Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD42 → Dot Connector
By spots1000
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 2 | |||
| Fun | 2 | |||
| Innovation | 2 | |||
| Theme | 2 |
Dot Connector is an abstract puzzle game in the vein of Two Dots, Chat Noir (http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/chatnoir/chatnoir.html), Lights Out, etc. Here, the goal is to draw paths connecting selected dots. Because the dots are selected (seemingly) at random by the game, scoring feels arbitrary. I'd also like to see a click-and-drag style interface. On the plus side, the concept is cool and could be something great with a little clever tweaking,
Reminds me of "dots and boxes", or that one game where one player attempts to build a chain from one end of the grid to another, and the other player attempts to prevent that by building "walls". The build files archive has issues, with both the Data and Mono folders actually being inside _empty_ Data and Mono folders, which require manual replacement to work. The game also opens in what seems to be a fixed-resolution window, which doesn't scale up on a 4K display. The game itself is simple enough. You have to build a "chain" between a pair of dots, but you can mark as many extraneous dots as you like. All marked dots disappear, and you get one point. Obviously, shorter chains are better, as you don't get any benefits for making a chain longer than necessary. Cutting through the middle means shooting yourself in the foot, as dot pairs appear to be chosen arbitrarily and a required chain may quite easily be impossible to build. In one of my goes, I ended up with two dots only (as a result of building chains far longer than the theoretical minimum, in order to "kill" as many dots as possible), and I only got the "ending" dot (the green one) of the pair. In other words, the final chain was impossible to start by virtue of a bug. With all this in mind, I can say that the idea is interesting and simplistic (maybe by virtue of being simplistic), but the execution could probably be improved in a lot of ways.
I agree with prevision guy. Anyway great first entry!