Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → kaliuresis
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | Rollslop | jam | 511 | 3.35 | 3.40 | 3.67 | 4.02 | 3.15 | 3.05 | 2.79 | 3.19 | |
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Neuronic Netronics | compo | 62 | 3.76 | 3.30 | 4.52 | 3.17 | 3.60 | 3.04 | 1.88 | 3.15 | |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Game of the Name | compo | 158 | 3.55 | 3.32 | 4.22 | 4.37 | 3.25 | 2.75 | 3.00 | 3.40 | |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Space Stitcher | compo | 229 | 3.42 | 3.06 | 4.20 | 3.40 | 3.28 | 2.92 | 2.04 | 3.06 | |
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | The Antidelivery Room | compo | 171 | 3.63 | 3.52 | 4.08 | 4.13 | 3.69 | 3.36 | 4.02 | 3.50 | |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Gene Graph Garden | compo | 66 | 3.82 | 3.75 | 4.12 | 3.55 | 3.25 | 2.84 | 2.38 | 2.91 |
Fun game! Interesting blend of real-time and programming. I'm sad about the anti-octopus specism, I thought they were friendly at first. I found that you can overlap instruction tiles to make sort-of diagonal move tiles, which is probably a bug but also kind of fun to play with.
Nice game! I liked playing with the door on the last level to isolate enemies, it gives more options to play with than just waiting for enemy patrols. It would have been fun to see more levels with doors/other mechanisms in the middle.
Nice little programming game. I liked the backstory of being an alien spaceprobe drawing crop circles. It would be fun to see patterns drawn on a 2d field, I think your programming system would extend pretty naturally.
@Justin_C The orange cells are supposed to be lava, they show up as empty since they are part of the ground layer. Hint: try to avoid the lava using predefined turns. I could definitely have made the visuals and wording more clear, thanks for the feedback!
@matimat Hmm, those messages are intended when you have not solved any levels or made a solution yet. If there is nothing else in your log.txt there must be an unlogged error or crash somewhere. Sorry about that.
@3rdHunter Thanks for the feedback! If I ever get around to doing a post jam update I will definitely add more early levels to teach the individual mechanics.
@Pincushion You have 217 fruits in your screenshot, there was a bug in the counting code where it would skip some cells in certain situations. It should be fixed now.
I really like the style of this game. I'm assuming the upgrade and next day commands are planned features that aren't implemented?
The ship controls are pretty good, and the graphics are excellent. I felt that the searching the whole planet for spheres part of the gameplay was much less interesting than the piloting the ship through rings part, but that might be a personal preference.
The atmosphere and storyline were great. The controls felt a bit clunky on keyboard and mouse. I think adding options to swap roll and yaw between keyboard and mouse, and to invert the vertical tilt controls would have helped make it feel a lot more natural. I know adding controls options is hard to do in a jam, but I think it's pretty important when movement is the main point of the game.
I had a lot of fun with this! It would have been nice if there was a way to see upcoming trains so you can strategize your crate storage and get the satisfaction of having a 5 long train completely filled by the robotic arms.
The flying mechanics felt pretty good. I had a slightly choppy framerate, which combined with the motion blur was a bit sickening. More mission variety would be nice, but I know that's hard with the time constraints. Other than that nice game!
Really interesting mechanics and nice graphics. There were a few times where the game seemed to soft lock.
Putting character customization in a jam game is impressive, and the core game loop is pretty fun. After the 2nd or 3rd day it seemed like every package I sent out was considered a mistake, even though the weight and stamp seemed fine and it didn't set off the bomb scanner. I'm not sure if it was a bug or if I'm missing something.
Interesting concept, but the UI clunkiness made it very difficult to understand what was going on. I think having routes separated from individual vehicles would work better, since I found that I would often want to assign more trucks to a route after drawing it, and multiselection seemed buggy. The lack of any feedback when you accidentally transform a vehicle was also confusing.
