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S O S

roburky 16 years ago
Secondary Objective: Survive
Download: Version 0.08



You are a cyborg slave, waking to find your ship crashed on an alien planet, and the human crew dead. You have to find food and water, build weapons and defend yourself, investigate the unusual creatures of the world, and try to repair the spaceship to escape.


IMPORTANT:
Play on the EASY DIFFICULTY setting the first time you play the game.
This includes a short sequence that introduces you to the game. For later attempts, the default medium setting skips this sequence.
In almost all other aspects, the three difficulty settings are the same.

Download current version: Version 0.08 (Filesize: 10.8MB)
Download previous version: Version 0.07

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This is the mod previously known as Scavenger. Work is not finished on this, but I don't think I'm going to have much time to work on it for the next few months. In its current state, it is a smaller version of the overall vision, and I think I'm happy to release it like this while I get back to work at uni.

I would particularly like some feedback from all of you Notrium veterans. I have been getting friends and family to playtest it while I watch, and while this has been helpful developing the tutorial and early game, I haven't been able to watch anyone playtest it who is making a serious attempt to complete it. So there's likely quite a bit of balance work that you can help me with.
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MageKing17 16 years ago
I like the new name, very nice.

Also, screenshots still look good. Keep up the good work.
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Zeron 16 years ago
This mod is cool in so many ways. The game play gets different and very fun in the crystal field.
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Aegis 16 years ago
Self-destructing definitely looks cool. But what's the point of it?
Great work, btw.
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roburky 16 years ago
I decided early on that an exploding death would be a little more satisfying than simply switching to a 'You died' screen. And I figured that somebody somewhere would want to be able to activate that explosion themselves when bored, so I gave the option to.

Thanks for playing. How much have you managed to accomplish so far?
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ahrenjb 16 years ago
I'm having an issue with this mod. Some items that I pick up via right click do not appear in my inventory.

Weapon chassis is one of these things. When I pick up the one near the ship in the beginning it's nowhere to be found.

Projectile unit too, the first one I pick up doesn't show, but if I build another, then it shows I have 2 in my inventory.

Rather frustrating as I can't build a weapon :/
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Zanfib 16 years ago
This looks to be a good mod.

Any advice on how to survive? Most of the enemy's seem too be very dangerous and it is difficult to find supplies.
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bwansy 16 years ago
I like the ideas. The mod looks very good. However it is way too difficult, mainly because i can't build weapons (too few weapon chassis) and find enough food (the slugs are either nowhere to be found or they always out-run me after getting shot). Are there any weapons powerful enough to beat those blue slugs or robots?
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roburky 16 years ago
Thanks very much for the comments. That's very helpful. Could you tell me a bit more about what your experiences were? The things you did manage to accomplish, the things that killed you, etc.

I'm glad you were at least attempting to kill the slugs for food. I intended hunting to be the primary food source in the beginning, but I ended up making a unique food source for each area in the final game, and I worried that most people would find the other sources easier and not bother hunting the slugs, or even realise they were a good food source.

I have been making a lot of changes to the sentry robots recently. They should be easier to kill/disable in the next version, as well as having more interesting behaviour.

The blue slugs are meant as a kind of final challenge. Some of the buildable items will make tackling them a lot easier.
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bwansy 16 years ago
I'd love to give you more opinions. I'm glad that you didn't give those typical "if you can't beat it, you suck. Go play something else!" answers.
One thing that made it hard is that there are some things that are not very obvious and didn't exist in other Notrium mods, but can doa lot of damage. Especially in the crystal region, where the crystals would grow and eventually explode then you hover your cursor over them, and those ghostly creatures leaving mines that explode after a certain amount of time. Of course this is what I discovered after playing long enough. My first impression of that area could only be described with one word: chaotic. Here's basically what happened:
*Walk into the area*
"Wow, those crystals are mines. Better stay away from them..."
"What's with those moving sand?"
"Oh, 'edible eggs'!"
*Munch munch munch*
"Doesn't really help a lot..."
"Woops, the mum gets angry... run!"
"Aha, they don't really hurt me..."
*Boom!* *Boom!* *Splash!*
*Beep... Beep... *
"What? What happened? They made the crystals explode? Better get outta here!"
*Boom!* *Zap* "Ouch! Those damned blue plants!" *Boom!* *Beep! Beep! Beep!*
"Why can't I outrun them?"
*Boom! Boom!*
*Beeeeeeep!!!*
"Oh what the... countdown?"
*Kaboom!!!*
<You died>
"Oh well... can someone tell me what 's going on?"

Another thing is that there isn't a "safe area" like the hermit's house in original Notrium or Weriver mods. Not that there has to be a safe house, but getting attacked endlessly without any means to defend oneself (not even punch) is somewhat frustrating. The items, especially the most important of all, the weapon chassis, are too hard to spot. Right after I started, I picked up every item around the ship, everything except the weapon chassis, and started exploring the area. After being killed a couple of times I realised that I must find one in order to build a weapon and survive, so I started searching for one frantically. After being killed for few more times, by several different creatures such as the blue slug and some pods that pop out from ship wrecks randomly, I finally found one just beside my broken pod...

But finally I was able to build a laser gun, and used sniping and guerilla tactics to kill a blue slug. Luckily they don't seem to regenerate health, otherwise it would be practically impossible for me to kill them.

I understand that this mod is still in early development stage, so I didn't expect so much. The graphics and planning are great, and it surely has a great potential. I hope in the future we will see a much more refined and complete mod, and won't be abandoned quickly like many other mods.
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roburky 16 years ago
Thank you very much, that's a massive help.

The weapon chassis being hard to spot is actually something that came up with one of my playtesters that I watched in person. I had increased the size since then, and reduced the amount of terrain that camouflaged it, but clearly more needs to be done. Because if someone doesn't pick up that item, the whole game just becomes an exercise in frustration, as you discovered. I guess I'll have to get making my own custom graphic for it so that it's more eye-catching.

Your recount of your first experience in the crystal field is also helpful. I do remember noting that the various kinds of exploding crystal were more damaging than the other dangers of the game, but I thought that was ok considering how easy they were to avoid. Of course, that was from the perspective of one who knows perfectly how they work and how to avoid them. I'll go back and have a look at tweaking the damage, to make the learning experience less harsh. I also plan on revisiting the crystal bird behaviours, particularly when they're 'angry' at you going near the nests.
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roburky 16 years ago
A new version: 0.08
Filezize: 10.8MB

No new areas, items, or creatures yet, but there are quite a few improvements for existing things that I wanted to upload in preparation for pointing some more people this way. Some creature behaviours in the rocky dark and swamp areas are improved, items you can pick up will now sparkle to make them easier to see, some damage values have been altered, and there's some light dynamic difficulty adjustment in the effects of the healing plant, and lots of other small things that I've probably forgotten. There is also some new music. I've gotten permission from DAT500 to include his Inescapable as the game's soundtrack, which gives everything an extra eery quality. This has raised the file size a bit, though.

Edit: Oh, I forgot, there is one new feature, although there isn't yet anything in the game to introduce or teach it to you. But you can give it a try if you like. You can break apart nanite cells to get nanite gel. Nanite gel can then be dropped on the ground for the fire spitter insects to eat, and they will then follow you around and protect you.
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harwe 16 years ago
Damn, file size too big, I'll figure it out somehow....
Keep up the good work though.

EDIT: Bah, I had to split it into 2 files
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michael15286 16 years ago
I have played it, and finished it, and think it's a pretty good mod.
A bit hard to figure out what to do in some places, but that's the challenge, right?
The nanites were a very cool idea to the game, and the EMP gun was awesome,
although i didn't know why it wouldn't damage normal enemies at first.
A thing you could add to the robot area is the ability to destroy their base stations, so they can't respawn.
An annoying thing about the game though, was the lack of food. I always ended up blowing up,
and i didn't know why until i saw my food counter was low.
Another annoying thing was no melee weapon, though it made it so you had to make things to survive.
The only other thing would be that the Electrical bug was hard to kill, but I think to keep it that way, to make things exiting.
Other than that, this looks like a great mod, with a promising future. Keep up the good work!
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roburky 16 years ago
Thank you for giving feedback. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Were your deaths from starvation due to the food in the world running out as the game went on? Or from not noticing your food levels were low or not identifying a particular area's food source? I hadn't put in any kind of respawn on most of the food sources, so that could be a problem if one game lasts a long time.

