paroxysmal 2025-10-05 22:40
Good puzzle game. Took a bit to figure out having to press Space to grab the bar. Great entry.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD58 → Stamp Collecting on Planet Q
By cassowary
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 7 | 4.30 | 33 | |
| Fun | 5 | 4.23 | 32 | |
| Innovation | 4 | 4.38 | 32 | |
| Theme | 42 | 3.96 | 32 | |
| Graphics | 15 | 4.31 | 32 | |
| Audio | 8 | 4.06 | 32 | |
| Humor | 22 | 3.77 | 31 | |
| Mood | 17 | 4.13 | 31 |
Good puzzle game. Took a bit to figure out having to press Space to grab the bar. Great entry.
Nice one! Pleasant art, great puzzle game. Thanks for your entry :)
I predict a very high rating for your entry. Nailed every category here and the puzzles are actually a good difficulty and fun to play. Really enjoyed this, fantastic work all round.
Very refined entry and challenging puzzle game. Bravo!
Introduces ideas at just the right rate, and then the last puzzle is a monster. Really fun.
I don't mind the English control descriptions, but thanks for keeping the rest of the text in the original Qzian!
I mean, this is brilliant. Feels like a finished product - there's so much to love. Solid puzzles, great world-building, and an awesome visual theming. Almost no notes here... Excellent.
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good puzzle, good music, good art, good game!
I'm not much for puzzle games but this is very nice! Art is very cohesive, the hand animation is great. Relaxing and frustrating at the same time.
This is a really cool and very solid entry! I have yet to clear the sixth or seventh stage, but then I am not all that good at puzzle games :-)
I was missing the instructions on screen. At one point I had to look up the controls in the description. You could make them more prominent, e.g. right at the top of the description or better yet in-game. I see that this does not fit the alien race language here, so I would be fine with controls in the description in this case ;-)
The tiles are clear, the animation works very well. Not too distracting but still it looks very nice. You get the hang of the hand movement easily. It is tile-based and you know it but it looks smooth. That is a really nice touch.
The music is also very nice, gives off good vibes, fits the mood of this puzzle game.
The stamp collection thing and the alien theme are very funny.
Overall, really well done game, congrats, this is awesome!
@gonutz after the first level, the instructions show up on screen if you wait a few seconds. It sounds like maybe I should have made the timeout period a little shorter, but ah well.
Amazing game! I love the charming aesthetic to the art and music, and the core mechanic is really intuitive and fun to work with. I'm not too good with puzzle games, so I didn't get to finish it, but it was fun enough that I never felt frustrated with the game.
a puzzle game made me feel stupid I love it :D
Probably my favorite entry of yours in a while! Really cute and original concept!
Solid puzzle game, really loved the alien language and theming you did. Nice job!
@fusionnist it's my favorite entry of mine in a while, too!
Amazing concept! The puzzle design is really good and challenging.
It is nearly perfect and very impressive that you did it alone, congratulations :clap:
Great entry! Difficulty curve was perfect, each level felt a little harder than the last, and I was still learning new tricks near the end. Only thing I tried that I was sad didn't work was holding space + X I thought would quickly snake the arm back. Having `X` at all was a nice touch, though!
Wow! I love the artstyle!.
Love it! The core mechanic feels fresh and the puzzles are really fun—just a bit tough for me, took quite a while to finish them. Please make a Steam version lol
The controls were a bit finnicky for me but overall a fun game.
PS I found it possible to believe aliens would create pixel art but not that their games would have human hands as the movement (I know this is a small thing to be bothered by)
One of my favorites so far. Very polished and well thought puzzles. The first one was a bit confusing to figure out what to do without tutorial but after figuring the core mechanics it was very fun. Good job!
Cool game, but a bit too difficult for me 😅 Overall, not bad!
Oohh I spent way too much time on this one last night 😅 It's the next morning for me now and it's time to reflect. I loved your game, this one was really clever. Its simple to learn, but my gosh hard to master haha. Its always satisfying when you set the stamp and the rods up for success. Sometimes a level would start and I was like "piece of cake!" and 20 minutes later I have a mental map about where the pieces should go but still no plan how to put them there I must say, but maybe its me, when the difficulty went up I was hoping that every level after that would be the last. Maybe because I set a time for each game to spend time on while rating and yours I spent already 3X as much on 😅 Which is ok of course, that's a compliment! I ended up checking the sourcecode to see how many levels there were to get back my motivation. A simple fix would have been to have some sort of indicator in-game, or in the description above to let the players know how many levels there were. Then you create expectation.
The game looks fun! My GF saw me playing it and was like "oohh can you send the link??". I love the alien language! I have a question though: does all the text accutally mean anything? Like: can it be translated? I saw a comment on itch that there were spelling mistakes and I was wondering if that player went through translating it or was just trolling
Other thing, what is your process on making puzzle games? I always see it as the most difficult type of game to nail. And taking a look on your website I see that you did multiple original puzzles. So you clearly have a method of making solid puzzle games Love your website btw! It's got a cozy vibe!
Screenshot 2025-10-11 002246.jpg
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every LD I go to find the new cassowary. this one the controls for moving the hand were a bit awkward so I often tied myself in knots. however it's quite a creative mechanic. I would also love to hear about your process if you can spare the time.
as always i'm extemely impressed by your compo !! excellent game ! my favorite stamp is this one Capture d’écran 2025-10-12 181154.png
I like puzzles. Took me a lot more time than I wished, but finished it, or it seems so? As I don't know any alien language, who knows…
This was a really unique challenge! I loved how everything was communicated clearly despite it all being in alien text. The puzzles were tricky, and there was always an "aha!" moment for each one when I figured out what I needed to do.
Only thing that's missing is that it'd be cool if there were a way to view all the stamps after you've collected them (the artwork is gorgeous).
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@wouter52 @alpacalypse re process: I feel like I have a few mechanical "themes" that I keep coming back to ("visit all these goal points in any order," "pull towards you vs push away from you," "two different characters/groups that are opposite relative to each other", "trace or extend along a path"). Also I tend to like wonky mouse controls and irregularly-shaped multi-tile objects. After a while, you get a sense for what mechanics are usually going to be able to create interesting puzzles.
A good sign that a set of mechanics can make interesting puzzles, in my opinion, is being able to build a "one-way door", where it's possible to move a character in one direction past an obstacle, but once they go past they can't come back.
In terms of level design, I usually find the most success by trying to think of one interesting interaction that you can do with the pieces (in this game, that would be something like, "what if we had to push a horizontal bar left and then right to get around an obstacle, using the same vertical bar both times?") and then trying to construct the rest of the level to force that idea to occur. I don't always succeed at forcing the idea to happen, and sometimes I end up permitting a lot of alternate solutions... but if a level is completable and the solution isn't obvious, then that's a good sign that even if there are alternate solutions they're probably also interesting.
Then I have to play through each level a lot, to try to judge difficulty and level order, and to make sure I'm not missing any simple ways to solve it. I don't always succeed at this either, which is why I often accidentally make the last level easier than the ones before, or put a really hard level too early, lol. Recently, I've realized that making a few "real" puzzles first, putting them at the end, and then trying to "fill in" the difficulty curve to teach different interactions in earlier levels, tends to create a better experience. I'm definitely still learning about how to do this better.
Wow, I ended up writing a lot. I hope this sort of answers your question, lol.
Thank you for the insight cassowary! I love these kind of deep-dives and I appreciate you taking time out of your day describing your process. I always wanted to create a puzzle game like this. I thought there would be some kind of mathematical method or something. But the process looks like more of an idea that takes shape + a lot of balancing. Still hard I think, especially for such a time window. But it sounds doable :grin:
honestly really well made. and i don't say that because we're also collecting stamps :P the, i think fifth level was quite the difficulty spike but it was a welcome one, challenging but fair and felt good to solve. the style is cute, the music is chill and the puzzles are rewarding, what more could i want.. well, more of them! oh and wasd would be nice.
also aw, this almost worked xP
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Congratz on the results! Those are very well deserved :smile: