FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD48 → Deep Seeker

Deep Seeker

By daf

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall17392.8620
Fun18512.3320
Innovation1194.0520
Theme18652.3320
Graphics14253.1320
Audio10852.9119
Humor1
Mood15332.9420

Comments

daf 2021-04-26 15:51

A game about programming? Maybe not the best idea for balancing and simplicity sake, but here I am trying to make the last stretch and have it working with not-too-easy and not-impossible levels.

More messy than I expected starting this (started for the Comp and probably will be very rough for the Jam), but I had fun making it:

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slingshot 2021-04-27 11:15

This was hard to understand but an interesting implementation of a visual BrainFuck.

leorid 2021-04-27 11:20

Ok I played around some time but I have absolutely no idea what I should do. There are Icons, I can't reset the scene, the tutorial is too long to remember anything from it, the cursor doesn't seem to move to "process" any of my inputs. Won't give a rating until you tell me how this is supposed to work.

ilyas-aqil 2021-04-27 11:37

Same as a lot of commenters here, I'm struggling to understand exactly how to play the game. Not sure what I'm supposed to do with "chiral compounds". I think you could improve this by having a guide to what all the programming bits do, as well as maybe some kind of indication about how the cells work and when they are destroyed/alive?

This is a potentially very interesting game unfortunately held back by poor graphic design and bad theming

darkshadow 2021-04-27 11:43

Intriquing, what's the difference between <> and [] ?

daf 2021-04-27 11:49

Thanks for the infomrations, I'll make a short video explaining a bit for who is interested, in general the HTML version (Preferred) has also some instructions (that might be confusing due to the UI)

exofrenon 2021-04-27 11:50

I like the main idea of the game, it is quite fresh and innovative, but it is very difficult to understand what you have to do. It gets complicated right from the moment you boot the game and there is no proper guidance to teach you how to play it step-by-step other than a huge instruction text that is a little bit too technical. I spent quite some time reading the instructions but I couldn't make much out of it.

Props for the effort though, the graphics and the music are well done, they create a nice atmoshere, the UI is functional (but not very intuitive). For a solo project this is a big achievement. I only wish I could play it without spending so much time to understand it.

lumue 2021-04-27 11:57

It's great to see a fellow Godot user!

I love this idea. But I have to admit that I didn't quite understand how this game works; In your manual you throw a lot of terms at us and it was hard to distinguish what is what and which explanations are in game mechanics and which are less relevant background information. That made getting started pretty hard in the first place. In the end, I solved the first few levels by try and error but then gave up rather quickly because I didn't get what the restrictions actually mean and how the "[" and "]" bindings are supposed to work. Or is this all part of the puzzle? (Is this even supposed to be a puzzle? xD) I don't know - I'm not familiar with coding myself which could be part of the problem....

Anyway, I loved the idea and am generally a puzzle fan, but would have needed a more guided introduction and way clearer explanations (maybe with pictures, showing what is what).

Cheers :fish:

yuri-yakovlev 2021-04-27 12:29

Good idea. Good implementation for visualization of programming. The game could be more intuitive if it had step by step instructions for some levels.

itooh 2021-04-27 14:37

Phew, that's a tough one! As a lot of others, it took me a while to understand the rules. There's a lot of concept to ingest (bot/cell/blob/slot, "current value"/"blob value", etc…) explained only by text with not enough examples to identify them. The early levels don't really guide the player either, so it's easy to be intimidated and not to see what's going on at all! I didn't even realize I could use the keyboard to erase commands until a very late level (until then I reloaded the game each time I made a mistake).

Still, I slowly managed to figure it out, and eventually… got stuck on a level (the one where we "start the real work"). My guess is that it requires conditional loops to be solved, and this mechanic wasn't introduced at all. The documentation for the brackets is incomplete by the way (it looks like an erroneous copy-paste?), thankfully it also includes the Wikipedia page that helped me understand what it does. But even knowing that, I just couldn't find a solution. I guess there must be an astute and elegant one, but this is the kind of programming challenge I'm terrible at! ^^'

That being said, I must recognize that this game is incredibly ambitious! A _puzzle programming game_, during a jam, based on _BrainFuck_!? I'm impressed. I say, this is one of the rare games that doesn't take "deeper and deeper" only as an esthetic! It really makes you dive in the complexity of recursive programming and managing multiple layers. It's a hard game, but ironically that's what's making it fitting. Plus the animations on the cells and blob are really neat!

PS: I didn't know Godot 3.3 improved the audio on the web games. That's great! I can make web musical games again!

daf 2021-04-27 21:57

Now I finally understand @darkshadow comment, I fixed the copy-paste error (I hope it is not considered cheating since the game is the same), I wanted to make a video tutorial or something, but I feel like it would spoil some of the game, the UI position of stuff with images might be good though

eugenik 2021-04-28 13:01

Nice job !.

vixenmink 2021-05-06 02:33

I really am having difficulty understanding this one. I'll pin this one so I can come back to it again another day

tyrannas 2021-05-06 19:09

I'm sorry I really tried but I must be a bit dumb, I can't figure how this work and how to complete stage 2! What are the blobs usage ? You describe the blobs and their numerical values but you don't describe how to use them? Not rating yet I want to play it in depth first, but this looks really promising!