FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD45 → Geary Grinder

Geary Grinder

By abregado, wheybags and samuel-hollywood-summers

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall2603.7638
Fun2443.6638
Innovation1493.8138
Theme9562.7137
Graphics5103.5938
Audio2773.5438
Humor7782.2224
Mood4953.4034

Comments

buoygames 2019-10-07 21:31

Great job, very clean and functional.

nocity 2019-10-07 21:35

Well done! Consistent, understandable mechanics and a nice soundtrack.

move127 2019-10-08 00:56

I love puzzle games like this. The controls for placing and editing the gears were clear enough and worked as expected. The music and visual design were both good.

It would be nice to give a little explanation for how gears work for those of us who are less mechanically savvy, but it is not too difficult to figure out by playing around with the options you provide.

jake-marks 2019-10-08 02:17

I am stuck on level 2. How do I get 20 speed from the starting gear?

nisovin 2019-10-08 02:22

Very excellent puzzle game. Looks clean, works well. I admit, I'm not very good at it, it took be forever to figure stuff out.

aevek 2019-10-08 02:40

Really enjoyed this, the 4th level felt like a strange place to end though since it had just introduced a new concept. Really enjoyed puzzling out of how to adapt my old solutions to be able to fit (literally) the new needs. My only real complaint is the up/down controls felt pretty clunky. Great little puzzle game!

wheybags 2019-10-08 07:34

@aevek > the 4th level felt like a strange place to end

Yup, we wanted to add more levels, but ran out of time :(

> the up/down controls felt pretty clunky

Yes, we wanted to have the camera zoom up when you finished a level, but forcing you to do it makes sure you understand you can move back down again. You could actually move with the arrow keys too. A good addition would have been scroll wheel to move, perhaps

mcdev 2019-10-08 09:27

Fun game, it took me a while to understand how to connect gears without belts. I managed to complete Level 3 but then I broke Level 2.

codeforjoycaro 2019-10-08 10:21

Really nice - although I am not patient enough too fully appreciate puzzle games. The music is pleasant.

alphaden 2019-10-08 17:08

The blueprint style gameplay looks and feels great. But as @codeforjoycaro mentioned the game is slow pased and it is difficult to sit throught the full puzzle.

sillyman987 2019-10-08 20:02

Love puzzles like this! Great game!

welliton 2019-10-09 05:34

This game has an awesome concept. I tooked some time trying to learn the basics and I still dont know how to up speed to 20 :( But its definetly a great game! Good job!

jake-marks 2019-10-09 08:40

Man, I feel dumb. Here is a video of me finding out just how dumb I am while enjoying the music in this game!

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/492122688

upsitesdown 2019-10-09 14:19

I kinda did not understand lvl 2, maybe I'm stupid as well. love the concept and nice music :)

abregado 2019-10-10 11:52

Level 2 requires that you use the Splitter machine (two actually). The trick is to speed up a gear, then Split it (making it two slower gears). Ive also added some more hints, because understanding gear ratios is not exactly every day common sense.

ltven0mi 2019-10-11 10:05

Cool concept. First time I've enjoyed grinding my gears haha. I like that it's set on blueprints. Would be cool if you could connect multiple gears to a single gear. Also it seems a bit odd to me that the splitter divides the speed of the input gear between the two output gears but that's probably just me. None the less though I really enjoyed the game. Great job!

joeshanahan 2019-10-11 11:36

I wasn't able to connect more that one gear to a gear, and wasn't able to connect a belt to a gear that was connected to another gear. Was this by design? It felt like I should've been able to do that.

It would also be nice to see how fast gears are spinning maybe when hovering over? A preview of the speed any newly connected gears would be would also be nice so that you don't have to build it, connect it, see if it's the right speed, delete it, repeat.

This is a really cool idea, and the music and presentation is great. It just feels like it won't let me to the things I need to do to solve the level. Oh and it hard-crashed before I could beat level 2.

jan5366x 2019-10-11 15:50

He nice game so far :D ... ( I found you via the factorio friday fact :smile: )

2019-10-11 17:41

I really, really liked this. If you guys decide to continue this, I'd happily buy it.

Some notes from me: * It'd be nice to be able to connect more than 1/2 gears to a gear. * Rotating splitters would save a lot of headache creating chains of 2-size gears to move the outputs. * Belts should be able to cross each other. * You should be able to connect the goal gears to other gears and not just belts.

Very, very nice.

drury 2019-10-11 19:30

Damn, you've done LDjam the one single time I didn't participate.

