FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD47 → While we are here - stuck in a loop

While we are here - stuck in a loop

By seskon

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall1543.7249
Fun2113.5149
Innovation194.2449
Theme264.3449
Graphics5492.6649
Audio1
Humor1303.2248
Mood3273.1047

Comments

gilad-bar-ilan 2020-10-05 06:28

Great idea! and a really nice game!

stormcat 2020-10-05 06:54

Very cool concept! The coding system was very cool, albiet a little hard to understand at first, but it worked well and was well polished. The only thing I'd recommend is some kind of tooltip/tutorial on the different code blocks. Good job

dunderroffe 2020-10-05 06:54

Great Idea. Well executed. I had to force my self to stop playing to get back to work! One nitpick would be that it is quite annoying to have to count the number of "-" and "|". At least I couldn't find a way to do it otherwise (such as highlighting it or such) could make the game leaner. Otherwise great work

meek-bits 2020-10-05 07:34

Nice idea. It was fun to play it. It took me a while to understand it at the beginning so I agree a better introduction would ease that. Also, it might be helpful to show what uneditable lines produce.

sirred 2020-10-05 07:48

Great game that I can relate to all too well. Only issue was that some of the puzzles were tedious because of counting characters.

james-joubert 2020-10-05 08:37

As a software developer, I loved this game!

LoopCode.PNG

THE GOOD: - Theme executed perfectly - Puzzles are really good - I couldn't help but finish, as I had so much fun - Sound effects are nice

THE BAD: - I didn't know that REPEATS will execute commented code (Figured it out by accident after thinking some levels had a bug) - Levels aren't ordered from east to difficult. - Would've loved some cool sci-fi music - Took a while to figure out that I had to match the output with the [While != ]

evogengames 2020-10-05 09:57

I thought about the code loop immediately with this theme, but struggled to come up with an interesting gamemechanic. You really did a great job on that!

I think the game was really FUN except the part where you had to count the number of '-' or '|'. That was really frustrating, but I see no easy way to fix that while keeping the puzzly attitude.

Great work though and thank you for the game!

zimny11 2020-10-05 12:42

5 out of 5 for me! And and agree only "not so fun" part of the game is to counting "-" and "|", but otherwise it's really amazing!

seskon 2020-10-05 13:29

@gilad-bar-ilan Thanks!

@stormcat thank you for your feedback :)

yes thats a good idea :), first i started out to give some help over the prints but i thought that would be too easy

@dunderroffe thank you, hope you made it in time :D

yeah i wanted to change that too, but didnt get a good idea at that time. Maybe it would have been better if i had different ascii art but it took me already a bit to get the current one to look good, so I didnt want to do it all over.

@meek-bits thanks :) i dont really understand what you mean, the output of these lines are at the bottom. Do you mean that it should be more obvious?

@sirred thank you

@james-joubert Thanks for the detailed feedback. Im very happy that you have completed my game!

yeah I once had a comment pointing out that commented stuff will be repeated but i guess i took it out, next game I will have a better instruction :)

I had some bugs while getting the sound to work so i was happy that the game still worked at the end. So I didnt want to add extra music to it because my nerves very already at the limit.

@evogengames Thank you :)

meek-bits 2020-10-05 14:57

@seskon

At the bottom there's animation of the program output as being produced. What I had in mind is showing what uninteractive lines will produce, something like this:

output.png

mutuware 2020-10-05 20:10

Took a whilte to figure out what to do, but once I got the hang of it some nice puzzles.

neowedge 2020-10-05 20:15

Game is very original and funny, great entry! :)

bootak 2020-10-05 21:11

Ah yes, the coding game! I had similar idea of some kind of "code review simulator", but couldn't think of how to make this. Your implementation of this idea seems to be pertty nice. It's easy to "code", it's cool how many different tasks you could make for simple actions like "comment, move up, move down, change symbol, change loop count". I agree with @james-joubert, levels should be more difficult towards the end. Also, some tasks are a bit tedious, when you have to count 30 symbols to locate the bug. Well, just as in real programming, I guess :)

fussenkuh 2020-10-05 21:28

Fun concept and well implemented! I, too, immediately thought about creating something related to coding loops, but do to time constraints, my compo entry is more of a code-related joke than an actual game. My hat's off to you for coming up with something code-related that was enjoyable to play! Great work!

kirbloid 2020-10-05 22:02

Very creative, immediately jumps out with its innovation and take on the theme, and plays up well to people who appreciate programming games, especially me.

ian-mcd 2020-10-05 23:37

Really like the concept, tho not a huge fan of counting characters. Verrrrryy cool idea tho

candlesan 2020-10-06 05:32

That was realy fun! I didn't like counting characters and thought I would stop after the 5th or 6th puzzle when I was getting frustrated with the character counting, but then I realized what was happening and I think the completion ASCII art was absolutely brilliant! Once I knew I was actually completing the puzzle it greatly magnified my enjoyment and I played to the end. Very sneaky and a lot of clever artistry there.

caeonosphere 2020-10-06 12:48

I played through the first ten or so! A great starting point, I agree with the above commenter that counting characters isn't all that fun. You could probably get many of the same ideas and mechanics across with shorter strings.

