deniz-aras 2022-10-02 22:47
Couldn't get pass the level 6. I am not good at puzzle games. However, your game looks and plays very well. Sound is great also. Love how you work with the theme also. Great work!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Out Of Memory
By adam-gould
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 33 | 4.03 | 29 | |
| Fun | 51 | 3.92 | 30 | |
| Innovation | 101 | 3.71 | 30 | |
| Theme | 174 | 3.74 | 29 | |
| Graphics | 263 | 3.38 | 29 | |
| Audio | 70 | 3.74 | 29 | |
| Humor | 233 | 2.62 | 27 | |
| Mood | 168 | 3.44 | 29 |
Couldn't get pass the level 6. I am not good at puzzle games. However, your game looks and plays very well. Sound is great also. Love how you work with the theme also. Great work!
Nice entry and solid puzzle! This mechanic has so much potential.
I had trouble solving level 8 due to lacking of forward modules however. XD
Together with attractive sound tracks, the game is quite well polished after all.
By the way there is no strict time limit of each level, which might no fit the theme well (I guess that it might be too hard to design such good puzzles if there is a strict 10s limit?)
Fun & unique. Feels complete, & very well themed together. GJ!
Great audio! Loved the sfx and the music, very good. Loved the puzzles, I like this kind of "programming" games. Loved how you implemented the mechanic by having some robot wait for the other. Also, very creative how you used the theme... valuing every second as a tangible resource instead of a vague, self perceived time limit. I would've liked to think of something similar for myself too!
Thanks for submitting your game for me to play on my stream!
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1608912292?t=6h56m47s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
Really awesome job! The audio and graphics were very well polished and really nice take on the theme. I liked how efficiently you used the some levels to teach the players how new nodes worked. One of my favs so far!
Very cool game - it's a good mechanic - it actually made me want to try doing something similiar to this when next jam start :smile:
:purple_heart: :dart: :frog:
It wasn't until after a _lot_ of experimenting on level 6 that I _finally_ figured out the difference between the "Next Level" button and "Keep Going" button (which I assumed were the same until then, or that one skipped the level, but I didn't want to skip it, so I kept pressing "restart") - I really had no idea you could do multiple 10 second sets of orders, and it seems pretty key. Maybe add something to the description about that? I realized later that the tutorial alluded to it, but perhaps harmfully so, as it seemed to imply "I'll explain that to you later", so I guess it just was completely out of my mind since the tutorial never re-introduced the concept =).
And then, holy cow as level 8 hard. I probably spent 20-30 minutes on it, was almost convinced it was impossible for a while, I kept coming up with solutions that needed 1 more move or 1 more u-turn. Finally beat it though! Thank goodness the final level was not as hard (only took one try there).
Capture.PNG
Great game! Love the concept, nice ramp up of difficulty of puzzles. I wish giving orders was a little more convenient - either keyboard shortcuts, or just select robot, then click order after order and they go into the next slot. Nice sound and music too.
92 Seconds lets gooooo.
Awesome Puzzle Game, had tons of fun with it.
If you want to keep going with it, consider a second bar that shows the current action stack of the robot that's hovered.
Thanks for making this game :D
Hey! It's me from the ArcaneRituals stream last night, back as promised!
This is excellent. One of my favorites so far.
I love programming games, and this is a pretty good one. This is a concept worth having a go at in terms of making a larger product.
In terms of criticisms I will say the game gets very difficult very quickly. Level 8 in particular is extremely tricky. The ramp up needs to be slower I think or you're going to lose a lot of people too early. The UX in level 6 needs to be explained better also. At first I was trying to complete the level in 1 "bar" and when I couldn't do it I'd just restart the level. Obviously the solution requires you to click "Keep Going" but (for whatever reason) my brain just wasn't processing that properly which meant it took me way more tries that necessary to work it out.
Even though I criticized it, I think the massive difficulty spike can't really be worked around given the time limit. You *have* to ramp up the complexity of the levels to show off the depth of the puzzling!
Overall really nice entry. My most played in LD51, if only because I'm dumb as a bag of hammers and it took me an hour to finish :D
@teddyreid Thanks for commenting, I'm glad you gave it a further shot! I agree that the difficulty curve is too steep... The biggest issue is that it's hard to gauge difficulty when you know the answers, and I didn't have any testers to let me know just how much harder 6 and 8 were than the rest. If I pick it up again for further dev there are a number of features I'd love to include such as a smoothed-out difficulty curve, drag-and-drop support, some kind of level selection (including par times for each level), extra quality of life UI elements (allow reset but with the modules kept installed, show a "reset" button you can press without having to hit GO first, let the player see remaining modules when on the Review screen, make the "KEEP GOING" button its own separate one so nobody misses that it exists, etc.)
