Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → Enceladus
By mgoadric
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 669 | 2.81 | 23 | |
| Fun | 734 | 2.28 | 23 | |
| Innovation | 158 | 3.61 | 23 | |
| Theme | 666 | 2.65 | 22 | |
| Humor | 657 | 1.61 | 20 | |
| Mood | 704 | 2.42 | 21 |
Heya, I got to level 5 in your game and it's really hard to wrap my head around the body swapping. I like the basic puzzle mechanic of counting and memorizing moves.
Kudos to making a challening puzzler.
If you find the time, check out https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-mother-of-all-games
it's got some neat puzzle designs, might be right up your alley.
cheers~
It is a puzzle all right (deductive logic only). I find the mechanics fresh and interesting, but also somewhat arbitrary. It is very hard to envision where the astronauts are going to land after a collision with each other. Most of the time the situation just randomly resolved itself, leaving me unsatisfied.
The move counter should count downwards, rather than upwards. The max move count seems to be 4 every time, but I also needed to test it every time to find out, which is a waste of time.
Inventive work. I can applaud that. :clap:
Thanks for the comments and for playing, @elzach and @huvaakoodia ! I'll definitely change the move counter to count down, this is great. I was hoping to have more time to make a better chain of levels so you can see how each color reacts differently to collisions, but ran out of time. I only threw in enough levels to test out the core mechanics. I think I need to have the initial moves of other astronauts be preprogrammed to fail instead of selected randomly, I have heard from others that some of the levels solved themselves.
Very unique puzzle mechanic, and it starts to become a mindf*** after a few levels. Great job! I like the creepy atmosphere too.
Interesting idea, but I found it a bit confusing, I feel like the mechanics weren't fully explained. It would've also looked cooler if the background was animated. :P
Made it to level 7. But still do not understand how astronauts are pushed away from the same tile. For stupid people (like me) It could be useful to leave some kind of traces where astronauts are gonna go.
Anyway, great puzzle, loved idea very much!
The puzzle mechanic is really interesting and something you could definitely expand on. It is a tricky game to get your head around at first, so maybe more levels that ease you into the way the game works would have helped. Also, it can be frustrating when you get the characters to the right spots but still have to use a move to match the move counter - it feels a bit like being punished for using fewer moves than the game thought you needed. I don't know if it made the best use of the theme either but I could definitely see this being fleshed out into a bigger game if you continue to develop it.
This is great feedback, @cmlsc and @alex-lutay, thanks! I wanted to know how much of the mechanics I could leave up to discovery by the players, and probably erred on the side of being too opaque in the instructions. The traces for where the other astronauts plan to go is an excellent idea.
Thanks for playing, @kodiqi! I definitely need more levels and an easier ramp-up for the difficulty. I did not mean to make a level where you could solve it faster than the time allotted, yes, this is frustrating, I will fix this for future builds.
I want to like it but I'm confused! Hitting up does something different every time it resets, there doesn't seem to be any indicator beforehand what a button press will do unless I'm simply mistaken. For me this has become "send poor astronauts helplessly into orbit simulator!", haha. Part of me is OK with that though, yep nothing wrong with that, lol. I like the idea of having a single input control more than one astronaut and you have to deal with it, beyond that I'm rather lost i'm afraid.
Really needs some in-game explanation for what's going on. Especially the body swapping thing, it's not very intuitive.
I found this really confusing, even after reading the explanation about playing back the previous moves. Got my two astronauts to the red tiles in level 2 and the game doesn't acknowledge it.
I was not really sure why the astronauts kept walking of the platform and sometimes they stayed on it. I was able to bruteforce until level 4.
@oxrock and @jorbits, you were always controlling the encircled astronaut. Based on your feedback, I'm trying out making the camera follow the currently selected astronaut, it feels a little nauseating, but I understand the need for more player feedback for how your actions are affecting the astronauts.
@zarkonnen, sorry about that! I didn't see that early possibility when I was making the levels, error on my part.
Thanks for playing!
Great game!
I had to trouble viewing the instructions though. They are being blocked by the game window on the webpage.
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It was an interesting game. Hard to figure out without looking at the instructions and a lot of trial and error. Nice job on the mechanics and graphics and getting it all working together. Keep up the good work!
Nice concept ! The puzzle mechanics are a bit tricky to get and it takes many trials to understand how it works. The game overall is a bit hard, I managed to reach lvl4, but couldn't go further. I'm not sure I understand why I sometime got a gameOver when I moved my astronaut though. Still very innovative, good work !
The puzzles were very tricky and difficult to understand without looking at the instructions. It's a really neat idea once you figure it out.
Interesting.
Great puzzle mechanics. I kept wishing for a "reset" where only the astronauts that already moved would move.
Interesting concept, but while I got to level 4, I'm not even sure I understood the basic constraints of the game. After moving one astronaut and not getting it to its end I got a fail sound and then got to move the next? And if at the end of that turn I had them in the correct spots, I completed the level? If that was true I would have liked to have a distinction between end of moving one astronaut and not getting to end and fail at the end of all astronauts.
I'm also guessing now, but was it the astronaut that was being moved that was the resolver of constraints or the one walked into?
That you could walk outside the world felt a bit weird. I would vote for either stopping astronauts from walking outside or killing them.
Otherwise it was a nice game and interesting puzzle mechanics. It would also be interesting if the player got to choose the order of the astronauts.
It is quite strange and at first I didn't understand how it worked. I thought my moves are mirrored by the other astronauts in some way, like in a mirror or repeated but with turned directions. Then I got it, that you play them one after each other. It was very confusing, because the way the levels introduce it to you. Maybe don't let the other astronauts move with the old inputs, but start from anew when entering the level the first time? (And also providing a clear/reset button to do that manually mid game?) This needs some work explaining it via text and via exploring - best with lots of redundancy. But then it is an interesting concept.
I managed to wrap my head around the idea of moving each astronaut in turn and having the moves played back. However, I can't understand the rules for what happens when astronauts collide. I got to level 7 through a bit of trial an error but no further. It seems like it could be a cool puzzle game if it was a bit more intuitive or there was more clear explanation.
To be honest, I had no idea why the second astronaut moved the way it did. Even after reading the comments (they repeat their last steps?) I couldn't get past lvl 4.
Very interesting and challenging. I included it in my Ludum Dare 38 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo0eF_2kFRY