lightningst 2025-04-07 03:56
WOW!! I was so confused at first, but when it clicked, it CLICKED! That was very satisfying and challenging. Also, that back button was a lifesaver! GREAT JOB!!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD57 → Refinerator
By jimbly
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 73 | 3.72 | 24 | |
| Fun | 101 | 3.52 | 24 | |
| Innovation | 51 | 3.81 | 24 | |
| Theme | 234 | 3.09 | 24 | |
| Graphics | 107 | 3.68 | 24 | |
| Audio | 81 | 3.56 | 24 | |
| Humor | 206 | 2.31 | 23 | |
| Mood | 175 | 3.26 | 23 |
WOW!! I was so confused at first, but when it clicked, it CLICKED! That was very satisfying and challenging. Also, that back button was a lifesaver! GREAT JOB!!
Sweet, thanks for playing, and glad to hear it clicked! My original plan was something timed/actiony like the original game that inspired it, but after watching just one friend play I though letting it be a bit more "think-y" with an undo button and no time pressure (and a goal of perfection instead of just "as much as possible") would be more satisfying =).
hints didn't help swaps aren't intuitive, game play is poor. graphics are good music is excellent. single click swap would be helpful.
Love it! At first I was also confused, but then I took proper time to read your instructions :)
Nice game! I tried playing blind at first. I was able to figure out how the swaps work but needed to look at the in game help to figure out the goal. I was close to guessing and even tried making the left all rocks, but it wasn't clear that the white orbs were special until I read the rules. The diagonal dots between the circles also confused me a bit, but I think those are just decoration? Once I read the instructions it was pretty fun, although a bit repetitive by the 12th match. I think it would have been cool to give a bonus if you also manage to make the top all gold, it could add an extra dimension of skill where the match area increases as it gets filled and you can build up bigger combos.
@gsoutz Thanks for playing, sorry the gameplay didn't click for you =). I considered single-click swaps, but in practice good play always involved lots of quick dragging through a bunch of orbs at once, so it seemed like it might just cause people to start playing in a way that wouldn't be as fun, and I ran out of time ^_^. Would have maybe made it more playable on touch devices though, I think.
@airgameboys Glad you liked it! I guess I should have put in a tutorial, but I was trying to keep my scope super small this jam :laughing:
@kaliuresis Thanks for playing. Yeah, probably no real way to figure out the goal by trial and error, I guess I could have put some "gold" detailing around the refinerator button or something to telegraph that... The diagonal dots between the circles aren't just decoration, they show you all current possible swaps, any swap you did would have been between circles with those visible, but of course when you're dragging through a chain, only the first one is visible when you're planning, because the rest aren't valid swaps until the first swap is done. Bonus for the top being gold is an interesting thought.
I had no idea what was going on until I read the help section, then I had some understanding of what was going on and managed to get a few full clears. At some point there are so few swapping options available, so I'm wondering if it is intentional having to fail a few times just to nuke the board into something usable.
I honestly don't have the willpower to get 12 full clears :D but it's a pretty solid puzzle game and it feels very finished. Also, that undo button is amazing and I wouldn't have gotten close to solving a board without it lol. Good job!
Figuring out the click swap took some time, I really liked it, I like games like these where you can just play for 5-10 min while doing something else =)
@frib Thanks for playing! In theory, I think as long as you've got a little pocket of things you can swap (about 2 of each color), you can manage to get unstuck from any situation (it's just a little tedious), and I make sure you've always got at least 8 gold on the board, so I *think* no matter how bad the board is when you do a full clear, you'll always be in a situation that would let you move anything anywhere after the new board comes in. It's definitely the kind of thing where in my first few dozen games I definitely messed up my board, so I knew I needed the "nuke" option, but by the end of development it seemed like I could just "see" the patterns and it felt nearly trivial :laughing:.
Taking a look at my high score list (which I didn't bother putting visibly in the game since it seemed like it'd pretty boring...), so far there's been 2 people with 12 full clears (presumably @lightningst and @kaliuresis), presumably you with 2, and 15 people who have not made a single full clear :sweat_smile:. Well, on the bright side, some of those who never got a full clear at least said the "liked it" above :laughing:...
@jimbly the scoreboard idea is great! Every Ludum Dare I wonder how many people that rated my game actually finished it (or even played it for more than 5 minutes). Also, yes it took me 2 or 3 tries, but I was eventually able to get all 12 clears.
Wow, really took some time to get in but then it is really fun to rush through the diagonals. Im exited to see what you will create in the dungeon jam this time :)
Cool, simple graphics and an equally fitting soundtrack. Surprisingly tricky. This exudes real tower of hanoi vibes.
I really loved it! Music is nice (though it stops and then resumes after some time), palette and graphics are really nice and once it clicks, I can just speedrun, as I started to see how I can move everything inside my mental model. But at the start it was very confusing, maybe a small tutorial, showing how you can "move through lanes" would help with that. Screenshot 2025-04-08 at 21.17.39.png
I tried it twice without reading the instructions. I think, I managed to figure out most of the mechanics. I didn't manage to beat the game but at least I got a little bit better the second time around. The thing I was struggling with was to remember the rules I had figured out when there wasn't a matching configuration in play. Which made me do some unnecessary flips. In the very beginning I was a bit confused with that I got selection marking around the non-connected balls and there was no interaction I could do with them... it might have been good to have some sort of disabled styling when there's no action to be taken on a ball.
I liked the simple palette, the music fit well with the style and gameplay. Oh yeah I also recorded my mumbling attempt at figuring it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDFIIjDIeU4
@apoly Thanks for playing! Do you mean the music suddenly cut off and then resumed (obvious bug), or like it ended and was silent for a while before it started back up again? And, yeah, a tutorial probably would have helped, although I almost feel like the amount of time it takes for the mechanics to click in one's mind is longer than any tutorial would be :laughing:. Also, nice job on the "Perfect", you're the only one to do so so far!
@local-minimum Yeah, remembering which swaps with which was tricky for me too (and, also, in the original game the swapping mechanics are borrowed from :laughing:). Not having a interaction rollover on the un-flippable tiles would have been really (obviously) smart - and actually it would have had a cool side effect that I wanted but couldn't figure out how to do, which is if you drag straight left (or even straight up), and there's only one path to swapping things, it could have been a little more forgiving/loose with the rules if it was only highlighting/considering orbs with valid swaps... _probably_ would let you just drag around a bit more and generally have the right thing happen ^_^.
Watching your video... yeah, the browser's not allowed to play sounds until you've clicked on something (usually why I have a title screen ^_^) - I should try to remember to just not show the mute button until after someone's clicked somewhere =). Nice that you managed to immediately guess the energy bar and output/score bar, I wasn't sure if that would be clear at all. And, as expected, basically impossible to guess that the goal is all white, glad you figured that out before too long though =). Thanks for recording and narrating the video (and trying "hard mode", though you figured out everything that's listed in the in-game help pretty quickly), was nice to see your thought process! Seems like you often forgot about the Undo button after making a mistake though :sweat_smile:. It looks like you maybe never made it to the logical leap that (almost) any configuration is recoverable - if you're in a situation where you want to get a white down and there's a black there, you've gotta kinda switch your mindset to first play the "get a mid-town down there" game (same logic, different colors, but now accomplishable), and then switch back to "get the white down there" =).
@jimbly yeah I never got the full strategy depth, which meant that it felt like a lot of configurations left me without a chance to improve the situation. Or at least, that was how it felt. I also, after I discovered the undo button promptly forgot it because it was so far off from the actual game area... might have been better if it was attached to the drill somewhere.
@jimbly it ends and starts after some silence (several seconds of awkward silence). Is that intended? It sounded like a bug.
Hmm, looks like there's no silence in the audio file, and I just ask the browser to play the sound looping, so it _should_ just work, but, well, browsers are browsers :laughing:. Maybe something I can do though... @apoly what browser were you using?
Really challenging to wrap my brain around, but once I got the hang of things, it started to make more sense how to move things around. I ended up mostly going for every other column (since the shorter columns are easier to fill), but that probably lost me some points:
you_win.png
Since the game is randomly generated, I'd be curious if there's always a solution for every column, or if there are cases where you're forced to sacrifice a column. Is the generation fully random?
The art is really good, similar vibes (and color scheme) to your last game. Also, the 3x3 version in your logo is super cute.
@sudocoffee Thanks for playing and glad you liked it, and made it through! Yeah, that art (and audio) style worked well last time and I was lazy, so I did it again :laughing:. I'll have to do something different next jam though =).
It's randomly generated, but I ensure there's always at least 8 gold after any change to the board, so you can always fill a column with some to spare, and the others are pulled from basically a shuffled deck, so there should generally be an even number of each. I haven't proved it, but it seems like if you have a cluster of something like just 3 orbs that are currently swappable, you can use those as a seed to get anything else "un-stuck" by wiggling them over to it, so I don't *think* you ever have to sacrifice a column, unless you really go out of your way to get into a weird situation *and* get unlucky. About half-way through development, I started never closing the game without scoring a perfect column or two, even after a bunch of random swapping around, and it seemed like I always could, but it took a lot of play time to get my mind in that zone I guess =). It also gets pretty repetitive, so I'm not sure I actually recommend playing again for a perfect score :laughing:.
