really understand the relationship between 'check traps' and bait and allocating extra hunters/trappers.
- as mentioned elsewhere here, there's a popdown over buttons showing what resources are required by the button. This is incredibly annoying when it obscures another click target, especially during a fight.
- (As Aardwolf pointed out) When gathering the spoils or as an enemy denies, the layout changes and the buttons jump around, meaning it's very easy to unintentionally click on e.g. 'leave city'
- It's a bit annoying to have to switch between the 'raucous village' and 'small room' tabs to figure out which resources are low and how to allocate workers
- When you find fur etc. in the traps it should say how much fur is found
- It's kind of hard to figure out what resources are going where. Maybe each message from the stream of messages down the right hand could be positioned as a callout bubble beside the resource or item that is affected.
Hope this is constructive and super job — great originality!
Button.cooldown = function (btn) { var cd = btn.data("cooldown"); if(cd > 0) { $('div.cooldown', btn).stop(true, true).width("100%").animate({width: '0%'}, cd * 10, 'linear', function() { var b = $(this).closest('.button'); b.data('onCooldown', false); if(!b.data('disabled')) { b.removeClass('disabled'); } }); btn.addClass('disabled'); btn.data('onCooldown', true); } }
Be careful about them, since they seem to be finite in supply. Though I don't losing all of them and not being able to talk to that man would make any discernable difference in the long run.
"Tanner: 0", "Hunter: 0", etc, have little icons next to them, but clicking does nothing...
I've maxed out my village etc (and am accumulating huge quantities of wood I can't use for anything anymore), but can't seem to advance until I get some leather!
thank you... :)
Really enjoyed the game the whole way through, but I agree with other people on this thread, the ending (or lack of) kinda ripped my heart out. Glad I took some screenshots before flying off into space.
http://bit.ly/17K3a1D - Building Screen
http://bit.ly/12tUk37 - Production Screen
http://bit.ly/17K3ldl - Dusty Path Screen (After getting Compass)
http://bit.ly/14Eyk4u - Map Screen
http://bit.ly/17sIVSm - Starship Screen
Sorry, no screenshots of end sequence - was too busy dodging falling ASCII characters.
If you turn on the remote web inspector (in Settings it's under Safari > Advanced), and then open Safari on a Mac, you can copy the game's save state (localStorage.gameState) to an instance of the game running on your computer.
Another automatic click script, clicking the buttons only when necessary:
var checkAll = setInterval(function() { var bn = ['stoke','gather','traps']; for (var i=0; i<bn.length;i++) $('#'+bn[i]+'Button:not(.disabled)').click(); }, 500);
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="lib/jquery.color-2.1.2.min.js"></script>
<script src="script/Button.js"></script>
<script src="script/engine.js"></script>
<script src="script/header.js"></script>
<script src="script/notifications.js"></script>
<script src="script/events.js"></script>
<script src="script/room.js"></script>
<script src="script/outside.js"></script>
<script src="script/world.js"></script>
<script src="script/path.js"></script>
<script src="script/ship.js"></script>
<script src="script/space.js"></script>
<!-- Event modules -->
<script src="script/events/global.js"></script>
<script src="script/events/room.js"></script>
<script src="script/events/outside.js"></script>
<script src="script/events/encounters.js"></script>
<script src="script/events/setpieces.js"></script>
State.stores.wood = 99999; State.stores["alien alloy"] = 99999; State.stores["laser rifle"] = 1
World.water = 60; Path.outfit["energy cell"] = 80; Path.outfit["cured meat"] = 40; Path.outfit["grenade"] = 10
But again, it's only valid to complain about/mock javascript on non-interactive pages like blogs.
More to the point, if at least you didn't care, then why did you comment?
Why didn't you "just move on"?
With that in mind, what the hell were you expecting? Even in the 90's web based games used flash. What exactly was the 'secure' alternative? A game needs to run code, whether natively or in your browser.
That's what I thought this particular game might be.
In fact, there is a slew of standalone, non-browser-based Interactive Fiction game engines like Frotz[1], Zoom[2], and Inform7[3] out there that this particular game might have been written in. And I would have had no problem playing it then.
[1] - http://frotz.sourceforge.net/
[2] - http://www.logicalshift.co.uk/unix/zoom/
[3] - http://inform7.com/
You mean you have yet to become aware that your browser has been owned through some Javascript exploit.
Somehow that isn't very comforting to me.
You prefer running a binary to play a game?