A fun idea, all in all. Reminds me of this [insanely obscure and interesting Japanese indie game](http://abagames.sakura.ne.jp/16/consomaton/) that I haven't thought about in years!

thegamerasd 2020-10-06 13:27

Pretty fun! The puzzles were engaging and challenging.

nick-rafalski 2020-10-06 13:56

Awesome execution of a code-related interpretation of the theme. I've played a couple now, and this one is the most fun. I also didn't like having to count (and then re-count!) some of the longer sequences of characters, but it didn't hurt too much. Great job!

kirthos 2020-10-06 15:24

I really loved this game. Completed all the levels, some took me a bit of time to complete. Nice work!

endurion 2020-10-06 15:31

Wow, a great game! First I was confused, it'd need a bit of instructions up front. Once down I solved all but two stages. You have to think of something regarding the counting. Counting by mouse is irritating ;)

Well done!

swimdoctor 2020-10-06 22:20

Really liked the concept!! Counting characters got a bit repetitive at times, but overall, the game felt great

indiedevdan 2020-10-06 22:23

Great idea for a loop game, and nice that there are actual sounds!

yword 2020-10-07 14:16

Very clever and interesting gameplay! Took some time to figure it out... ^_^

ale 2020-10-07 16:33

Nice! I also had an idea to do a programming puzzle :)

At first I was super confused because the only feedback you get for solving a puzzle is a sound effect and the playback animation stopping, both of which are easy to miss unless you know to look for them. Once I got it though, I had fun uncovering *part* the pumpkin. Couldn't solve some of them... although in my defense, this game is a lot harder than actual programming :sweat_smile:

Great submission, and great use of the theme!

glaciereclipse 2020-10-07 17:10

Incredibly creative idea, I agree with all the other comments, counting the characters was really annoying and took significantly more time than solving the actual puzzle. The game kinda just throws you straight to the water with no explanation, took me a while to figure out what to actually do. Overall this is the kinda of games I expect to see from zachtronics which I would buy and spend a lot of hours on, Great work!

maychant 2020-10-08 00:21

So... I can't see the plain text. I did like five levels without seeing them but I can't do it anymore. Any idea why? cantsee.PNG

monkosum 2020-10-08 07:54

I think commenting and moving requires too much precision. A good way to fix it would be to let the player select a line, and then do stuff with it using the keyboard. Other than that, the game is genius. I think it's simple enough for not-programmers to understand, but if you want to make a post jam version, it seems like a solid foundation. The audio was satisfying, the visuals, while not being that good IMO, fit really well in this game, and it fits the theme in a unique way.

seskon 2020-10-08 09:16

@caeonosphere thanks, thats a cool game, thank you for pointing it out :)

@maychant that is strange, maybe unity messed up the layers of the UI because underneath is a black panel, but not sure, have you tried to reload the game? That should be the same problem @meek-bits pointed out. Hope not everybody had that problem... Just getting back into Unity after a while so im kind of a noob regarding UI.

@monkosum Thanks for your feedback! Yeah my initial idea was a drag and drop system but due to time constraints i went the save way but your idea is also a good idea, maybe if I make it generally more like a text editor. Can you point out what you didnt like about the visuals?

sinusquell 2020-10-08 10:20

while it's not the most unique concept, it fits the theme perfectly. Also, I loved the little easter egg at the end :)

blubberquark 2020-10-08 10:43

It's a nice idea, but it's held back a bit by the up-and-down clicking. I really wanted the UI to be drag-n-drop, or all keyboard-based (up, down, tab). It's a lot like human resource machine. I like how you differentiate it by giving me the lines to rearrange, makes it less zachtronics sandbox and more like a combinatorial puzzle.

caeonosphere 2020-10-08 13:52

@seskon It's not that I don't like the visuals, it's more that the desired outputs look something like

=================OOOO------------------------------

and you have to count all the equals signs and hyphens manually before going about solving the puzzle. Is it necessary for the design of the puzzles, especially the early ones, for the outputs to be so long?

spotline 2020-10-08 14:10

Nice job ! The fake programmation context is pretty cool and well laid out. Also I like the way the core idea is presented, with the instructions shuffled with the gameplay elements, with some humor on top of it. However I hoped there would be more gameplay elements for this number of levels, it got a bit tedious pretty quickly (and indeed the drag & drop would have been nice). Final image is a nice touch !

seskon 2020-10-08 20:39

sry that question wasnt directed to you, your point is totally correnct, there should not be any need for counting, the question was for @monkosum, i copied your name into the wrong paragraph, i corrected it now

seskon 2020-10-08 20:46

@spotline thanks for the feedback, yeah it was also very tedious to think of all these combinations with the same puzzle elements, a few more would have definitely helped or fewer levels, but i did the art first and the puzzle elements/levels on the fly. So there should have been more planning i guess.

monkosum 2020-10-08 21:14

@seskon Well, there are a lot of tricks to use to make your game look cleaner, like background colors and actual UI stuff, that you can't really display in a console window. You kinda dodged that problem by using those tricks to some extend, but I think it still looks a bit cluttered. Also, and I believe that's mostly on me, console windows somehow feel almost claustrophobic. But as I said, I think it fits the game really well, and it's also not as bad as it might've sounded earlier.

eugenik 2020-10-09 01:56

MOOOOOD 5 stars :)

island-jam-2-group-3 2020-10-09 20:49

Cool entry!, although it took me a while to figure what I had to do and what were the "controls" ^^U

frigow 2020-10-10 22:52

I like programming games, so that's just right my alley, and I have to say, this one is really fun! :D

pandakipu 2020-10-11 18:56

Nice entry, very fun game, it's a good idea for an halloween special :D

sunblast 2020-10-14 13:50

A little confusing at first but great concept!

justcamh 2020-10-25 14:54

Hey, I played your game on stream! And as a matter of fact, it was recommended by the audience, which is something to be very proud of! Here's the vod if you'd like to see what happened; https://www.twitch.tv/videos/781363405