debugman18 2025-10-07 03:02
The concept is pretty cool, and the art is really cute. The randomness can feel frustrating.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD58 → Random Walk
By nuzcraft
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 599 | 3.20 | 26 | |
| Fun | 626 | 2.93 | 26 | |
| Innovation | 229 | 3.54 | 26 | |
| Theme | 713 | 2.91 | 26 | |
| Humor | 411 | 2.93 | 26 | |
| Mood | 655 | 3.04 | 26 |
The concept is pretty cool, and the art is really cute. The randomness can feel frustrating.
Love this concept, so simple and neat. Very clean and well executed game!
I was confused too! I liked the flip animation though.
Fun game! The beginning is quite frustrating, but I persevered until the end and finished it in 351 steps.
More interactive elements with the character would be nice when you're not going in the right direction, whether it's bonuses or penalties.
Congrats!
Well, I am certainly confused. The level of randomness needs some tuning.
Yeah, I was really confused at first,the art is great!
Very addictive and nice-looking game!screen.PNG
really interesting concept... forcing a random walk down a path... but I would have liked to have additional ways to constrain the walk by placing things it wants to avoid... Love the graphics. Keep working on it.
What a cool idea! Super interesting experience - I got so incredibly frustrated, but I also couldn't stop playing. Nice job!
I love the Baba Is You style and coloring. This is actually the type of game that I've been really wanting to make for a while. Really good job! I'm giving it 5/5. =)
It's a pretty cool game. but the numbers are too high to get improvements. it would take too long and routine to play it to get expensive improvements.
The path is a neat little iteration on Unfair Flips. I'm excited to see this genre develop, like clicker games after Cookie Clicker.
I like this game! Although it felt difficult at the start, I was able to proceed very quickly after some decent luck. I enjoyed the positive feedback loop.
A super easy-to-grasp mini-game: the loop is clear, each run gets a bit smoother, and hitting the final goal feels genuinely rewarding. It’s surprisingly addictive—I just lost a good half hour to it!QQ20251012-232953.png
It’s really confusing at first. The concept is good, but it’s tough to get started. Nice visual style and solid sound design, though!
Wow, that was super confusing at first, not gonna lie! But that was a good thing I think - part of the game's spirit and unique mechanic. Honestly it took me a while to realize I could click the upgrade buttons, because I was so focused on figuring out the movement. This idea has a lot of potential though, I would probably add a bit more feedback and clarity around movement, like some visual cues that show "you tried to move this way". Right now it feels like you're just playing a slot machine and grinding, waiting for the points to go up.
Random interesting thought - it would be fun to play with "chance of success" probabilities of less than 25%, so that the player has to figure out that it's better to NOT move in the direction you want. I had some deep thoughts about this and eventually realized it's not THAT deep, but still interesting!!
Before I get into a design ramble, I want to say I think the presentation of the game is great. The interface is clean, the Baba Is You-style graphics are appealing, and the little question mark particles are fun. I also like the little text effects on the right side, it brings a lot of visual appeal.
Quick note, the option of hjkl navigation made me smile, but it seems like the 'J' key doesn't move the character? Might be a little bug.
Nicely selected scope, and good implementation of your vision. I'm glad I had the chance to play it! :smile:
Quick disclaimer: I don't want to come across as too pushy, because I know this is your game - this is just me doing a lot of thinking out loud. I'll have opinions about design, but I know that it's just my perspective, definitely not intended to be presented as a authoritative. Anyway, on with the ramble.
The concept of Unfair Flips is very interesting to me, mostly as an introspective experience. A meditation on randomness, and the kind of unreasonable expectations that folks generally have about randomness.
What's especially appealing to me is that the core concept "flip heads 10 times in a row with this coin" intuitively sounds very hard to accomplish - the odds must be very very low, especially if you have a "bad" coin at the start. What's neat, though, is that even though I think the odds are bad, the reality of how bad the odds are is many, many times worse than what I imagine. Like, I don't have a good mental framework to imagine how bad it is - by default my brain has some baked-in assumption that it'll happen sooner or later, it just might take a little bit.
That gap - the fact that I think it's unlikely to happen, but I'm still overestimating how likely it is to occur - is super neat to me, and thinking about how I evaluate odds & probability is a fun result of interacting with that game.
In terms of mechanics, the function of this game is essentially the same - you have to win a series of "confusion flips" to get your character to move in the direction you want to win the game. If you win enough flips in a row (and don't accidentally press the wrong direction like I did a couple times :laughing:) the game is cleared.
My mental response to it, though, felt quite different. There are probably a lot of factors at play here; for example, when I control a character with directional inputs it doesn't feel like the kind of action that should be random. My experience with coins is that flips are 50/50 odds, but my experience with walking around in games is that (generally speaking) I move in the direction I want 100% of the time. Relatedly, usually when I'm walking around in the game, I don't need to take an arbitrary path to reach my goal - if I happen to reach it in one way or another, the movement has achieved its purpose.
I think these pieces of dissonance (walking direction normally doesn't feel random, pathing normally isn't strict in top-down walk-around-ey games) make the game feel more unfair & arbitrary than the coin flip game. When a coin flips tails, I can say "well, that's the way coins go". When I walk closer to my objective but not on the path the game prescribed & get reset, my instinctive response is "that doesn't seem quite right".
This doesn't *really* matter in a mathematical way (it's all just coin flips behind the scenes) but I think this kind of game / experiment is probably most interesting when it plays into & exposes fallacies in the player's flawed expectations. Though I have played plenty of games that involve a character walking around in a top-down view, the idea that the character moves randomly & that the character must follow a particular path are both unique to this game.
I can still have some fun poking the buttons & seeing if the character reaches the end, but I don't think it has the same kind of impact for me. Becomes a more general meditation on the Skinner box-type behavior, I guess.
I think that it could be possible for this game to get more out of the movement concept - maybe making the game not require a static path, but instead giving the player an "energy limit" that gradually gets increased (which triggers the reset mechanism when it runs out) would make the randomness feel less arbitrary & more "normal" to the top-down perspective. Scoring & awarding XP would have to change, I imagine it could be based on how close the player got to the coin before their energy ran out.
There might even be some extra fun tension, getting that feeling of "I can't actually reach the coin, maybe I should just stop & cash out my XP" feeling along the way.
Of course, that would make it more game-ey and less of a probability experiment - might not hit the notes you're wanting.
I had other thoughts (maybe you flavor it as "the floor has a chance to break w/ each step) but they might not be the right way to go - there is an endearing quality to a character who just fails to walk in the direction they're supposed to over and over :smile:
At the end of the day, though, what matters most is your satisfaction with it. Thanks for indulging me in this too-long rambly pair of comments, and good luck on your future game-making endeavors!
@doctor-zeus thank you so much :heart: I've been thinking about the game design implications a lot as well and how it relates to unfair flips. I think it's materially different that flipping a coin is at base 50% heads while movement in a game is at base 100% gonna do what you want. There is a lot of room in this design space for new ideas and I loved hearing from you :smile: THANK YOU
A pretty okay game!
I liked the randomness aspect pretty well, I couldn't lose focus because otherwise I was misinputing directions, I liked the rush of "oh no I'm having a really good streak right now!".
Incremental-wise, I feel that the upgrade paths could be more balanced - right now it was difficult (unless you had a really good run) to really 'customize' your upgrades - the only decisions to make were during such long streaks, where you could get greedy, increase your multiplier and hope you'll make another good step - or go 'safer' route with increasing your chances (or just step value)! I wish there were more choices to make during the regular grind. It could be done with changing the scaling of values so that you could take multiple tiers of one upgrade in a row - or maybe adding a secondary system that feeds off amount of moves, successful or not? Those are my ideas, though I'm not really sure they would work in the framework of the game.
Anyway, nice!
That certainly was confusing. And when it started making sense, it became frustrating. It just takes forever to win. And frustration is the last thing people want in a game. The game looks nice but those odds are just too low.
Everbody found it confusing including me, which I guess was the point :wink: I like the game design a lot though. i think this is where jams shine, making games that frustarted players :laughing:
558 moves to reach the end - I think it's not great, not terrible :D However, it's a lovely game with an interesting concept, great graphics, cool sounds, and incredibly engaging loop. Great job, guys!
Finished the game in 656 steps At first, I thought I was doing something wrong, but then it all clicked. The game is really frustrating at the beginning, yet somehow incredibly addictive
I love that you added sound progression when the character successfully steps several times in a row — that small touch really sells the feedback loop
Overall, the game feels stylish and polished, which is probably why I played it all the way through. I also liked the core concept — I haven’t played the references mentioned at the end, so the mechanic actually felt quite fresh to me
If I were to change one thing, I’d slightly increase the early success rate, since the initial balance feels a bit too tight