Chaotic Space Mappers of SPLORR!!

Fun Idea, and it was cool to see a terminal based game. It does get a little repetitive and tedious, though I'm not sure there's any way around that when you have a game where you enter commands to do anything. Cool Entry anyway, it was interesting to play

I like how original this one was and played quite a bit, but i need to agree with Aaron that it's become a bit monotonous after a while. Sadly, in my playthrough, I didn'd find any wormhole.

I think this game could be expanded into a sort of discovery game with some mechanincs as having to figure out what some commands does or drawing a hand map of the system, because I was having fun in the start trying to discover how the game works.

I'm not sure if it's a bug, but in my system (Windows 10, portuguese), I had to enter the numbers with a "," instead of ".". Probably not a bug, but worth mentioning.

@katuiche
actually that IS a bug… in the code that displays the numbers… i must not be taking into account the locale when printing the text.
windows was just using the local settings for portuguese, which uses the comma as the decimal separator (i switch my locale on my machine and checked).
however, it is not good for it to display one way, but require input in the other.
i'll know for next time.

Congrats on making a full 3D game! I played using a greedy algorithm: always move towards the closest unsurveyed entity. This worked until after 17 entities I went through a wormhole and ended up somewhere outside the galaxy, in empty space… it was tense for a while until (by sheer luck, I guess) I stumbled upon a faraway star and found my way back in.

Because it's 3D, and because the reference axes and directions of the polar coordinates are not well specified, it's practically impossible to draw a map as you go along. This might have worked better in 2D and allowed for a bit more planning and strategy.

On Arch Linux, the dotnet run command did not work (after installing dotnet-sdk it still complained "Couldn't find a project to run.") but this worked fine:

chmod a+x ChaoticSpaceMappersOfSplorr
./ChaoticSpaceMappersOfSplorr

Sadly sound didn't work, but I got the gist of it from your YouTube video.

Command history (up arrow) also didn't work for me. I tried with rlwrap but apparently .NET does something "clever" that breaks it. But I'm very proficient at typing engage now ;)

(got the comma bug as well, locale is 'Dutch with US keyboard')

I normally gather my notes and make them into some sort of coherent review, but in this case I think my more or less raw notes are a story of their own:

• help option doesn't work? -- not before you start at least, then it does
• ever played the old Star Trek text based games?
• text based games are really something I miss playing
• why both speed and engage? (just repeat the last if given without parameter)
• ah, you're map_ing_ I see
• not encountered any real chaos yet…
• ah, there is a list of earlier commands
• words like 'refuel' just gives help instead of specific refuel message (like 'needs entity number')
• refuel will take all the fuel in the star, even if it goes over your top-off of 100
• ah, wormholes, that must be the chaos element
• I somehow really like the sound effects, no matter how slight or rudimentary they are
• wormholes don't count as entities?
• even though I don't have to retype it 'engage until interactable' would be really nice to have
• I've only encountered stars and wormholes. It's text only, with a few beeps. Yet, I'm having a blast somehow :-)
• just one more, see if there's anything else besides those two possible things
• why would you ever slow down?
• let's see if we can crash into a star
• oh, stars do replenish fuel then?
• ok, distance just becomes 0, fair enough

EDIT: Ohh, F# … I should get back into functional languages, even though nearly everything has lambda's and even closures now… :-)

@remco
this game is an homage to the old text based BASIC games I typed into the computer when I was a kid.
it is a lot like the ones called Star Trek and Space War from that era.
this game borrows a its core mechanic (tho made 3d instead of 2d) from the game I'm currently "really" working on on my stream - https://thegrumpygamedev.itch.io/seafarers-of-splorr
there was no real need for setting speed, but it was in quite early so i left it.
refuelling takes all of the stars energy on purpose, because you can waste refuelling this way
wormholes are the chaos element, yes.
the sound effects are accomplished with a Console.Beep function in .NET. It takes a frequency and duration. My goal was to emulate the PLAY command from old BASIC variants from my childhood.
With more time, I would have likely had asteroids, derelicts ships, and other things. my time was even more constrained than the 48 hours.
Mainly my goals here were to get something playable, in a form that is not very much associated with games, in a language poorly suited to making games.
Thanks for playing.

Cool little text game! It's really easy to understand rules of game. Liked wormhole idea, but maybe neeed to add more features for diversity

yer right, @DictorDro
with more time and more things to explore, this could have been a much richer game. time constraints required I boil it down to its bare essentials.

I couln't run the game in the terminal (macOS) using the provided command:

% dotnet run ./ChaoticSpaceMappersOfSplorr.dll
Couldn't find a project to run. Ensure a project exists in /Users/maartene/Downloads/csmos-mac, or pass the path to the project using --project.

But was able to launch the game by cloning the repo and using:

cd alakajam10-master/ChaoticSpaceMappersOfSplorr
% dotnet run --project ChaoticSpaceMappersOfSplorr.fsproj

Now, I'm going to try the game itself. ;)

Interesting game, I'm a sucker for text based games.
What I did find that there is not that much difference to do. I do believe this game could be expanded with more content/depth. I'm especially interested in being able to do more than just refuel with a surveyed planet.

Note: sound did not work on my system (macOS).

Ah, a completely text-based interface!

A few observations/suggestions:

• I was also impacted by the "locale" issue.
• I couldn't resist trying to collide with one of the objects, which luckily for my ship just let me phase through it (or even co-exist with it on the same coordinate space). I'm not sure whether that was a disappointment or a relief.
• I found myself wishing that the survey command also named objects. Both to leave my mark as their discoverer, but more importantly, to let them function as waypoints.
• It was pretty hard for me to "translate" the coordinates into a mental map, so I tried to navigate between objects trying to remember them by their "nearness"/proximity of each other.
• Having unknown entities referred to by their number, in combination with a "set heading towards (object-number)" would be a nice quality of life feature.
• As has been mentioned, extra actions and objects would have improved the gameplay, but the core feels solid!

This was an interesting game, it took me back to the good old STARTREK text-game days!

Definetly one of the most unique game in the jam!
The amount of text!
Bit more colour or better organised/formated text would help the readability of the game.