I had a gap in my schedule for this jam, so I had more time than a lot of my friends. I'm pretty happy with the result, but also have some things I wanted to reflect on here.

What is RCT?

That's a good question! The original concept got a little lost:

You're controlling a robot through a terminal, telling it to pick up objects. But, the behavior of the "hold" command is _weird_.

Under the hood, objects have properties (using Godot's metadata) that "bleed" into each other when you pick something up, and the robot refuses to pick anything up that doesn't have any properties that match what it's holding, even if that "thing" is literally Nothing.

The exact nature of this behavior is poorly defined internally. Level 3 actually "cheats" a little to stop you from beating it too early by removing the "cat"-ness from Nothing you get from exchanging it with Tibbles unless he's already escaped.

Inspiration

I didn't realize it when I started working, but I was inspired by a very frustrating class I'm taking in my school's CS major on UNIX. I like Linux, I had used it personally for some years in the past, but if you really get into the meat of terminal, it's nasty. It's very arbitrary, and doesn't really make sense unless you've memorized a lot of arbitrary nonsense. That might make some people angry. I don't think it's bad. It's possibly the most impressive software I've ever used. But two things can be true. It's not very user-friendly. That's not what it's for.

Anyways, I'm frustrated with linux right now. And C. And Vim. And lex files- why the hell is my professor making us use lex files?? Not to mention healthy doses of TeX and bash. I've worked with HTML, CSS, JS, and this class is almost as bad as all that. Almost.

That's where the concept got a bit lost. The puzzle became more about getting around the obtuse design of the RCT than actually using the hold command.

Visuals

They suck! Don't let the calm colors fool you, that text is unreadable as hell and it showed after multiple playtests. Better text contrast - darker background and lighter text, or maybe even a light-mode version -would be much more readable. A higher resolution would also be more fitting of a modern website.

I haven't provided a download because Godot doesn't provide the right UI scaling functionality I need to make the game look like a terminal in multiple aspect ratios.

Also, what the _hell_ is going on with the second level select screen? I guess I thought it would be "funny."

Overall, I think the game retains visual charm thanks to a tasteful sprinkling of ascii art, said calm colors, and adorably retro BBCodes, built in to Godot's RichTextLabel Node.

Sound

I've never made a game with sound before. If you were lucky enough to hear the random music, I tried to make "typing" music. Repetitive piano nodes recorded into my phone. I've been playing piano for a long time, and I love freer-style jazz pianists like Danilo Perez. I think I managed to capture a little bit of his spirit in those snippets.

The ambient sounds are mostly Audacity pure tones, I think the command-send sound is a pixabay free asset, but it's still in the "retro" aesthetic. Overall, I think this is the strongest point of the game.

Gameplay

It's reading. The gameplay is reading. I don't know how this is going to appeal to fellow game developers, who have just been staring at code for 72 hours. It's a little monotonous to say the least. One friend who tested a prototype had some great problem-solving moments.

The puzzle design is bad, but it's my first puzzle game and I'm happy with it.