Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → Diacombs
By aeveis
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 83 | 4.00 | 32 | |
| Fun | 128 | 3.86 | 32 | |
| Innovation | 197 | 3.70 | 32 | |
| Theme | 776 | 2.90 | 32 | |
| Graphics | 82 | 4.17 | 33 | |
| Audio | 212 | 3.58 | 32 | |
| Humor | 395 | 2.59 | 24 | |
| Mood | 268 | 3.56 | 31 |
lovely! your effects and animations are always so nice. really nice sounds and music too, fits super well. Other than some minor bugs (undo weirdness mentioned on the page, and got myself stuck at the very end messing with several dozen dragons), this is a very nice puzzle game! fairly short but still got me scratching my head at some sections. great stuff!
Nice ani. like hopping. I love them puzzlers.
I loved the hallway section that was flooded with diacombs. Really great puzzle design! Nice work.
I was hooked and couldn't stopped until I won.
graphisms are very "moodesque", but I got a little confused because sometimes they flip automatically horizontally to fit their match. I thought at first that there was a difference between an object flipped and a not-flipped one.
Music is soft and fits well with the game, but it ends up being annoying.
The enigma on the fourth screen, with all the simple diacombs is very well-balanced. It looks scary and full of combinations. Then you understand little by little how it is structured.
Every time I changed screen I thought there would be a way of cheating, by bringing diacombs to the new screen. But every time, it revealed impossible, or just useless.
Let's call this puzzle type "soko-merge" !
cute game, dig the atmosphere. Also like that there's more of adventure feel than your average sokoban game
Love the concept and the visuals. It's very dark but with lots of tones so it's still colorful. Plus you really captured the iridescence with just a few pixels, especially in all the different diamond shapes. Makes it really addictive to just push things around.
I got stumped by the puzzle with the four diacombs, but I loved everything up until that point! Cute music, gorgeous pixel art - especially with those particles; very juicy! - and it all just clicked straight from the get-go. Great stuff!
This felt really polished. Art style was cute, and loved the little touches around the character borders and movement trails. The audio was a good fit too. The puzzles felt like they had a nice progression. Well done!
@torcado thanks! I kind of got more out of the mechanic than I had expected so I may do some more exploration with it.
@mdotedot thanks! The animation on the player is just 3 frames, but added some scale to the regular sprites add a lot.
@100th-coin Thanks!
@recher oh yeah, I wanted a bit more variation, but the outline still needs to match haha. Perhaps something to think about for later.
@zzox Thanks! Yeah, wanted to get a bit of exploration-y feely in there
@foolmoron Thanks! I was looking at diatoms (the -tom part means split, so they are called daicombs (combine)) for visual inspiration.
@john-gabriel if you want to take a peek ahead, "]" will open doors :) thanks!
@quoclon Thanks!
I really loved the game. The cute art style and music are so lovely^^
This was a really cool twist on the sokoban genre! I think my favorite challenge was the part where you had to make 4 stationary diacombs in the narrow hallway (of width 2) - maneuvering the pieces around to avoid getting stuck was a lot of fun to think about. The final challenge with the "angry" diacombs was also pretty creative.
I didn't read carefully at first and lost a couple minutes of progress because I thought R would restart a screen instead of the whole game. I see you did that because it made for the neat aha moment of (ROT13'd for spoilers) oevatvat va qvngbzf sebz bgure fperraf, so I think it was worth it. However, it'd have been nice to be able to press Z to undo a restart, since it was a little stressful knowing I could restart the whole game with a single button press.
Also, like @recher above I was confused by the outline reflections at first, but the gameplay is pretty intuitive so it wasn't for too long.
The game did end sorta abruptly right after you introduced a new mechanic (the bell), but I understand that there's only so much you can do in 48 hours - I'd be interested to see what other sorts of levels could be made!
Nice job overall, and thanks for the puzzles!
fun, but i had trouble getting things off the walls if i made a mistake
This was quite a fun idea! The graphics are adorable and shiny. Music wasn't bad, but got a bit repetitive after a while. I couldn't for the life of me figure out this screen, it seems like the second half of the section is heavily dependent on doing the first half perfectly but I'm always like 1 piece away from solving it. chrome_vTyZdqrqnn.png
Very nice little puzzler! Well done. If I have one complaint it's that it would be nice to be able to undo in larger increments (e.g. go back to when I entered the screen) since I'm bad at this kind of game and needed to undo a lot. :D Great work, really enjoyed this. :)
Graphics and sounds are amazing!, though like @connorses above I got stuck in the same section and it gets quite tedious to undo that much work. It would be good to have a reset to the current stage, as opposed to resetting the game.
@qzqxq thanks! I have a post compo version where R resets the rooms instead :) it is not online yet though haha. I also have some more ideas I'd like to explore with the mechanics.
@nikolaj Thanks! You might have to press z several times if you bonked against the wall a lot (this is fixed in an not online post compo version).
@connorses Yeah, I think I made that puzzle a bit too long. the solution here is at the beginning you need to push one diacomb up so you can use it later and not fill the star diacombs until after you push most things in since you end up making a bunch of them anyway. Also, you can press ']' if you want to skip ahead just to see :).
@otresnjak thanks, yeah, I have added an room undo for an not yet online post compo version, and have it so bonks don't detect as undos, but I also changed around some puzzles, so that version may appear at some point later. you can press ']' to open doors if you want to skip ahead just to see.
@silkypantsdan Thanks! Yeah that was the next feature I was going to work on (have worked on now) for the compo haha. you can press ']' to open doors if you want to skip ahead.
I noticed your cheat “]” and looked ahead and being able to move multiple Diacombs is great. And calming down the sleeping ones is also great. ;w;
@aeveis - thanks for the tip for that puzzle! Now I managed to finish it :D
very polished little game you have! really enjoyed the overall art and vibe with the very well fitting music. simple mechanics but it makes for an addicting puzzle game. If i had one gripe, its a little hard to see what type of block you need if something is over the outline. maybe itd help to make it easier to tell what number block you need but other than that, a very fun puzzle game
@fyslexicduck thanks! I agree it's a bit hard to see. I added red dots in the corners that tell you the right level you're supposed to hit, but it is pretty subtle and still not sure what would be a good solution for that. Maybe just making that more obvious. Thanks!
So cool! I like the art style, the mechanics and sound. I confess I had a really hard time even with the early puzzles — but that's mostly because I'm terrible at puzzle games :sweat_smile: Very impressive, especially for a compo entry, congratulations!
@pijamar thanks! I did end up ramping up pretty quickly on the difficulty of the puzzles sort of by accident, so that may give me a good excuse to make more puzzles leading up to the harder ones in a post compo. If you want to see some of the further mechanics, you can use ']' to open doors to skip ahead. Thanks for playing!
Diacombs are so fun to play with! It's very polished and really fun experience in general. In fact, I don't actually have much to say other than a small few things.
However you did place a lot of frustrations in the end: * The long corridor puzzle with the whole corridor with all the diacombs. I think we both are aware that's too long to finish and will definitely confuse the player if not eased in, especially with the concept of taking out a diacomb out that whole set. * I can't help but feel there should be a 2-diacomb and 3-diacomb versions of the Diabos. It's like being given a head banger of a puzzle immediately to another head banger of a puzzle. * I am actually sad I can't properly place this in full screen since it just hugs the top-left corner without rescaling. * Oh and uh... hold rewind please. That would be great. I can't really tap rewind for like, 20 moves in a row.
Either way, it's a really fun and visually appealing remix of Sokoban and I would definitely love to see this finished post jam!
@fiakaiera thanks for the feedback. 1. Yep, I saw that after testing with a friend, but the compo was done haha 2. 2-3 level Diabos are a good idea! I think my first thought would be that they would be very much like the pattern matchers, just that there are four of them surrounding a thing. I might have been thinking that they might move too, so I'll have to think about that. 2-3 level diabos would definitely open up another set of puzzles that probably have more open ended solutions (2/4 and 3/4 possible places, so some leeway). something good to think about. 3. haha I noticed this too, I forget to set rescaleable to true in the xml build file. I would probably just update it but I already changed some level stuff (perhaps good note to actually use version control even if solo project) :sweat_smile: 4. I post added a reset that just undos the current room you're at, but that's a good idea too.
Its a nice puzzle game with nice audio and graphics.
i loved this game!!!, it makes you think really, i had to press many times z to undo eveything
I'm always a fan of your cute and polished artworks, but this time you provide a very nice puzzle, wich I played much more time long that I planed to do - well, the R thing not helped me on that, but I would not have continue after the first time if it was not worth to be redone… :smile: Good job!
Wow this is really good! In 48 hours too, I have no idea how you can pull off this much polish. The game worked perfectly, all the controls felt responsive and gave great feedback. I honestly have nothing to criticize, very well done!
Great game! Loved the art and the idea, it's a really nice implementation. Congrats!
Wow, it took me hours, but I finally figured out the section @connorses pointed out. Eek, despite all the hint slots in there, that section begs for perfection.
I really like all the puzzle mechanics presented in this game, from the tried-and-true Sokoban formula to Pikmin-esque command-'em-all movement. I did find the latter mechanic to be rather confusing at the very last puzzle, given that the characters, after bumping into a wall, sticks for one turn. Also, fantastic touch on requiring the player to rely on pieces from other sections of the screen, and even a full screen apart! It really helps make each level feel connected, as well as testing your own memory.
My biggest complaint (other than the hard parts of the puzzles; 'tis the nature of puzzle games) actually has more to do with the undo feature. There are turns I wish the undo system didn't record, such as pushing a non-movable object. Most movements where I'm not pushing something, I also wish wasn't recorded, either. This would have made the harder puzzles more tolerable to deal with, given it would have taken less input to get back to where I wanted to be.
I also thought that while the sound effects design is quite excellent (realistic, timed well, and informative), the music felt really dull. Even if it's a thinking-game, I think it could have used a few more instruments and a longer composition to lighten up the mood, especially if the player got stuck.
Had a lot of fun, great job!