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GRIDLOCKED
GRIDLOCKED
By robo-chiz and bradleypollard
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 503 | 3.46 | 49 | |
| Fun | 562 | 3.26 | 47 | |
| Innovation | 134 | 3.76 | 47 | |
| Theme | 542 | 3.55 | 48 | |
| Graphics | 584 | 3.45 | 48 | |
| Mood | 642 | 3.07 | 43 | |
Comments
I love myself a good puzzle, so this game is a nice welcome. The game looks clean and pleasing to the eye, and the concept itself plays nicely to the theme with how you're placing wires and nodes.
However, I have some gripes about the game. For one, I didn't understand how the game works until a bit of exploration. Mechanics I had to figure out included being able to drag wires out of the numbers itself, how inputs and outputs worked, and what I can and couldn't do. Personally, the nodes given are quite limited, in my opinion. I wished that the nodes can connect from the bottom, and the Cross node interchangeable. I also found it a little frustrating knowing that more final outputs would appear only after completing previous ones.
The game also had several bugs: - Sometimes, in Endless mode, final outputs can appear in the same place. - When getting Locked Out and going back into a stage, the timer seemed to decrease a lot faster. - When getting Locked Out and going into another stage, the node list overlaps with the previous one, I think. - You can place two nodes in the same place.
Overall, the game has a lot of potential to be a very interesting and thought provoking puzzle game, it just needs a little more freedom in what you can do and instructions/tutorials on the game. Keep up the good work!
swini
2018-08-14 22:37
It's a cool userinterface. Buttons are made beautiful and clear. After thinking a bit i understood the function of the wiremode. But after understanding this it was clear. Good and solid Puzzlegame. Keep it up my friends! Love games like yours!
Fun game, love the use of modules that wire into each other to create outputs. It makes the game a challenge to combine everything to get to the desired result.
Realy nice game. I liked the UI, everything ran smooth and it is not to easy but not too hard. Well done!
very elegant UI for this game, and it sticks perfectly to the theme! cheers.
swift
2018-08-15 22:34
Super frustrating in the beginning. Took a very long to figure out that I could draw wires directly from the numbers, even though they don't have red bubbles on them. I would remove the count down timer as well and opt for a count up timer, with say a ranking system based on time spent, that way the slower among us still complete the game without being frustrated, but the quicker can still fight for the max rank and higher speeds.
Mouse overs didn't always seem to reflect what I was hovering which wasn't too much of an issue, but I imagine most users won't know what a modulo operator does. Or was it a bitwise AND?
Cool concept and nice sleek execution though. A bit of work on new user friendliness and you've got a pretty cool thing.
With a little more polish I could probably play this for hours!
akuirako
2018-08-15 22:41
I thought it was creative and well thought, although I thought the UI on the less side was a bit annoying. It was a cool game nonetheless !
ana
2018-08-15 22:46
I like the clean minimal design of the game, and it's satisfying seeing the colour-changes to signal success/failure! I did get a bit confused about how to use the wire-mode at first; I was also wondering if there would be brackets in level 5 so you could specify (1+1) to be multiplied etc. Overall a neat puzzle game though, fun and nice to look at too!
A very nice logical puzzle, my only problem with it is the wiring mode that is not very obvious where to click and drag to draw wires. Otherwise, the puzzle is a little hard to understand at first, but gets very fun once you understand the basics of the game! Good Job!
Like others have said, it's frustrating at first, but gets much better once you get the hang of it. It took me wayyyy to long to figure out how to rotate. I expected RMB (down) + drag, not LMB (down) + drag + (click) RMB.
I only ran into one bug: somehow when I was trying to figure out rotation, I placed a block back in the left column from the stage, and it covered another block (which caused it to vanish).
Very good concept.
Only suggestion going forward is to have all the goals shown at the beginning, instead of revealing them as you complete a node. It got a bit annoying having to clear the board because another number was added.
It's a bit hard to grasp the rules at first and I think a puzzle game should always have some kind of background melody to make it less monotonous. But it's definitely a nice game!
deprecat
2018-08-15 23:21
A cool spin on one of my fave kinds of puzzles! I like that you have the drop mode and wire mode separated, though I feel like I had a hard time transitioning between them. Maybe because one of them is a click to activate, then drag and drop, and one is just drag-and-drop. I keep getting mixed up when switching between these two functions because I can never remember which I click and which I click then drag.
Overall, an awesome little puzzle game. And the fact you fit in an unlimited mode on top of hand crafted levels is impressive! Well done!
shozou
2018-08-15 23:22
The mouse dragging at the time drove me crazy in the wired mode. The puzzles themselves are rather nice. Some sounds would really enhance the experience, however.
wahooney
2018-08-16 00:29
Really cool idea, definitely would find a place on mobile. Took e a round or two to figure out I didn't need to use all the numbers for each wave :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
shockeye
2018-08-16 02:12
Nice puzzler. Bit awkward to work out the interface. Took me a while to understand wired mode ... I had to go back and read the instructions. I think you should have just made it so any time to click on the outputs you can drag out a connections. Visually it has neat and tidy design.
@swift You're right about the tooltips, unfortunately we didn't get a chance to fix the bug where they display the wrong text and get stuck. Thank you for the feedback though, the % gate is in fact division (integer division to be precise) - but you are right that the icon is confusing!
@squabbler Thanks for the bug report! When you say the left side, do you mean outside the grid? I believe we intentionally allow you to replace one gate with another, but if it went out of the grid and covered an input that would be bad. Also, revealing outputs one at a time was an intended design choice since you might discover you need to re-plan your original solution to meet all the new outputs (to go with the theme of having increasingly less space). Sorry you found it frustrating!
@the-triumvirate Some gentle music and soft interaction SFX is already on the todo list :)
@deprecat Thanks! The Endless mode only just made it into the game in the final hours of Monday morning, glad you liked it.