If the interface was much more polished I can imagine it being very fun to optimize routes. Depending on what you want the focus of the game to be I think having a separate planning phase and execution phase could work better, where you would need to tightly optimize throughput to meet the time limits. As it is the game is mostly about micromanaging units, which is fine but less interesting to me personally.
Also not sure if this is just a godot problem or if you could fix it, but the html version on firefox just showed black after the loading screen.
The losing abilities on taking damage mechanic is a great idea. If the switching animation were removed or much faster it would add an interesting gameplay element where you need to switch to perform different actions. It would also have been nice if the introduction to some of the consoles was a bit longer; for the last few I barely figured out what new thing was added before I found the next one.
I always love upgrade systems. It would have been nice if upgrades were more frequent or the game were longer so you can get a build going to the point where you can really fight the wolves. The camera transitions and view through trees could use some work. I spawned in one time being attacked during while the camera was still moving, and even after the transition I could only see trees.
Moving around felt pretty good. I'm not sure if I was imagining it or not but I felt like I could run faster by moving diagonally, which is nice. Shift to sprint seems like an important thing to include in your controls description.
There is no ending. I had some ideas for one but sadly ran out of time to implement them.
Nice implementation of Sigmar's Garden. Some of the symbols could use more contrast, the salts in particular blended in with the background. The selection outlines were also very hard to see. I know the original game does not do this, but partially greying out all marbles except the ones that can match with your current selection could help make the game easier to learn.
I like the visual style is pretty nice. Only a single package was spawning for me. The controls seemed pretty intuitive, but it would have been nice to have a bit of simple animation on the drone such as tilting based on its acceleration.
The gameplay was simple but pretty fun. As someone who love mildly exploitative tech in games, I liked the ability to spam pickup/drop to move faster. I found I could outrun enemies even with no speed upgrades using that method. The fences were a bit frustrating, especially when your character barely fits through when carrying the rune.
Neat idea, but fixing the lag and adding ability to restart when you fail are necessary to make it playable. I know you didn't have time to configure the graphics, but turning off motion blur or adding an option to do so would be nice.
Very fun little game! You even randomize the character colors. It would be nice to make it so items can't spawn on top of you.
I really like the sound effects. Great job for such a short development time.
The base gameplay is great. I agree that this would be very fun with a bit more variety. The controls explanation being a bit more descriptive would have been nice. I only realized you could rotate with middle mouse because of the screenshots, and I never figured out what the 4th ability does.
I really like the concept! It's fun seeing your swarm of fish grow. I didn't finish since the framerate got really bad, but if it were better optimized this would be quite fun.
This is a very well done Zachlike! I had a lot of fun with this one. It seems I have beaten or tied all of the LOC records :). I might come back to try to crack some of the cycles records. I would have liked to be able to use acc in the conditional jump instructions, but I suppose having an extremely constrained instruction set is the whole point.
The concept is very interesting! The fact that unusable cards are not shown made it confusing to learn, since if you make a mistake you have no idea what you missed. If they were greyed out instead you can learn that you need to save space or SP to do something. The last fight seems like it's impossible if you're unlucky on the enemies first flame lance placement.
Very cool concept! I didn't see any healing mechanics, which I would have expected since max hp is an upgrade? It's possible I just didn't get far enough. It would also have been nice to have descriptions of what the boss upgrades did.
Ah, I guess I just got unlucky my first few runs and never saw it. I tried again and was able to get a lot farther. Capture.PNG
Neat puzzle game! It was pretty challenging but I managed to finish it. It felt like there were two distinct parts of the puzzle to solve, figuring out the correct layout and actually moving pieces where you want them. The first part was interesting and satisfying to solve. For second part it was easy to figure out what to do, but it took a lot of clicks to actually make happen. As a result moving pieces ended up feeling more like ui clunk than a puzzle. The fact that pieces rotate about their start square instead of where you click was also a bit counterintuitive.
I like the graphics and music! