Heat Signature
Heat signature
You hide behind the rubble and watch the kid, who listens for drones. Vigilant, focused, and obedient; not curious or joyful like kids used to be. Was it worth it, leaving a broken homeland? The border is close, just one more push. Just avoid the machines.
Gameplay
Your goal is to cross the border without being evaporated by killer drones. You’re safe as long as you remain hidden behind the buildings. Oh, and one more thing — there’s a kid, so 'you' is plural.
- Use the arrow keys to move the character
- Press Z to call the kid
- Remove the plug to end the oppression
- There are two endings, indicated by captions
About & Notes
Heat signature was made for Pico-1k 2024 jam with particular requirement of game being compressed into at most 1kb.
Uncompressed source along with comments is available here.
Picotron version lacks some of the sound effects and details due to slight syntax/architecture overhead. It is fully playable, yet the proper release is for the PICO-8 and this is the way game should be played.
Finally, game is follow-up to my "Distraction" piece https://rostok.3e.pl/codeart/#distraction
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Comments
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cool game ♥
very cool me likey, took a long time to beat, got unlucky with finding the right path but got lucky with guessing positions of last buildings, fun mechanic once you find it
thanks, glad to hear you liked it and i really appreciate the feedback. after being in a constant gamedev loop where you run-test-refactor i could pass this in sth like 2 minutes. eventually i wasn't sure if it's too hard or too easy.
This game is so cool. Really nice atmosphere with the film grain (or I guess digital sensor noise?). I think I'm either missing some piece of strategy or haven't found the best path because I've made it within sight of the border many times but haven't been able to clear that last sprint. Your other comment about looking closer at the targeting behaviour was really useful to get me this far though. Gonna come back to this one and figure it out, I swear!
Okay yeah the map is more expansive than I realized. I was favouring the lower path before because tucking yourself behind the buildings while moving upwards is a bit awkward.
Finally got it!
glad you made it and didn't give up!
Interesting concept and it's always very cool to make dark games about social issues. Couldn't beat it tho. Also boy's AI suck but it's ok bcz it's always hard to make pathfinding algorithms.
Thank you. There's no pathfinding or anything fancy here since this is a 1KB game. The kid's logic is pretty simple it goes straight to the player left side sliding on the houses. This may stuck on vertical movement but should work on horizontal directions pretty well.
I'm sorry but the game becomes quite annoying as you try more and more to finish it because it makes me as the player understand that i have to make near perfect movement and hope that the kid does not go in front of a building when I follow him,plus I've had a couple of plays where the X axis movement didn't work
The further you go, the longer are the distances between the houses. But no perfect movement is necessary to finish the game. I did, however, assume that eventually players will "hit the wall" and become slightly frustrated and this will force them to revise the strategy. In particular - did you study/notice the drone targeting behavior?
This is a very intriguing hint, but I couldn't notice anything in the drone targeting behavior..
All right, here's the solution. I can't hide it since itch.io has no spoilers tag.
Once any of the characters is in the open, drone targeting begins. A red rectangle appears and gradually shrinks over time. Once the target is locked, the character is executed. However, if a second character appears, it disrupts the targeting mechanism, causing the initial rectangle to grow larger. This gives you extra time—not much, but still enough to reach nearby buildings if you hide and reveal yourself strategically. Note that if both the hero and the kid move close together, this disruption becomes unnoticeable.
Interesting! I definitely tried to observe that dual targeting behavior, but the behavior was similar enough to when people were targeted alone, I didn't notice. Something that might make this more of a reasonable discovery is if I could tell myself a story about what is happening.
As it is, the drones seem to be able to independently target multiple targets independently, so it's unclear why a new target would require the initial rectangle to get bigger.. But if there was a way to communicate that the drone system has some kind of "switching-cost" when there is a second target, then that could be effective in allowing the user to intuit what's going on.
As an example solution, perhaps the red box pauses for a fraction of a second and changes to a more transparent color when a secondary target appears, giving the appearance of being "inactive" while new targeting is happening, and then resuming the shrinking. This could be intuited as extra processing time required. It might even work without the transparency effect.. Anyways, just some thoughts, nice work!
I just assumed there was a single drone and, as you've explained, extra target would force it to perform cost analysis. Please note, that this is a 1KB game, and I really had no more space to fit in any kind of extra effect to hint the player. Even a single sound. Well, maybe if I have refactored it more I could spare these couple of bytes...
wait killer drones... LIKE MURDER DRONES!?!?!? *MAIN THEME OF MURDER DRONES*
im here to get away from ultrakills horrible womenattacker comments
I love the idea, but it seems like movement is significantly slower when moving only along the Y-axis, compared to X-axis only or combined movement.
you are right and it is intentional. horizontal movement is twice as fast as vertical.