@wahooney Mobile is on the list too, just need to re-work the rotation controls and do some testing!
@shockeye "I think you should have just made it so any time to click on the outputs you can drag out a connections." This is a great idea and how I hope to make it work in the future.
Thanks to everyone else who I haven't replied to, Robo_Chiz and I definitely intend to keep polishing this up after the jam and the feedback about the initial frustration has given me some ideas of how we can ease players in (and make wire mode more intuitive) in the future.
2018-08-16 12:41
I enjoyed this! The last level is a real step up in difficulty but I think it was a good inclusion to showcase the complexity the game can achieve.
I'm not personally a fan of having a timer, I'd rather sit and ponder a solution rather than feeling rushed. This was compounded by the feeling of fighting the interface a lot of the time. I can see its value as a design decision though, to try and prevent the player from having time to plan the most space-efficient solutions.
There are some bugs and usability issues, and lots of scope for polish, which could turn this into a really satisfying game to play. Some things I'd love to see polished:
- Add output/input nodes on the source/target numbers to make it clear that wires can be connected to them. - Don't have a separate wire mode - I found it frustrating having to constantly toggle this on/off. Instead I'd allow wires to be dragged from the input/output nodes at any time. For this to work nicely the gates and nodes should highlight when the mouse is over them so it's clear what the result of the player's click will be. - Allow deletion of wires, maybe by right-clicking on them. As with the previous point, the wires should highlight when the mouse hovers them to indicate what will be deleted before the player clicks. The only way I found to delete wires in the current version was to add a gate to the wire, then delete the gate. - I think it'd be nice to leave the adjacent wires in place when deleting a gate, and if possible connect the wires up in the square where the gate was. - Make it clear which is the primary input node on the subtraction gates. It's not obvious which number will be subtracted from the other. (Same for division, also using a percentage icon is confusing for division) - The blobs that travel along wires could faintly display the value being carried by that wire. This may reduce some of the mental maths required, but would make more complex puzzles easier to keep track of. - Improve the visuals of the crossover gate so it's clear that one wire is bridged over the other. As it stands it looks very similar to the splitter gate so it looks like the wires are being split/combined in some way. - I'd like my whole palette of gates to be visible at once rather than having the scroll wheel. Removing the wire mode button, rotating the large gates to be 2x1 rather than 1x2, and scaling them down a little could help with fitting them all on the screen. - Make tooltips appear instantly rather than animating in/out, as the animation is very slow. Make the tooltips disappear when the mouse moves away. - Colour-blind friendly colours for input/output nodes
But yeah, love the idea, and excited for the possibility of more hand crafted levels. e.g. ones where you no longer have simple gates like addition, so have to get creative with multiplication and division. Thanks!
weine
2018-08-16 22:23
Cool idea and impressive how hard the puzzles become when you keep running out of space (and time). I found the controls a bit annoying, but I think the previous commenters have already covered most of my thoughts of that. This game has good potential!
A great puzzle game for the theme. Math is always a magic element in games. Great Work!
empish
2018-08-19 00:45
I love the puzzle mechanics, but had some difficulty figuring out the controls. I never did get anything to rotate... A tutorial would be a nice way to address this. Graphics are nice and clean, and I enjoyed playing around with it. I wasn't able to get a feel for metrics of how well I did when I solved a puzzle though. It tells me how many cells I didn't use but is leaving ones unused good or bad?
All in all the concept is very clever and engaging and with a bit more time to polish controls and make more puzzles, this could be a great thing.
Nice game with interesting mechanics! The only thing missing for me is the tutorial, but other than that the game is great! Keep up the good work! :smiley:
Wow this is a good puzzle game!
maksime
2018-08-20 20:16
Nice little game you got there !
As a lot of people stated, the entering/exiting wiring mode is kinda awkward to use, you should always be able to draw the wires. It would avoid a lot of the frustration induced by this mechanic.
The core gameplay is very well suited for the theme and quite interesting and I played quite a bit even thgough I really really suck at this kind of game... xD
As others stated, the bug on the tooltips ruins a bit of the game as I didn't know what to do when I got the "Replicate" gate but the game kept telling me it was a "Add gate".
If you address these issues and add more levels to it, it would do a perfect mobile game for people who like torture their brain when playing :smile:
Keep up the good work, I'll check the future updates for sure !
I enjoyed the concept! I found the controls a bit difficult, but I'm playing with a trackpad so that's really on me.
Great art style and sound. Good job. I like the mechanics as well. Keep it up!
Please do check my game maybe you’ll like it and leave some feedback.
papaver
2018-09-02 19:27
Nice game! I enjoyed the concept, the looks and the puzzles. I was not a fan of the timer in the normal levels, especially in level 5 I was annoyed, because I wanted to keep puzzling. It seemed that the hover-over information of the gates was not correct (at least in the web build). I didn't like that I had to click the 'Wire mode' every time (especially when I misclicked something). Also after I put down a wire, I couldn't click the gates on the left immediately which confused me several times.
I think the game has a lot of potential, it just needs some small adjustments. :smile:
You've got a lot of great feedback already, so I won't repeat it. Really enjoyed the concept and I hope you're able to tweak some of the mechanics and implementation and REALLY make it shine.
Have a great LD!
suve
2018-09-02 19:51
Fun little puzzle game. The controls are a bit clunky, but once you get past that, it's very enjoyable. It's a shame there's no sound. I think it'd be nice to have little numbers flowing down the wires to give a better view of what's going on (though on the other hand, that would reduce the challenge).
zeu31
2018-09-03 02:58
Very interesting mechanics, I think that it fits very well with the theme. The UI is a little confusing at first. And I don't like timer in puzzles. Still, good game! =]