Ion Duct

Description

In this game, you push conducting blocks around, attempting to connect up wires (that is, conduits, or, if you'll allow me to be more whimsical and anagrammatical, "ion ducts") to open doors and make it to the GOAL. Watch out, though, since there is some deadly fire in your way...and you only have 4 HP. Use them wisely.

This game was originally going to be longer, but something came up so I just drew up a single level with a handful of mechanics. I added a bit to it, but since this level was hand-coded (unlike last year, I didn't put in the time to write/fix a level editor), I couldn't make more than one. Even post-jam, I still don't have a level editor, so at least for now that's all there is.

This is a submission to the Linux Game Jam 2023--together with a post-jam version including quality-of-life improvements along with a new "challenge" goal.

Mechanics

Part of the fun of puzzle games is figuring stuff out, and (like nano) the controls are always visible (except the menu controls, which are arrow keys and enter), so I encourage you not to look down here unless you're really lost. There's also now a mode (accessible from the menu) that allows you to explore the map and see what everything is.

What all the symbols mean

• Grey blocks: solid walls
• Grey blocks with lines through them: stationary wires
• White blocks with lines through them: movable wires
• Red blocks with an 'X': a closed door
• Green '.': an open door
• Grey blocks with an '8': a battery
• Red '#': fire, dealing 1 HP of damage
• Grey arrow: a one-way passage
• Green asterisk: a checkpoint
• Green GOAL: your goal
• Green CHALLENGE: a goal which is a challenge to reach!
• Last but not least, a yellow/orange arrow: you!

Assorted hints

• Since you cannot pull the white blocks, be careful around walls.
• If two blocks get pushed next to one another, you can't move the two together (although you can move them separately).
• You have just enough HP and movable wires to make it through the game, no more and no fewer...well, maybe a bit more HP.
• Figuring out how checkpoints work is probably useful, and you can always reset to the last checkpoint with 'r'.

Installation/dependencies/troubleshooting

To install and run, unpack the archive, and run

./ion_duct.sh

from a terminal inside the unpacked directory (you can also do it from outside, but just need to include the full path).

The requirements should be pretty light: it was built on a machine with a version of Arch Linux from March 2020, so glibc >= 2.30-3 and Linux >= 4.19.98-1-lts should be fine. I've tested it on an Ubuntu 22.04 machine and it seems to work, but let me know in the comments if there are issues. If you are running it on a sufficiently slow machine (or, above, in the browser version), there may be issues with lag when pressing/holding down keys, and I apologize for that but I can't really fix it now without rewriting a core part of this game's engine.

If the level looks weird, first compare to the screenshot to make sure that it's behaving as expected So far, I have seen two types of issues that are, unfortunately, terminal-dependent:

• None of the grey walls or wires appear: that grey color is technically "bold black", and you may need to adjust your terminal configuration to see it on some systems: for example, there's an option in xterm called something like "use bright colors for bold" that you need to turn on.
• None of the grey walls appear, and the wires look like grey lines, instead of black lines on a grey background: having bold background colors is supported (or unsupported) differently in different terminals. For some terminals (for example, xterm), you can get a background bold color by using the bold and reverse video attributes together. This is the option that makes sense to me. However, for some terminals (for example, the linux console), you need to instead use the "blink" attribute. This is a holdover from how VGA handles bold background colors. I currently only check for the linux console (since it was the only example I found), so if you are having this issue, running

  TERM=linux ./ion_duct.sh

  should resolve the issue (this is a currently untested workaround). To help resolve this issue in the future, if you ran into this bug and this fixed it, let me know in the comments below which terminal you were using so I can add it to the list.

If you have any other troubles with the colors, let me know in the comments and make sure to tell me what the output of

echo $TERM

is. Finally, if there are any issues running the shell script (which calls a pre-built, self-contained copy of the python interpreter), and you also have python >= 3.8.1-4 and ncurses >= 6.1-7 (potentially lower versions work), you can also simply run the executable python file in the included src/ directory directly.