# Overview

They killed the world generations ago. Find out the truth and ascend to the Wire.

As always, the Ludum Dare entry page can be found here

# Design

We had a proper writer for this one! You can tell, because there’s a story (and it’s really good).

Building a game that doesn’t have any gameplay is always an interesting design challenge. We wanted to present the world as an old terminal, so the most convincing interface was… well… basically just re-implementing a window manager and basic apps.

Anna talks to you through a chat client modeled after IRC, with some basic delay code to make it look like she’s “typing”.

# Tech

There’s… not really anything interesting tech wise here, beyond just making it work. Everyone has used a computer so there are a bunch of ingrained expectations on how windows work. You can’t violate those expectations, or at the very least you need to make a convincing wrapper for why it works the way it does. There are tons of little things that you have to account for like window focus, scrolling, clipping, etc.

None of it was individually challenging, but getting it feature complete in the timeline required some careful feature pruning. For example, we don’t support minimize/maximize, and apps automatically add themselves to the task bar instead of having a “start menu”

One of the more interesting realizations here was just how much small touches affect the user experience of a window manager. For example, the window “appear” animation was originally just added to drive the user’s attention towards newly created windows, but with the “close” animation added as well, it made the whole system feel way more responsive and believable.

# Play

You can play the latest version here.