The Hidden Facility

Made in 9 days for Dungeon Crawlers Limited Asset jam.

You discover a blank spot where no signal goes in or out, so you decide to explore what secret lies in that hidden facility.

Game and combat is turn-based, world doesn't act until you move (rotation doesn't count).

Controls

WASD/arrows/numpad - move + strafe

QE/numpad - turn

Space - skip turn

Mouse click to use abilities and items.

Levelling

Make sure to level up as soon as you start the game. Each level up you get 10 points to spend on your upgrades, which you can do by pressing +1 or +5 next to the character attribute.

Items

• RegenX - restores half of your hitpoints
• BearSerker - adds 25 to STR for 10 turns
• RefleXXX - adds 25 to AGI for 10 turns
• MindDefogger - adds 25 to MIND for 10 turns
• GeniusInj - eases the next action you take (increases chances of success by 2x)
• Bandito - adds 25 to STR, AGI and MIND for 10 turns

Bonus tiles

No bonus tiles were created, everything is just a palette swap or a paulstretch (for music).

Theme incorporation

Spoiler

Theme is incorporated as you discover a facility where conscious mushroom is being imprisoned. It's being used to populate dreamspaces for captured humans.

Story

You discover a dark spot in the Net where no data flows in and out. A strange thing in the age of trillions of devices talking to each other all the time. You think this might be your jackpot, your ticket to discovering something hidden and valuable, so you decide to explore. Now you're standing in a dark corridor of some strange facility, it looks very artificial and empty, air is filled with the moldy smell. The door you've hacked open shuts closed right behind you.

Spoiler alert!

The whole facility was build and managed by a super-human AI which lured humans to enter the facility and then it captured them in capsules to use their mindstate to farm resources. In order for humans to be obedient it introduced a dreamspaces where humans live their alternative lives and their brain activity provides a lot of resources to the AI. But early on the AI faced a problem: the simulations are not that good and humans tend to malfunction quickly, requiring a new stream of participants, which becomes problematic with time.

The AI turns its gaze to the outside world and discovers and captures a sentient alien fungus with some staged incidents in the space. This is the new specimen for the AI, which ends up being a huge success, as its consciousness is now driving dreamspaces for humans. But fungus is smart enough to stealthily escape part of its colony, so AI ends up losing a meatspace in the end. Reduced to the cyberspace and blocked from the outside world AI struggles to find a way out of the status quo.

Until you arrive...

Now it's up to you if you want to help fungus to reduce AI power over dreamspaces even more or help the AI to kill off enough of the fungus, so it'll regain some control over the meatspace and dreamspaces.

Something which is left out of the game is that if you only helped the AI, you end up in the dreamspace with no way to escape, if you helped only the fungus, you end up back in the meatspace with an escape route out of the facility with fungus set free. And if you end up in between then you are in the dreamspace tailored to you, but have a way to escape it via a fungus emissary (this is what's written on the final screen).

Credits

• Alexander Polyakov - code, design
• Nika Khudonogova - design, level design, palette swap master
• Kyle Chand - code

Tools used

• raylib - render + OS interaction
• eecs + edat - gameplay logic and data
• Aseprite - palette swap
• Audacity - paulstretch