barnabewild 2026-04-20 14:29
Great concept, went ahead without fully understanding how to play but were able to do around 20 levels. Would have liked a little more tutorial!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD59 → Metric Relay
By xotraz
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 78 | 3.73 | 47 | |
| Fun | 128 | 3.40 | 47 | |
| Innovation | 42 | 3.86 | 47 | |
| Theme | 55 | 4.17 | 47 | |
| Graphics | 56 | 3.96 | 45 | |
| Humor | 1 | |||
| Mood | 102 | 3.63 | 46 |
Great concept, went ahead without fully understanding how to play but were able to do around 20 levels. Would have liked a little more tutorial!
Nice puzzle with pleasant UI and sound feedback. Unfortunately I am a little bit dumb to figure out how I solved 5 puzzles in a row.
Wow, 120 levels? That’s impressive! The game looks great — a nice, chill puzzle experience
The idea is cool, and everything is drawn really well! From level to level, I think I've already figured it out, but when I get to the next level, I don't understand anything again xD
This is really well-polished! I made it through about 40 levels. I understand the concept but at a certain point my brain was like "ok we can't logic this out let's just place beacons in likely spots and roll with it" but I did start kinda learning the approach after a bit. I love puzzle games so this was great! Good work! AND it's a compo game? Even more impressive!
It looks really polished! The sounddesign is very satisfying. I just wish there was a bit of a tutorial, because I had no idea what I was doing most of the time, even trying to retrace my steps to see how I solved a puzzle. But you made alot of puzzles in this very short time!
Thank you all for the kind feedback, it is appreciated!
@barnabewild, @metalgear, @last-angle : I wish I had done a proper tutorial to explain the concept better, I probably could have managed it, but I got surprised by a few bugs.
@fassenberg, @last-angle : All 120 levels were generated by a few algorithmns, which is why there are so many. I 'just' had to tweak algorithmns, order levels (with another algorithmn), improve the rendering, and playtest a bit.
This looks and plays fantastic, i enjoyed all the levels I played (around 15), but would've loved a more in depth tutorial.
This ones cool! took me a while to figure it out after the 3rd iteration, and the music is absolutely nice
Insane amount of polish here, I don't understand how to solve the puzzles yet, I get that there are patterns in the distances between the beacons and the relays but I think there's some sort of feedback missing there
@juanrod707 Thank you for your feedback, I improved the game description to try to make the objective clearer.
I'm starting to get the hang of it I think? It's strangely addicting. It feels super polished compared to most games too.
Nice, has that intuitive feel that well-demonstrated mathematical concepts do. Good work.
Instead of a full-blown tutorial (though one would of course be good, time permitting) just being able to replay the "ping" animation more slowly and showing how each node's shortest path distance is calculated, and how the ambiguous groups are broken up, would probably help it "click" for players.
Very polished. The feedback in all parts of the game is done very well.
The mechanic is a bit hard to understand for people who are not familiar with it. Of course, that may just be the price of innovation. It may need a fairly long and clever tutorial as an introduction.
Great effort, really polished feel to it, and I love procedural / function type implementations! There's probably not many people (percentage wise) with the patience to work out the puzzles and enjoy the "system" to more than a few levels, but those who do will defintely enjoy this game.
The puzzles are really well done—they’re quite a challenge. I like your game.
Such a cool idea, really enjoy the vibe of it, though like a few others, couldn't always understand how to do better at it. Some trial and error got me to about level 22, but there's something really good in this. The music is lovely background music, the sound gels really well with it, and the whole look is nice and crisp. Well done!
dang, 120 levels is insanely impressive. I felt like the tutorial was lacking a little, but still barely enough for me to at least figure out what I was doing. Art design is also nice and simple, gets the job done. Audio is also nice and pleasant, still astonished about the 120 levels, holy cow did you sleep??? Anyways, great job :D
This was great!
Good puzzle game and I love the simplistic graphics that look really nice! All in all great job!
Well I can't say I really understood how to solve these other than just guessing and bruteforcing, but I got through 30 levels that way and had a good time. Really nice sound effects and visuals!
simple and fun!
Someone else said addicting, that's pretty accurate. I still don't FULLY understand, but it was possible nonetheless! Music also had me in a trance. Very nice experience haha
Simple, clean and efficiently designed game :wink: Did you use AI only for code or also for graphic/UI design ?
The concept of this game is simply brilliant. I’d suggest adding some kind of indicator to help visualize the current shortest paths, so players can make more informed decisions. You can always try to map it out mentally, of course, but it’s difficult to visualize the relationships between the different beacons. Incredible work, congratulations!
Ironically, I had to use an LLM to figure out the rules, and it only managed to get through to me on the third try — when it finally resorted to "Alright kid, imagine you had one apple and..." =) Overall, this turned out to be a really cohesive piece. UI, sound, gameplay — everything's in its place and fully delivers on the vision.
Thank you so much for your support. This is my first Ludum Dare with so much feedback.
The problem is hard to describe while keeping the atmosphere, I am happy you all managed to have fun still.
I discovered yesterday that one of the colors for an ambiguous group is very close to another, and now it is the only thing I see when I play. :grimacing:
The colors looked different on my palette, but it was mostly because one is slightly lighter, and when they glow, they are super hard to differentiate. So when you see one fewer different glowing color than the ambiguous group announced by the text, the orange group is made of two different groups actually and this is why.
@jacky-san I used AI as a starting point for all my code; a lot of it generates graphics and UI (like the button class). That said, I had to fix most hitboxes, enhance the layout, and adjust hazardous vectorial strokes.
There are only a handful of simple textures, created dynamically at the start. That gives the game a strong identity and, most importantly, was manageable without real graphics :grin:.
I was so happy with how it turned out that I also did the logo with objects. It is a glowing graph on top of moving arcs and lights, but it works.
Very solid! Is this a studied problem in graph theory or something? If you came up with it during the jam, I'm impressed. It makes for an interesting puzzle: I did about 40 or so.
Some of the early levels (row of boxes, triangle fan) are pretty repetitive; that's maybe where the downsides of generated levels become evident. I'd say that the main problem, though, is UX. It can be kinda hard to tell at a glance why certain nodes have the same signature: maybe each beacon could have its own color, and then when you hover over a node it could tell you the distances to each node.
Solid entry! I like the UI and the concepct. However, the game could make use of a little tutorial to teach the exact mechanics. I went through several levels not knowing what I was actually doing (just randomly clicking the dots until everything was green). Apart from this, well done!
I also feel like I didn't get the mechanics for many many levels, but overall, one of the best-made games here! Excellent entry. Good job!
wonderful game! using the simplest rules to emerge 120 levels with different dynamic. interaction & visual design is also so good
Просто и красиво но 120 уровней не смог пройти, за раз оставил на потом. Хорошая работа.
pretty amazing stuff!
This is interesting! I went through about a dozen levels and could sort of feel it starting to tickle my brain’s “develop an intuition for the structure of this puzzle” lobe. I was a little perplexed by the progression though—it would give me a series of interesting ones followed by a trivial “you have one beacon and the relays are connected in a straight line” one. Procedural generation could have used some more tuning, maybe. I agree that the sound design is very satisfying. Well done.
@caeonosphere
I did not come up with the problem; it is a very old known NP-complete problem which is relatively understudied.
But I did a research internship about solving this problem on a special class of graphs with *treewidth 2*. All the graphs shown there have treewidth 2. I knew they would be nice to play with and relatively easy to draw!
I did not find a polynonial time solution during the internship, but a colleague of mine did years after my attempt. This solution is very hard, I would never have found it, it and has never been implemented. So I resorted to a kind of brute force for the jam.
@caeonosphere @mahalis
About the start of the progression, thank you for the feedback.
This is more my fault than the generator. I implemented a special 'pedagogical' progression for the start of the game, which is strict. Each type of 'very easy' problem is shown twice, first with a few nodes and then with more.
I thought it was a good idea to show them twice, and people would be satisfied to do them in one second.
After this pedagogical section, there are two unintentional repeats that I should have definitely removed, though. The first is probably the one you experienced; it was supposed to be a tree, but it ended up being just one path.
I believe it starts to get real after level 20, and the more you advance, the more you get difficult classes of graph and difficult instances of them. But I admit it is not as linear as it should be, and I can understand it sounds like a 500-episode anime that gets 'real good at the second arc, I promise' :grin:!
I will probably rework this for a final version and try to improve the UI.
Oh boy. Math... Lol this was pretty punishing and I still don't fully grasp it but I did enjoy the graphics and polish. The math concept from my perspective was niche enough to have a more deliberate tutorial to understand why things work without allowing me to progress till i TRULY understand. And 120 levels is just too much and beyond necessary. Focus on making ONE solid tutorial level to express the concept of your puzzle theory. then have a reasonable amount of purposely designed puzzles that ramp up the abstraction of the theory nailed down in your tutorial, maybe introducing new concept layers as you go! My brain hurts and i feel now that I don't know Math. Maybe - I never knew...
[Thanks for submitting your game to stream!](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2756861534?t=01h17m05s)
And also thanks for giving me PTSD flashbacks from my Discrete Math days :laughing:
Really clean and polished!
Dropping a long over due comment here. Really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to play this game [on stream.](https://www.youtube.com/live/KSYoPmFIwTA?si=ceXwi0jIFB8YmYXe&t=11456)
My thoughts are shared in the VOD. Hope we see you back for LD60. ✌
Super cool idea for a game. I really enjoyed it, especially the presentation. It felt so slick. Wish I could rate it for the audio too since it really added to it. Simple and elegant.