Very neat game. I liked the twist on level 3, and the game ended at about the same time as I realized I can daisy-chain belted 2x2 gears to cheese it :D

2019-10-11 19:53

Factorio junkie here :smile: :wave: Took me a little time to understand that a set of directly connected gears only had one input and one output when it comes to connecting belts. Other than that, rotating splitters would be nice indeed :stuck_out_tongue: Even though it's short, I enjoyed the puzzle, thank you very much for creating this game! :smile:

archimagus 2019-10-11 23:04

Fun game, the mechanics are pretty clunky though. It was really hard to know when a gear would attach, or when a belt was or wasn't allowed to be connected or to go through another. After I got level 3 spinning the game just closed. I don't now if that's by design or if it crashed. I had to disconnect level 2, to get it going, maybe could have went back and got all 3 going but with the "crash" not going to try again.

Still cool game. Also, I'm enjoying 0.17

2019-10-12 11:45

Thought the last level was asking for 75 RPM rather than 7.5, was quite the challenge let me tell you.

wheybags 2019-10-12 13:01

@archimagus The game was definitely not supposed to just close :( From what I can tell, it's an internal engine crash that happens every now and again inside love2d, if it was our code crashing it should show an error.

@joeshanahan >It would also be nice to see how fast gears are spinning maybe when hovering over?

Did you try doing that? Because it already does :p

markus 2019-10-12 14:36

Nice Puzzle Game! The moment i understood how to solve level 3 was really good - i really liked that idea! The music was a bit too creepy for my taste and I would have loved to have a bit more space, espacially in the earlier levels (it's definetly ok to have space as a constraint in level 4, but in level 2 i was still figuring out the mechanics) It also took me a while to understand that belts cannot cross. Highlighting pieces that prevent the placement of new pieces could make this more clear.

wheybags 2019-10-12 14:52

> Highlighting pieces that prevent the placement of new pieces could make this more clear.

@markus That's a really good idea!

2019-10-12 16:19

I just completed the game for a second time, this time using only the first driven gear, it was a bit of a fudge. the splitter thing is weird, I would just connect 2 gears to one, and that is my (very configurable) splitter. All with all, well done, had fun! On the 3rd playthrough I tried to get as fast a speed as possible, 2.7235902753284*10^15, (I don’t know what unit, but if speed 5 equals 1.2 rpm, this would be deadly. Taking a gear of 1 cm radius, this is like 20000 times the speed of light.)

2019-10-13 11:36

Cool game, sadly it crashed at level 3 and didn't save the game :(

Error

libs/HC/polygon.lua:145: Need at least 3 non collinear points to build polygon (got 0)

Traceback

[C]: in function 'assert' libs/HC/polygon.lua:145: in function 'construct' libs/HC/class.lua:77: in function 'instance' libs/HC/shapes.lua:438: in function 'newPolygonShape' libs/HC/init.lua:86: in function 'rectangle' collisions.lua:86: in function 'add_belt_to_collider' collisions.lua:136: in function 'collide_belt_with_state' gear_placement.lua:153: in function 'valid_belt_preview_placement' gear_placement.lua:258: in function 'draw_belt_tool_overlay' gear_placement.lua:401: in function 'draw' main.lua:106: in function 'draw' [C]: in function 'xpcall'

rialgar 2019-10-15 19:46

I had a lot of fun with this. The ambient noises/music really rounds it all out. I think a killer feature would be moving fears/splitters without deleting and re-creating them. See me trying to calculate fractions in my head here: https://youtu.be/-CEIl-txtyI

kajko 2019-10-18 02:34

Mmm, physics.

2019-10-19 00:19

Was fun, though the only real challenge was figuring out game mechanics.

PS, I had just filled the playable area (after unlocking it all) with increasingly fast gears (to see how fast I could make them go, of course) and was placing a gear in the last little edge of space at the top when I guess I broke the game (same error as the person above me). Oh well.

lakrits 2019-11-14 20:54

A wee bit late in trying this but I liked it. Soothing. Wish there was a fullscreen option. Also expected it to be possible to attach more than one gear to a parent, maybe intentional game mechanic though.

Moving the camera view up/down with the scroll wheel would have been a small convenience (as well as auto-moving up when clicking the next level button). Would maybe have been neat if the levels were connected together, so later gears would move just from the one at the very beginning.

Edit: Spoke too soon, after finishing level 2, then I scrolled up and noticed that level 3 didn't have an input gear of its own. Well played! ;) Almost feels like cheating that you can just stack several small gears after each other to get to the other side of a belt (since you can't cross two belts).