https://jere.itch.io/dead-faceI started the very first day sick, so that sucked. Otherwise things went pretty smoothly.
The game consists of 5 levels of battling multi-tile mechs and a hacking mini-game. You can only take over the mechs by successfully hacking them. I tried to incorporate, in a very loose way, some real world stuff related to hacking.
HackingThe hacking is based around hex numbers. In fact, the title is all hex and intended to be a fictional
magic debug value. You see a memory dump on the left in hex and even the corresponding ASCII data (I really wanted a post-hack cutscene where you see passwords and stuff scroll by as you scan memory). Your goal, like most puzzle games, is to clear (e.g. zero out) the memory.
On the right, you have 5 "progs". I realized that hex numbers almost line up perfectly with playing cards (1-9, face cards vs 0-9, A-F), so the progs are really just a playing card metaphor. 0-9 can be used to replace all instances of the same number. A-F each can be used to delete rows that have a pair of that number plus they each have unique abilities. I had a good idea of what the cards should do going into the challenge and most of that got thrown away because it was too hard to use. I leaned towards abilities that could be used often and felt good. A playtester suggested a penalty for typing a command that would have no effect to prevent you from mindlessly typing everything and that really helped.
MechsI had made Dumuzid in 2015, one of the first multi-tile 7DRLs. Mechs seemed like a good fit for another multi-tile game. In DEAD FACE, you can control each tile separately, which can be batteries, shields, or weapons. There's a power mechanic sort of like FTL so you can only power about half of what's on your mech and even less if your batteries get destroyed.
Surprisingly, the game turned into somewhat of a bullet-hell. It's very easy to accidentally turn the ALERT level up high and when that happens everything in the levels starts unloading on you. You move as fast as projectiles (when on foot at least), so you're able to weave in and out of sprays of bullets. I reviewed some of the past entries that did well on Fun. Dodging was a pretty common theme...
Things I didn't get in: an overheating mechanic, glowing/glitch/CRT effects, a city overworld with rain and badass cybperpunk advertisements. I couldn't think of a way to make the city mechanically interesting anyway. On the plus side, my failed attempting at writing a glow effect turned into a creepy backdrop for the corporation names:
