Welcome to a frightening world where little is certain. You are imprisoned with insane pirates, murderous robotic guards, and ninja sabateurs. An earthquake wakes your tired body, and you begin your evaluation. Two locked cells, one pirate, one bowl of rancid soup, and a powerful robot standing six feet away. Escape. --------------------------------------------------------- Since our entry was being worked on up to the last few minutes of the contest, I thought I'd make a post to fill in some information left out in the readme and to take comments and criticisms. Paranoia was started with a larger goal in mind. We've developed a complex storyline and gameplay elements from text adventure games and first person shooters. We cut out several of the more complicated elements for the sake of the contest, but unfortunately we still only finished the first two levels. We will certainly be completing this game and "uncutting" all of the corners. --------------------------------------------------------- Since there have been comments about the game locking occasionally when you die, we have a revised version of our entry for download. This is the same demo that we uploaded to the site for the contest. You just have a better chance of completing the game without freezing [smile]. If you are playing the original demo and need to quit from within a level, just press F11. (This also works in the new version.) For more information and the updated game, head to gsgraham.com/paranoia/ [Edited by - pi_equals_3 on November 2, 2005 8:43:39 PM]

I might as well post a walkthrough of level 1, as it is a bit confusing (but NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING compared to level 4).

PARANOIA

You're stuck in a cell, you have no apparent plot devices, and probably don't understand the controls - now escape.
(On an aside, there will be a plot and some explanation of this in the full version. Not to mention zombies. And ninjas. And shooting.)

Controls:

WASD Movement

E - Examine - If something is examinable, it should have an eye on the left of the scroll. Pressing E again will remove the examine text from the screen more quickly.

Space - Use - If an object is 'usable,' you will see a Hand/Mouth/Wrench icon on the right of the scroll. The hand mostly means that you can take the object, mouth that you can speak to it, and wrench that you can use another item with it (but not which one).

Right Click - Inventory mode (freeze screen, show mouse). In this mode, you can select inventory items (left click them), apply items to other items (left click-drag) or enjoy the mouse cursor.

F11 - Exit game immediately. Do this if your screen stays black when you die (it will eventually come back, but it probably isn't worth waiting for).

So...

Examine the door in your cell: it's locked.
Examine the door in the other cell: it's busted.
Examine the pirate: His name is Captain Moargen, and he's not looking to good.
Examine the pirate's peg leg.
Use the pirate's peg leg: You can't take it, as the Captain is understandably fond of it.
Examine the soup.
Use the soup to pick up the metal fork.
Examine the loose stone next to the Cpt's door (just to the right of it, on the busted-up wall): it will crumble in your hands.
Examine the rum.
Use the rum to pick it up.
Select the rum (enter inventory mode and click it, or press the corresponding number key - 3, in this case).
Use Captain Moargen to give him the rum.
Examine Captain Moargen to notice that he has now comically passed out.
Use the Captain's peg leg.

Now, to escape. If you open your door with the fork, the robot will shoot you (in theory, anyways), and if you bust open the Captain's door and try to exit, the robot will shoot you (again, in theory). So... you have to bust open the Captain's door with the peg leg, immediately run back into your cell while the robot trundles into the Captain's cell (and, in theory, shoots him), open your door with the fork, then exit your cell and the level.

Level 2... Get to the other side. Feel free to examine the bracket and prisoner on the way. Once you get to the sturdy, barred door, examine the broken bracket and rope. Feel free to pull the rope, it doesn't do anything right now (it should lift the door up, and drop it back down when you let go). Go back to the start, take the intact bracket, use it on the wall indentation at the end of the level, use the rope, and exit.

Whew. Seriously, you get to kill something in level 3. With your choice of a peg leg or fork.

We would really welcome any comments from people [smile].

Menu - any suggestions?
We plan to flash lightning on occasion, which will also highlight all the mouseover buttons. This way you won't have to sit there for very long trying to figure out how to start the game.

FPS - hit ` to turn it on. What ranges are you getting in each level?

Music - thoughts?

Sound Effects - unbalanced, too loud, not appropriate?
Certainly we hope to improve some of the sounds, most notably the robot ones, as they tend to blend in with the level sounds.

Textures - blatant screwups? Suggestions?

Controls
I realize that we don't explain them in the game. A parrot will kindly do so in the future. That being said, do they make sense, or would something else work better?

Difficulty
It's hard, yes. The idea is to make it a little less complicated and convoluted than, say, Day of the Tentacle, but still keep it fun. Of course, the FPS part isn't there yet, so that's not an issue.

Anything else?
Throw it at me. Be critical. You too, nes8bit :)

[Edited by - Avatar God on November 2, 2005 6:53:03 PM]

Here is my thought train. Oh, Paranoia, cool name. Downloading. Very good screen at the beginning, the menu is nice if a little confusing. Wow, this game looks awesome. What do I do? Oh there is somebody over there. Oh a fork! Nice. Maybe this works on the lock. Yesss, good puzzle good puzzle. Fade to white... wtf. Try again, found door. Hmmmmm this part looks like a maze... walk, walk... fade to white. Hmmmm what is happening? More fades, I get frustrated, maybe they didn't finish this part and they just fade you back to the beginning to prevent you from going far.

Read some posts.

Ok, it's them robots that are doing that. Play second part more, great suspense with the robot sounds and the zapping! Pulled the rope at the end but nothing happened. Can't find anything to pick up. Gave up.

Read walk-thru. Wow I missed a lot in the first part. How did I not see that? Oh in the second part you have to trigger that to make the bracket pickupable. I'll try it. Hey it works. Neat.

I really like this game, but maybe the objects you can interact with could glow a little bit? Also the pickupable trigger threw me off.

Quote: Original post by Boder
Oh, Paranoia, cool name.

[grin] Glad you like it. As we get more time to complete the full game, the title will have a whole lot to do with the plot, which was nonexistent in the contest demo.

Quote:
Very good screen at the beginning, the menu is nice if a little confusing.

I think we're all proud of the intro/menu, although it's almost criminal how much time we spent designing and implimenting it compared to the rest of the game. We were going for a somewhat unconventional puzzle-like menu, although in general people haven't responded well to how confusing it is. I think we'll be adding some rain out the window combined with a lightning effect that illuminates the screen, revealing the buttons. I figure this way it'll still be confusing, but not for more than a couple of seconds when the lightning flashes.

Quote:
Wow, this game looks awesome. What do I do? Oh there is somebody over there. Oh a fork! Nice. Maybe this works on the lock. Yesss, good puzzle good puzzle. Fade to white... wtf. Try again, found door. Hmmmmm this part looks like a maze... walk, walk... fade to white. Hmmmm what is happening? More fades, I get frustrated, maybe they didn't finish this part and they just fade you back to the beginning to prevent you from going far.

Read some posts.

Ok, it's them robots that are doing that. Play second part more, great suspense with the robot sounds and the zapping! Pulled the rope at the end but nothing happened. Can't find anything to pick up. Gave up.

It looks like your experience was for the most part what we intended. Even once there is a complete ingame introduction, we don't want to reveal how deadly the robots are. Unfortunately, due to bigger problems, we couldn't decide on an appropriate robo-death effect, so we settled on the flashing screen and zap sound effect. It seems like about half the people who play don't exactly realize that it's the robots that are causing it, which is understandable. We do intend to make it obvious once you've died that it was the robot, so you won't make that mistake twice.

Quote:
I really like this game, but maybe the objects you can interact with could glow a little bit? Also the pickupable trigger threw me off.

That's a pretty good idea. We don't want all of the items to be obvious, but at the same time we were trying to avoid turning this into a random-clicking game. We thought that the scroll text would at least reduce the searching to looking around only, but we'll definitely consider making some of the objects glow, if even just as a tutorial in the first level.

We don't really like the pickupable trigger either. I think we'll either make it pickupable all along and add a few robots to the maze to make it more difficult (since you won't have to walk back), or we won't make it examinable either, at least so that you don't think you've already explored all your options.

I'm glad you liked the game, and it's great to get some feedback. We'll definitely consider your suggestions as this is still a work in progress. Thanks!

Suggestions: It would be nice if alt+f4 worked. For some reason the game blocks it, and I couldn't find any sort of exit button in the game.

Also, there's no reason the menu should be so confusing. The first time I played it I thought something was wrong with the game, because I kept waiting for the menu to appear and it never did.

Quote: Original post by The Senshi
Suggestions: It would be nice if alt+f4 worked. For some reason the game blocks it, and I couldn't find any sort of exit button in the game.

Also, there's no reason the menu should be so confusing. The first time I played it I thought something was wrong with the game, because I kept waiting for the menu to appear and it never did.

Hmm, I hadn't noticed that Alt+F4 doesn't work. I'm not specifically blocking the command. I'm creating my window with SDL, so I would guess it's related to that maybe.

And we're sorry about the menu confusion. We're already planning on revising it to reveal the buttons every couple of seconds, and possibly keeping them semi-transparent.

Also, F11 will exit the game at any point. It was just left out of the readme out of haste.

I liked the menu and I don't think it overly confused me. Good idea with the lightning that shows the buttons when it flashes.

Can you confirm whether these are artifacts by the syringe or intentional?

Those would be artifacts.

Good eye! It took us weeks to notice them, and by that time, the cursor was pretty low on our to do list.

Quote: Original post by pi_equals_3
Those would be artifacts.

Good eye! It took us weeks to notice them, and by that time, the cursor was pretty low on our to do list.

Well, it took me weeks to remember to tell you, anyways [grin].

Yeah, I've heard a couple of comments on not realize that the big cylinder thing was actually a robot. I'm really not sure how to make this more obvious, though the shoot effect should help somewhat. I may make him a little brighter so that he actually looks metallic instead of a grungy vending machine.

I think we have the parrot say something about the killer robots in the script, we just didn't have time to implement it... along the lines of "Well, I'M not getting my feathers shot off by the guard out there."