Code 7 - Prologue

Hello,
we are two students from Cologne Game Lab and we are currently writing our master thesis in “Game Development and Research” on a project called “Code 7”, which is a modern text adventure.
This game wasn’t made in a text parser, but in Unity3D. We wanted to try to bring the idea of text adventures to a modern visualization mode.

You wake up on an abandoned space station that you and your partner wanted to investigate. After an incident you both get separated and now you have to navigate your partner to your location. You do that by hacking systems and extracting information.
On the way you face some dark story twists that make you question your identity.

You can play this about 30-minute prologue for free at: http://www.code7-game.com

The game is focused less on hard-to-solve puzzles and Forgiveness Ratings and instead tries to immerse the player with story and a juicy user interface.
We’ve gotten rather good feedback from the general public and already got through Steam Greenlight, but now we are looking for constructive feedback from the interactive fiction communities as we see you as one of the main demographics that we want to please. Would you buy a full game like this? Do you like the idea of inputting commands instead of sentences and choosing dialogue options? Did you feel immersed in the game?

However this is just a prototype that was created in one week and there are some things about our current plans, that we want to mention:

• This prologue contains a very linear plot and you can’t just roam around an environment freely. The episodes currently in development will have a more open-world-y feeling.

• The voice acting was done in just three hours in the evening before the university projects deadline and can be seen as a demo. For the new episodes we plan to get professional voice actors.

• We plan to have different difficulty modes, that can be distinguished on the amount of auto-completion you get from the game to address classic text adventure fans as well as newer generations of gamers and maybe bring them closer to the idea of text again. You can read more about that on our devlog

• We are currently unsure if the next episodes will have any kind of hacking-minigames in the first place.

Thanks for any feedback,
Kevin Glaap & Zein Okko

It looks very pretty, but the flickering text is really hard to read. I could play about 5 minutes before my eyes were watering so bad that I had to stop. Is there an option to turn the flickering effect off?

Thanks for the reply. That’s sad to hear. What kind of hardware are you using? The game obviously has a higher need for graphics power than the typical game you find here. We never had that problem before though.
There’s currently no option to turn flickering off because we didn’t get complaints before, but we’ll definitely put in on our list.

I’m on a Mac with a fairly large screen. I tried to lower the graphics levels in the settings but it didn’t change the situation. Thanks for looking into it!