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A jam submission

StanislavView game page

On the brink of nuclear war, how sure are you?
Submitted by Acetronaut — 21 hours, 42 minutes before the deadline
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Stanislav's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Narrative#35142.6483.375
Audio#64622.3533.000
Artwork#79942.2552.875
Creativity#84382.3533.000
Enjoyment#89871.9612.500

Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the theme?
The game is about the tensions of looming nuclear war in the 60s-80s. There are 2 literal countdowns, with you trying to survive 31 days without nuclear war, and also when you do launch, agin there's a literal 10sec countdown. Also the less literal "countdown to the end of the world" vibes this was based on.

(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Sounds - pixabay
Fonts - fontspace
Images - Adobe stock photos

(Optional) What would you like to be called if GMTK features your game?
Bailey, the Acetronaut

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Cool Game Man

Submitted(+2)

The art style is truly distinctive and immediately gives the game a strong identity. The restrained colour palette, stark presentation, and unsettling visual design work together extremely well, making the game feel cold, oppressive, and perfectly suited to the subject of nuclear warfare. The interface also has a convincing military-command atmosphere, which helps the player feel as though they are facing a serious and dangerous decision rather than simply interacting with a conventional strategy game. Most importantly, the game succeeds in creating an eerie sense of tension from the very beginning, and that atmosphere remains memorable even after the playthrough ends.

However, understanding the game requires a certain level of military and political knowledge. Even after several playthroughs, I still had to combine what I had experienced with the description on the game page to barely understand the mechanics, so the game can feel rather obscure and difficult to grasp.

In addition, whether the player launches the missiles immediately and destroys the world, hesitates in confusion and fails to retaliate before being struck by a nuclear attack, or manages to survive all 30 days without either side firing, displaying only a single line of text at the end does not create much emotional impact.

I can understand why the developer chose “Stanislav” as the title. However, it is difficult for the player to experience the sense of redemption that should come from recognising a false satellite warning, resisting the urge to launch, and ultimately saving the world. Likewise, the game does not fully deliver the heroic feeling of correctly predicting an enemy nuclear strike and launching a counterattack before their missiles land.

Overall, creating a tense and exciting nuclear-war strategy game in only four days is already an impressive achievement. With further refinement of the player experience, this game has a great deal of potential.

Developer

Thanks for playing! I'm glad you liked the aesthetics so much! Great point about the feedback on you never really being rewarded for actually holding back at the right time.

It gives me some ideas for the game to actually acknowledge those moments, like we could keep track of the amount of red flags in the last 5 seconds, and then record how many times it goes over a certain threshold, and tell the player, they stayed cool under X number of potential threats, when it's almost indistinguishable from the real strike. Also, yeah, a better victory screen or something. I only added in the time remaining at the last second, because I realized that was pretty important to actually caring about how well you did.

Turning it into a roguelike, where you get upgrades over time, would really boost the feeling of success for the player, as they would be literally rewarded, and maybe we could even give them specific rewards for the number of times things were chaotic and they didn't launch, rather than just a flat reward for winning each round.

Submitted(+1)

A little difficult to know what's immediately happening,  but I managed to win by launching the missile whenever stuff started popping off. I think a little text story explaining the context or fleshing out who you are would've done it alot of favours since there's already a narrative of sorts with the war.

The top right and bottom left monitors you can't control and they feed you information way too quickly to use them to your advantage, but I liked the vibe of sitting behind this monitor while the blips on  my screen signify war, i think its a cool concept that could be a really good narrative experience.

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Thanks for playing, I'm really glad you could enjoy it! Yeah, I realized while making it that it's definitely not the best fit for a jam where people don't expect to have to detect and learn complex invisible mechanics, and I don't have time to convey them correctly!

So I just knew some people would bounce off right away, but hoped others would find some joy in trying to optimize it, and learn all the patterns. If you're interested, you can launch the game from a command prompt with --debug-ui after the .exe, and you can see all the invisible behind the scenes stuff, like the bombers that show up on the radar and the intervals the launchpads might misfire on. It's not super deep, but if you're curious about some of the rules, it helps visualize them.

Quick edit: Just noticed you made Millenium! Thanks for checking my game out! <3