guine 2021-10-04 04:07
Nice work!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD49 → Reactor
By birdwards
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 103 | 3.85 | 30 | |
| Fun | 165 | 3.64 | 30 | |
| Innovation | 104 | 3.83 | 30 | |
| Theme | 116 | 4.00 | 30 | |
| Graphics | 195 | 3.64 | 30 | |
| Audio | 34 | 3.98 | 30 | |
| Mood | 82 | 3.74 | 29 |
Nice work!
Alot of fun and the physics feel so well done. This game is very high quality for a game jam game you should be really proud. Downside is that the game felt very hard to control making it hard to succeed at. Overall I like it!
Linux version worked great! Surprising addictive. Not sure what triggers the end-game, well, except running out of atoms. Did several runs and had good time! Thanks! Screenshot from 2021-10-08 23-53-35.png
Super creative game! I like how there are two different gameplay "modes" for growing and shrinking, and each feels risky and rewarding in its own way. The controls were a bit hard to get used to, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. Also, it's a nice touch that the shapes and colors of the elements add up to their compounds/combined elements. Very cool overall! And nice soundtrack :)
Unfortunately we cannot rate this time since we didn't get the chance to participate this time around, but it was really fun to play it on stream! Thank you for submitting! Because I absolutely love puzzle and match-esquee games, I kept up playing this well after we finished recording.
Definitely was a bit try-hard but I wanted to have my current highscore recorded for the thread to see. :pray:
**Thanks a lot for making this game! :whale: **
Reactor Highscore
Cool little game! I enjoyed playing this with the relaxing music in the background!
The sfx/music was really pleasant and felt super satisfying. I love the atmosphere of the game and how soothing it feels. The UI is well done and overall it was a really satisfying / fun game to play. Awesome job!
Really cool game! The concept is novel, and the gameplay is well-done and bug-free. Incredibly high quality, especially given this is a compo game. The music is nice and soothing, as are the sound effects. Very well done!
The concept is cool, it's an interesting reinterpretation of puzzle bubble! It's fun to play and intuitive enough, good job!
Neat game! I appreciate how you put thought into the visual design of each atom so they would have a distinct color and interior design, makes the readability very good. I really like the idea of the gameplay but it is pretty frustrating to control due to the way angular momentum is implemented. I feel like the player should have more control over rotation, with a shorter acceleration time. The current rotation system make is pretty hard to intentionally place an atom anywhere, especially once you have a mega structure (which should be when the game is the most fun and hectic, but right now it's when you basically lose all control). Although you losing control as the structure spirals into chaos does fit the theme well (and that's on top of the very good use of the theme with atoms decaying).
Took some time to get use to (and remember) which hand did what. A nice game (but not as relaxing as the music would suggest)!
This was super cool and creative! Definitely took me a second to commit the different colors to memory so I could really grasp it but once I did it was pretty addicting :p I'd recommend simplifying it a bit though so it's not so much of a mental load, personally I don't think you lose too much from getting rid of a few of the levels but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it! Either way really neat entry and graphically pleasing.
The gameplay and the music are really relaxing. I like match-3 games, and this one distinguish itself from the rest. I was able to get only 68 points, and I'm not sure why the game ended, because I did not cross the red line and I still had atoms, but oh well. Great game, it was fun to play it.
@zimny11 Thanks for playing! I believe you encountered a bug that I only discovered after the jam. The algorithm that determines how large your cluster is when new atoms are added has a small, RNG-dependent chance of returning an incorrect value when the cluster is in certain shapes, making the game think you've crossed the red line when you haven't. I imagine you saw the camera zoom way out before it told you the game was over? That's the telltale sign of the bug. In either case, I've just figured out the fix, and will be adding it in a post-jam version.
@birdwards If I remember correctly, that was the case (with zooming out). I thought that was an added effect :)
The sound design is really good and the nature of the movement made for an interesting puzzle game! Well done!
This was a fun and simple game. The movement was quite challenging to get the hang of for myself but eventually I got into the flow of things. I found that for a good part of the game the splitting would take care of themselves. I don't know how you decided to choose what they split into but it might be good to make it have some context awareness if you decide to develop further. Speaking of that I liked the nature of the game and could see it as a game you play while waiting for the bus, something to get your brain working and being able to pickup and putdown quickly. It is quite fun!
Nice, super satisfying to make color combos :-) Liked the sounds !
At the beginning was hard to get if it was better to be a huge structure or a tiny 3 discs structure. ^^
Always amazed by people doing Compo.
I really liked the music, the visuals and the concept of the game. The music was very soothing and gave it a nice mood. I do think however the game needs to be balanced more. What I mean is for example the atoms decay very fast but also it is pretty hard to control your "core" this makes it so that to get the higher level atoms you need a lot of luck. I did kind of enjoy playing it but it felt off in that way. I also feel like the amount of atoms flying around, the size of the death ring, the speed of movement, ... are all things to tweak. With the tweaking I think you can go two ways either aim for a calming game or make it more high paced, I think both can work. Off course the fact that is unbalanced is to be expected in a jam , definitely for the compo. So overall I think it is a great entry that with a bit of finetuning can be a very fun game.