@jimbly I was using Safari. Tried on Chrome and. it works perfectly fine, so it's something incompatible with Safari it seems. Completed it again :D
@apoly Thanks, good to know. I do remember seeing some fallbacks in the audio library for dealing with Safari, I bet something breaks there and it does a manual re-start instead of auto-looping or something... easy solution is just add a fade in and fade out at the beginning and end :laughing:.
Figuring out the strategies was pretty fun! It took me a bit to get used to the available moves, but I managed to finish with a perfect score. (As long as you ignore the one incorrect refinement at the start when I was randomly poking buttons.)
It's pretty cool how the different pieces created emergent interactions: coal likes to rise while stone likes to sink, but you need them to do the opposite to actually take advantage of their movement, so you have to make extra moves with the gold to "replenish" the moves you have available.
@mao Thanks for playing and glad you liked it! And, yeah, I intentionally didn't count any refinements before the first good one against anyone, was really hoping some people would "figure it out" after some experimenting and then still manage to go on to a perfect score like you did, that's great to hear =).
What a game! Keep up the good work! (:.
A very original concept. I really liked the simplicity of the game.
With more time, maybe you can think of a way to keep the moves from getting stuck and preventing the player from making moves. This happens a lot. Maybe this game "https://www.kongregate.com/games/aggrix/sworbs" will help you get some ideas. They look a bit similar. I saved the game to try to finish it later, because I think it's worth it.
Congratulations!
Was sitting at the "this is a cool game, but not sure I understand it well enough to keep playing it much longer." then noticed a few people posting end game screenshots and decided that if there was a definite end, I should try to get to it. I'm so glad I did! The dip back into it gave me that bit more play time I needed to really get my head around how to sort of deliberately plan things. Really solid puzzler, nicely done graphics with the sort of Gameboy style colour palette, and the music brought it all together for a good chill vibe to everything!
This mechanic is fantastic. Its so simple but interesting (and kind of forgiving for mistakes) that it feels like some actual classical game (but have never seen this mechanic before) It took a moment in the beginning to grasp it, but after a while it became pretty natural to see the paths the gold can take.
Bildschirmfoto 2025-04-18 um 15.28.21.png
Apart from the pure mechanic side also great work on the visuals and the music! Maybe the gameboy style made me think this is some classic game mechanic :smile:
Super neat! It took me a good while to understand the links only work for going UP, but when I got it makes sense
Screenshot 2025-04-18 180434.png
Really well executed. Took me a few tries to understand the strategy but it was smooth sailing from that point forward. Polish is exceptional, and despite it being simple, the art looks great. Deserves more attention!
I'm just stopping by to say that I managed to get to the end.
Sem tÃtulo.png
Now, I'm going to try to get **PERFECT**.
Really clever! I don't know if I've ever seen a mechanic like this before, but seconding the comment that it feels like a game that should already exist. The "rock-paper-scissors" mechanic creates some really interesting interactions. The music was pretty good but got a little repetitive. The graphics made great use of the four-color palette. Well done!
This was very fun for me. Simple rules to understand (and the in-game help does a lot), but grasping how to win this was quite a challenge. It took me three plays to do this perfectly. Second try taught me well how to prevent softlocking (as I eventually did), and the third felt like a breeze to play. Could not stop playing. The visuals though simple, are polished and coherent. I do not feel this game needs any addition, that was perfect as it is. Super cool!Screenshot 2025-04-24 130640.png
I DID IT!!!
ganhei.png
Thanks again for the experience.
Excellent game!
Loved it! Once I understood it's language, the game have put me in a different state of mind. I was thinking in terms of patterns in coal and stone transcending the visuals, inputs and my mortal shell. I other words, I locked in ^^ I love it when a game puts me in this kinda flow. Great mechanic! If you're wondering: perfect on first try :sunglasses:
@thelastslowpoke Nice job getting perfect on the first try, you might be the only one I know of to do that =). And, yeah, this mechanic seems like it can really lock in _some_ people, and for others it just doesn't click at all.
As mentioned in the description, I can't take credit for the guts of the mechanic (the rock-paper-scissors swapping rules) as that's from a game in Puzzle Pirates, although there it was a high-speed timed thing and I'm really glad I massaged it into this more think-y form =).
Everyone else who played and commented recently, thanks for playing, I'm so happy to see other people getting into it and managing to (and feeling inclined to try to!) get a perfect score!