Your enthusiasm on the stream made my weekend! I'll check yours out tomorrow when I get the opportunity.
Alright, I give up. After way too long I have to admit that level 8 has defeated me. I just do not see a way to approach this puzzle that does not require 22 foreword moves, so clearly there is some clever path that eludes me this evening.
Overall I found this to be a great puzzle game, I like the parallel movement of the bots in some levels that allows for some interesting optimization of the number of moves. The music and sounds were great (not driving me crazy at all after more then half an hour of staring at the same puzzle), although the stacking of the move sound when several bots are moving at the same time was a bit harsh. The art style is clear and simple, and I personally quite like how the lines on the floor look when lit up. The puzzles were reasonably challenging (until 8) and I felt that they did a good job of introducing what the different mechanics were and how to use them.
I agree with some of the other comments here that it was not clearly explained that not completing the puzzle in 10 moves was fine, and you just had to move on to another set of instructions. I did the same thing that I saw mentioned above and restarted a few times trying to get both buttons pressed in level 6. In the end I thought that the game was letting me get a less then perfect score and move on to the next level, it was a surprise to just get to continue with the remaining moves in the same level.
I quite like this style of pseudo-programming game, and I think that this was a great implementation of one. Very well done!
@smilewood Thanks for the feedback! Annoyingly I had solved the issue of sound stacking but didn't realise that it doesn't work in the WebGL version (the standalone/download version compresses it so it doesn't get too loud).
@adam-gould That is interesting. Out of curiosity, and as another Unity dev who suffers sound stacking sometimes, what was your solution in the standalone builds?
Solid puzzle game, great ld entry
@smilewood I used the audio mixer functionality, shoved a compressor on the SFX group. All built-in stuff. Turns out some of the sound manipulation doesn't work for WebGL builds though, so that's something to keep in mind for the future!
This unit is not wired for logical puzzle games. It's a fantastic concept executed very well. The only quirk really is the player not realising that they can accomplish their goals in stages instead of just the 10 allotted moves.
Short, sweet. 94s, but I'm sure that could be optimized.
Love programming puzzles. I wish restarting a level wouldn't reset your current solution. It would suit theme better if all the levels were doable in 10 seconds. Some keyboard shortcuts would be nice. Still not a bad game overall.
The idea of the game and puzzle setup is pretty good. I like that you have multiple robots so you can choose which robot performs a given action and you can coordinate their timing. You did a pretty good job of having levels that make use of this.
Most of my feedback is about the UI:
- The visual selection for selecting units and controls is pretty subtle. I would prefer something like a huge green circle or glow. - I think drag and drop of commands into slots would be more intuitive than click to select and click to place. - It would be nice if the buttons for available actions was physically closer to the timeline of robot actions so that my mouse doesn't have to move as far. - Gray buttons looks like they are disabled. It might be good for 'Go' and other buttons to be green. - 'Keep Going' sounded like either "go to the next level" or "try this level again". It really surprised me when it continued the current level without resetting anything. I would recommend not even asking whether the player wants to keep going but instead have it happen automatically. - Cables and squares don't seem to do anything. I think it would be simpler to just have circles on the tiles that you need to press. As is it looks kind of like you are supposed to place square boxes on square tiles. - Since robots pick up and drop box in front of them, I thought the robot would hold the box in front of them while carrying it. So for level 6 I was worried about the lasers shooting my box if I stopped in front of a laser.
The inspiration from Zachtronics is pretty clear! It's a nice little puzzle game, with some interesting ideas.
Unfortunately there were some things that stopped it from being great. The UI was pretty swish but a little clunky to use - perhaps dragging and dropping the icons would have been better? It was also very not.clear to me that you could.program more than one 10 second set for each robot, which I think really changed the dynamic of the game. There were some pretty gnarly difficulty spikes, especially levels 6 and 8 (which I got stuck on).
I think there's the base of a great game here somewhere - perhaps removing the 10 second limit and just having to plan out the robots with a limited instruction set would be better? Potentially with more ways for the robots to interact - in level 6 I tried to have one robot pick up another, which could be cool.
In general though, it's a very solid entry, especially for a compo game - it feels very complete and put together! Good job 😁
At first I thought level 6 was difficult but then came level 8 :joy: I like the idea and the level design, but the controls feel a bit cumbersome. Maybe it would be better to display the placed actions on a grid, where each row corresponds to one robot. Also some button to directly restart would be cool. But the level design was pretty good!