This is a great concept. Very chill.
There are some games on LDJam where I forget it's a Ludum entry and and start to see the game as a standard browser game-- this is absolutely one of those cases. It's a simple concept that works exactly as intended, and with very clear matching rules. I like the fact that you have to start to get a feel for which isotope circles expand and contract over time, and getting overwhelmed can happen a lot faster than you might have come to expect after accumulating enough points.
All in all, a solid entry where I have trouble really picking apart anything about the game. It's not a genre I typically play, but what you have is a solid arcade game that keeps the player engaged as the pace picks up.
This definitely feels like an easy postjam sell. Other than some visual flair and general presentation polish, it already feels like an IO game and just needs a little more work to be commercially viable-- the kind of work that a weekend would never account for.
Nice work!
Is this relaxing or stressful? Who knows, it's fun for sure :smile:
I really enjoyed the match 3 mechanics but I think I would need a lot of training to excel. My top score was ~230.
The controls are nice and reactive, maybe a bit too much rotation momentum conservation (if that makes sense). I was expecting my rotation to slow down by itself without requiring input on my side; but that may just be me.
The sound design is awesome as well, great entry!
Quite a lot of depth in this one! I did not encounter a physics-based match-3 game before. I like the fact that there are 2 lose conditions, I had a rollercoaster of emotions while my combination was too small and it was going to disappear and then when it grew bigger, nearly out of control the situation totally changed super fast.
The whole atmosphere was calm and relaxing even when gameplay got intense, and the beautiful sounds made connecting the atoms pleasant and enjoyable.
I noticed that particles keep the radial grid nicely and shift around flawlessly, without any physics/instability issues. Sometimes I couldn't get the particles to attach, but I wasn't sure if that's because of the rules of the game (certain particles don't attach) or just the physics magic.
It took me some time to realize I could move AND rotate with WSAD and arrow keys. I've read the "how to play" but somehow my brain did not register the possibility to move with arrow keys while focusing on all the other rules. On-screen key prompt on the first play would surely help, especially that I assumed that WSAD and arrow key usually do the same things in a lot of games.
Graphics were clean and readable, but if would be to nitpick, I would maybe suggest working on the color palette and graphics a bit - all other parts of the experience are already on high level. The 100% saturated colors combined with purple background don't harmonize very well - but that's my subjective opinion - nitpicking.
Solid entry, deep gameplay, fresh mechanics - nicely done :muscle:
I can appreciate this game trying a new idea to the match-3 formula. The rules seemed simple enough, and most visual designs and animations communicate their intent well that I wasn't confused most of the time while I was playing. The visual theme and audio to match did a pretty good job of setting a consistent and relaxing tone one would expect from a puzzle game.
That said, it didn't really *feel* like playing a puzzle game. Most of my experience was about chasing after a specific atom, rather than attempting to create a cool formation or combo to generate the most points. I don't consider this necessarily a bad thing -- it's just different -- but it was certainly unexpected.
There were some legitimate issues I did have with the game, though. Playing the WebGL version, it was kind of hard for me to grasp why the game suddenly ended. In theory, it would be due to some of the atoms touching the red ring, but I never felt like through any of my play-throughs, that actually happened: the red ring would simply expand instead. Instead, after getting the bond to a certain size, the game seemingly just ended. Perhaps the visuals aren't catching up with the actual intended data range?
I also felt like the controls were really loose, and it made it difficult to precisely choose which atom to attach, and where. The turning wasn't instantaneous, and both rotation and movement appears to have momentum that's difficult to stop. This may have contributed to the game's lack of "puzzle-game-like-feel." It may have been nicer to have more tighter controls.
Still, I thought there was a neat idea presented in this game, and certainly think it can be expanded upon with some more time and polish.
@omiya-games Thanks for playing! I'm intrigued by the comment that it doesn't really feel like a puzzle game - I'll need to think about how I approach that in the design.
The game suddenly ending probably means you encountered the same bug that zimny11 did (see my comment to them earlier). I've fixed that for an upcoming post-jam version.
As a note, the red ring never actually changes size; that's an optical illusion I accidentally created by having the background not zoom in or out with the rest of the camera (and probably not helped by the fact that the circle is constantly changing its center to the cluster's center of gravity). You're not alone in seeing it, though - even I have trouble unseeing it, and it's something I'd like to address post-jam.
The loose controls and conserved momentum were intentional design choices - although the turning not being instantaneous is news to me (maybe it's a performance issue; maybe the deceleration when you're changing directions is just difficult to see). Given how many commenters have mentioned disliking the controls, though, I'll definitely be tightening those up post-jam.
Thanks for the detailed feedback!