Recovered: Containment Spheres
Until tomorrow (22 Dec 2020), the Mothership Discord server is hosting the 20x20 Jam. Make a piece of Mothership content (any sort) in Playscii in 20x20 format, and upload a png to the server. Winner gets a shirt?
I entered this thing, “Containment Sphere 5”.
20x20 is just too dense to be easily digestible, so I thought I’d expand some of it here (the submission itself is still only the image).
- The map is the net of a regular icosahedron (d20). The repeated letters at the top and bottom are the same room with connecting hallways doubled. The map wraps at the edges of the screen.
- There is an energy management game implied: it costs 2◆ to pressurize a room and 1◆ to open a door (hallways all have heavy blast doors and fail closed).
- Additionally some amount of energy is taken each “turn” by “anomaly containment”. The intent is that the +- value is a projection of the next turn’s consumption. (There is already some risk in the present configuration.)
- What happens when there isn’t enough power for anomaly containment will depend on the anomaly, but it might be related to VENT.
- WOOD is intentionally weird and vague. It’s a leftover from the derelict generation tables in Dead Planet.
- I opted not to use any of the available CRT effects. Instead, I drew on my real-life experiences designing operator interfaces for modern LCD monitors using tools from 10-20 years earlier that only go up to 640x480 anyway. The CRT effects all look “fake” to me, but the weird muted colors look very real.
- Possible missions on the containment sphere might include evacuation, recovery, restoration of power generation, or anything anomaly-related.
I kept thinking about usability, so after I entered I kept tweaking it. I re-keyed all the rooms so that rooms on opposite corners are in the same row as each other in the key. This might be useful if I made an interactive version, because it would aid memory if you rotated the map.
Finally, I wanted a way to communicate the “wrapping” nature of the map. Without making it interactive, animating it seemed to be the way to go. Ultimately I think it hurt the usability too much, but it was an interesting experiment.
Anyway, Playscii is fun and if you’ve got a bit of time today, you can still get your entry into the game jam. Good luck!
This post was first shared on December 21, 2020. Spwack called out ASCII Sector in the comments.