I think you are the first person I'm aware of to have completed it. How long did you play it for, do you think?
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michael15286 16 years ago
Yes, it was hard to find food as the game went on, but i played it while saving continuously.
The easiest way to get food is from the birds nest area, but they eventually start to run out of eggs.
The worm creatures were also a good source of food, but I didn't like wasting so many bullets to catch them.
Soon I ended eating my formidable reserve of rations, which are reasonably easy to find.
As for playing time, I don't know accurately, but it was about 3-4 hours, on medium.
I hope to see this mod become better as more people play it.
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JDIZZLE 16 years ago
I really liked this game! One of the best mods i've played so far. My only problem was with the exploration implant would unequip itself sometimes when i switched between areas. Also, I may be the only one who thinks this but i found it a little hard to figure out what creatures would hurt me =] it took me a while to see the small underground slug things in the jungle area were hurting me and not the very visible flying bugs. Maybe that was intended but i think a shaking screen or other visual cue would be very helpful rather than constantly viewing your healthbar to see whats killing you.
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roburky 16 years ago
Thanks, JDIZZLE, that's some helpful feedback.

I'll try to make it clearer in future versions that the leeches in the swamp are hurting you.
I had noticed the exploration implant unequipping itself sometimes, but I've never identified what caused it.
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JDIZZLE 16 years ago
Another thing might be explaining the crazy killer robots that come out of the ships. Just a databank entry would be helpful. I also felt the cyborg's red eye lights were terribly underpowered but that might have been on purpose. I am glad this mod is still being developed and i hope my feedback helps.
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roburky 16 years ago
I do have a long list of databank entry subjects in my ESSENTIAL MUST DO list. But the making of new stuff is so much more fun than writing those things .
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roburky 15 years ago
Years ago, I had an idea for an elaborate ending sequence to SOS. I never ended up making it, partly because I thought what I had in mind would be too difficult to do in Notrium, and partly because I didn't think there would be many people making it through to the end of my mod.

However, I ended up making that ending idea into its own game. It's called Reset, and you can find it here:
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.roburky.co.uk/?p=13">http://www.roburky.co.uk/?p=13</a><!-- m -->

When you play it, you can try imagining you've just spent several hours hunting slugs and scavenging spaceship parts in my Notrium mod to get the experience I was originally intending.
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Amarth 15 years ago
That was pretty cool. You make great things. And congrats on the RPS mention.
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Quantumsingularity89 14 years ago
I cannot get it to work. I can do the introduction in the "easy" difficulty, but as soon as I click the hatch, it goes black and crashes to desktop. Other difficulties crash right away, (because they skip the intro, I suppose.)
This looks awesome, I want to try it!
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Venom31 14 years ago
This IS awesome regardless that this mod is so short.
What's your version of Notrium when you try to use this mod?
Does any other mod crash like this?
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Quantumsingularity89 14 years ago
I downloaded it 3 days ago, so the most recent version. Other mods work. I haven't tinkered with the files yet. I'm using xp. and I'm a girl. Do you think it might be the last one? XD
Edit: yep. that was it. I did what I should have done immediatly and re downloaded and re installed the mod, now it works. ty anyway
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MageKing17 14 years ago
"Quantumsingularity89" said:
...and I'm a girl. Do you think it might be the last one? XD
Not funny.
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Venom31 14 years ago
"MageKing17" said:
"Quantumsingularity89" said:
...and I'm a girl. Do you think it might be the last one? XD
Not funny.
Anyway, this didn't seem to be the case
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