FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD58 → Mission Ares

Mission Ares

By martenscedric, winter2277, William Wells and David Huculak

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall1573.8533
Fun1913.6733
Innovation1863.6133
Theme3783.6933
Graphics4503.5333
Audio3303.3333
Mood4363.4833

Comments

mikita-gancharou 2025-10-07 00:14

I just love it.

There are some confusing moments with a rovers selection but damn, that's sick

aleksey-the-kid 2025-10-07 00:21

Cool game! Really loved mechanic with charging rovers from one each other, creates depth. It is nice to plan route in the head and then see it comes true, great game!

kit-gorn 2025-10-07 00:26

Interesting. Reminded me of Algotica Iterations

ciph3rzer0 2025-10-07 00:42

I had a lot of fun solving the puzzles. Once I figured out I could click on an instruction to delete it, I was way less annoyed by planning out the solutions. The power transfer was a neat mechanic, I think one or two more mechanics would have made this great.

iloskutov 2025-10-07 11:06

Cool game, interesting puzzles. And all of this in Rust!

happysealgames 2025-10-07 13:17

Really good and polished puzzle game for a jam. Nice job! I had a lot of fun setting up the robots movements.

gat 2025-10-07 14:23

fun puzzle game very impressed, although The rover selection not matching the rovers placement led to some annoying moments (example, the rover that starts on the left being on the right in the editor and vice versa).

bea 2025-10-07 17:37

Solid entry! The charge panels were a cool variation on the programming mechanic!

xhadie 2025-10-07 17:59

Screenshot 2025-10-07 195553.png Fun litte puzzling game! I was too stupid to beat level 7 :( I think the platform for the wire are both receivers and hence do not charge or did I miss something?

winter2277 2025-10-07 18:04

@xhadie The wires are not directional. If one side is under the sun, then that side will always be the one providing power to the side in shadow. If both sides are in shadow, then whichever has the most power will provide to the one which has less power. There can be cases where 2 rovers are waiting on shadow plates and they are both exchanging 1 unit of power (2, 1) -> (1, 2) -> (2, 1) etc. I agree level 7 is a bit jank! You might need to make your rovers wait an odd or even number to give the right rover 2 battery units. Thanks for playing!

jawdan 2025-10-07 18:19

Some really nice and interesting puzzles in here! Good work!

mackelio 2025-10-07 20:47

great entry! i really like the puzzle aspect and the planning! great job!

anthony-dunlap 2025-10-07 23:57

This game was pretty fun. I really enjoyed all of the puzzles. The wires took a while to figure out, but I managed to get through all the levels.

raysplaceinspace 2025-10-08 01:59

I was really glad when I saw there were two levels to control. At first I thought this game would be far too easy but that makes it much more interesting and challenging. Well done! Also great job using Rust! I'm using Rust for my game engine at the moment and really like it!

ismael-rodriguez 2025-10-08 02:38

Very cool idea. Friendly and unorganized thoughts: I can imagine a bunch of QOL ideas to the interface and "programming" bots, like being able to insert instructions instead of deleting everything and redoing it. I also think it would be nice if the UI/instructions lit up as they were being executed. But maybe dealing with the limited interface is part of the fun/design? Like calculating chess moves? I wonder what a more comprehensive timeline style interface would do for it.

I like the low poly visuals but also feel the brown environment is kind of bland looking.

Great job overall. Well done yall!

franklyn01 2025-10-08 14:44

Very cool puzzle game! It would be nice if the order of the rovers in the UI matched the order on the playing field. Otherwise a very solid entry, great job!

wetburritosupreme 2025-10-08 16:10

Great puzzles in this, tough to align the steps, would've been nice to just have that done for me without counting steps, but otherwise I think this is a good twist on the classic giving commands to rovers. Nicely done!

kuggenhoffen 2025-10-08 19:06

Great work, this is a very nicely thought out and implemented game. Quite nicely fitting graphics, music and the gameplay works very well. Just some small improvements could be nice for usability like being able to clear commands from one robot for example instead of all. Anyways great work!

willoxs 2025-10-08 22:08

Ok - terrible confession: I completely missed the sun/shadow mechanic! I just stumbled my way through every single level without understanding the core puzzle principle xD

I was quite confused as to why the rovers sometimes seemed to drain and sometimes not - and the power exchange pads were quite random to me too, but it somehow intuitively worked when i put in the solution. This is completely on me - I just restarted it to see if it's really that hard to see and there is even a tutorial screen that i must have promptly skipped.

I think this shows that the puzzles are probably leaning a bit on the easier side, which is always the better decision for a jam (imo).

The planning movement ahead of time idea is neat and the presentation/ui works mostly intuitive. There are some small annoyances: The order of the starting positions are not always matching the order of the ui, and removing commands doesn't automatically switch back to the rover in question, so i often times entered them for the wrong rover first after a change.

The graphics are simple but charming - and the cute bopping of the rovers didn't go unnoticed.

logicalinsanity 2025-10-09 04:49

Amazing! You are incredibly talented.

planetary 2025-10-09 18:54

Nice puzzle game! I love the mechanic of light & shadow, instantly reminds me about a game called "Race the Sun" (mechanics for this game are pretty similar: in light you charge the energy and in shadow you lose that). Great job!

n-feofentov 2025-10-10 16:36

Very clever puzzle game. And the most finished I've played so far. Nice art and overall style. Music is a bit repetetive though. Good job!

euler-moises 2025-10-10 21:56

I worked on a game called SMIB that follows roughly this premise. I personally like this style of game. It turned out well polished in just three days of work.

Congratulations!

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k48uto 2025-10-13 13:55

If you need an honest review. The usual puzzle game. Nothing interesting. The music is nice, the art is okay.

woona 2025-10-14 08:23

Nice game! Huge respect for making it in Bevy!

I completed all the puzzles. I think the game does a good job of teaching itself and the puzzle complexity progression is good.

I quite like puzzle mechanics and it's fun watching little robots move and every part of your plan fall into place. But I didn't really think while solving the puzzles, every solution is very obvious. I think that's because every path is linear, you just send the robots where they can go, wait on wired tiles for a while, then continue going. I think for a good puzzle game there has to be more freedom: not just one possible right solution, but 100 wrong solutions and 1 right solution.

Also, I think the game would look better if there was more contrast between light and dark areas, and maybe more cold colors in the color palette.

wallted 2025-10-14 21:46

This is a great jam entry in my opinion. You managed to make your game nice and clean looking and design quite fun puzzle mechanics with a bunch of levels to play, with enjoyable curve of complexity. The best thing in your design is that you can incrementally solve puzzles by programming a few steps at a time and watch exacly how this behaves which makes this game easy to consume, but still you get fun from it. Nice work guys! Also the fact that you made this in Rust is quite fitting for a game about programming rovers :D

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