BLUOT

verttixpertti 2023-01-09 12:06

Sadly I couldn't get the game to work properly

frib 2023-01-09 12:13

Not sure what I played lol, but winning is always good :D

I could smell the spaghetti through my screen, which added to the amazing vibe with the music and graphics

vphyre 2023-01-12 17:07

Hello, how are you? :)

I like the concept of your game. Although it is simple, I found your game with a very different and creative proposal. Good work!

100th-coin 2023-01-14 16:25

Sorry to hear ~~you spaghettied yourself into the nightmare realm~~ it was once working but then broke! I enjoyed the colorful aesthetic of the shapes you can place. I recorded myself playing so I could deliver maximum feedback:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKsdI1icBR4

kuro 2023-01-17 16:54

I like the idea, and the trippy funky flower animation.

Your games have always this specific feeling which I grew to like. It's purely subjective but it's 5* mood for me.

Downloaded Spagettheroni in the hope I'd find the source to the music, which I kind of adored. May I ask what software do you use for the music?

honey-pony 2023-01-20 03:11

This game was a bit of a journey for me.

First, I was very excited to see cards in the description, as I also made a card game for this Ludum Dare and it's been fun seeing how others made card games with the same theme.

So, I started by just playing the online version for a bit. There were quite a few mechanics to play with, such as the movement, which has some fun characteristics, and building the map... but I couldn't figure out how to attack the enemy. Looking back at the description, apparently red cards were used for attacking -- but I hadn't seen a single red card.

I tried refreshing to start again, thinking maybe there was a glitch happening or something. I believe this time I got a single red card near the beginning, but it only had a range of one and I wasn't able to kill the enemy. So I played some more, but more red cards just were not showing up, yet again.

I tried refreshing a couple more times, and I just couldn't seem to get red cards to show up, ever. I thought at this point it would be worth downloading the source code and seeing if I could figure out why.

Much to my surprise, red cards were seemingly a simple 1/10 chance to be generated, same as e.g. the healing cards, which I had seen many of. I decided to print out the value of `x_roll` just to be sure, and yup, it seemed to not really be rolling in the 0.9-1.0 range. Strange...

Then I turned my attention to the `randomize()` call at the top of the function. According to the documentation, this function seeds the random number generator based on the system time. Aha! This must be what's causing the random number generator to not be uniform! So I simply removed the calls to `randomize()`, both in front of `x_roll` and `y_roll`, and played again, and sure enough -- this time around I was getting red cards. It still actually took a while for me to get one, but eventually they did start showing up. And then I was finally able to win.

So, to summarize... in this game, at least in the officially available version, your luck is based very much on the time that you decide to play the game. Depending on when you decide to play it, red cards might show up practically never, simply because the time values being used to roll the random numbers are much less likely to generate certain values than others.

And this is, admittedly, quite an innovative feature... a game that simply gives you terrible luck if you play it at the wrong time. But I imagine that's not what you were going for! :smile:

Nonetheless, it was a good time figuring that out. And the experience of reverse engineering that was itself not unlike playing some of your other games, namely Contact Nesigur, which had some intended shenanigans along similar lines.

That said, there were still some things I liked about the game as designed. In particular, I thought that the movement mechanics were very interesting. At first I thought that, say, the "walk" card would only let you move 1 space, i.e. move to a space connected directly to the one you're currently on. But this isn't really the case... it seems to be based on distance, meaning you can move two spaces, or cross gaps in between spaces, if the edge of that space happens to be close enough.

This is super fun, as it means that the strategy for moving around often means closely inspecting the board to see what spaces might be possible to sneakily move over to.

I also really liked the way that the create-a-new-space cards worked. It seemed like they sort of generated one shape to follow your cursor, and then generated a different shape when you actually clicked... but this feels like a nice little animation, when the shape instantaneously turns into a different one. It's just a nice effect.

(continued...)

honey-pony 2023-01-20 03:11

Admittedly I never figured out exactly what the "draw a card" cards did, even though I did look at some of the source code. My best guess is that perhaps they generate new cards to add to your hand, or maybe they make your hand bigger on the next turn...? I could probably figure it out if I tried hard enough, but for now it will remain a mystery.

I found the music nice and the graphics endearing, particularly the movement spaces and the card graphics. It's just kind of fun to have big colored squares for cards, I don't know. And, in terms of the movement spaces, I think that the interesting movement mechanics I discussed are fun because of the random (as far as I know) shapes of the spaces.

So, overall, one way or another I managed to have a pretty good time with this. Perhaps it was all a genius design intended to provoke the player into doing some reverse engineering... or perhaps it was all random. Either way works for me. :smile:

trexxak 2023-01-27 19:21

Apologies for the late response - Turns out this January was much more hectic than anticipated... I'm so honoured though to have you guys play my game. It's so heartwarming knowing that people will pay attention to your game... even if you yourself don't.

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@frib amazing vibe, huh? :D

Concerning music and graphics, because it's actually something I thought about: A few LDs ago I switched from an assets-first to a mechanics-first approach, as many respected jammers suggested.

While that seems absolutely fine for a lot of people, I seem to get disappointed with the "feel" if graphics/ audio are an afterthought. Mechanics-wise I don't see any improvements of quality at all with more time, anyway.

So I decide to go with my guts again and switch back to my original organisation. I hope I read this comment in prep for the next jam :D

Thank you for playing, and sorry for the rant D:

hey @vphyre! Thank you so much for your praise! I agree, I like the concept a lot, and I like card games. I actually would like to continue working on the game. For real this time, to at least bring it to a state where I can show it to my mother and she at least understands what she's seeing :D

@100th-coin Damn, unbeatable Bluot 100% glitchless world record :D

Incredibly honoured to get featured on your videos! Seeing you having fun with the glitchiness had me rolling! :'D

@kuro Honoured by your subjective view on the mood :D One day I'll get good at this stuff, I swear!

Concerning the audio I used 1BITDRAGON. it's stupidly easy creating a mockup with it (I spent about 30 minutes for the track). Super useful for game jams!

For animations I used PixelOver. It's super handy for creating some spritesheets in a rush (that's not to say it's only good for that).

Starting next jam, I may write such information in the game description haha :D Everything's a learning process!

@honey-pony

Whoa, I'm humbled you took the time to look into the randomization problem! This is embarrasing, but when it comes to randomize(), at some point I just started using it whenever I was frustrated with the same sequence of results appearing. Surely I knew about the time-dependent nature of it when I started doing this, but it simply became a matter of "if you want pseudo-ier random results, randomize regularly". In retrospect, I wish I went for the more obvious solution of simply shuffling the deck of cards.

_"And this is, admittedly, quite an innovative feature… a game that simply gives you terrible luck if you play it at the wrong time. But I imagine that’s not what you were going for! smile"_

I could actually see space for this in combination with time-sensitive events! Thanks for the inspiration! O:

Often times I found myself simply being too lazy (or stressed out) to implement a feature properly (Examples: Initially the walk mechanic was intended to work by-space, the shapes shouldn't change their... shape on placement, the draw-cards... cards don't communicate well that cards are added to your hand).

It's so cool you looked into my terrible code :o As always, I learned a lot from your comment and am immensely inspired to think of ways of how to make my beloved bugs into butterflies of intentional game design o:

(btw: Your game plays VERY similar to how I imagined mine to! :O)

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From the bottom of my heart, thank you all once more for taking your time to play around with my attempt at creating a card game hybrid. Failing can be bitter, but reading your witty and thoughtful comments totally made up for that!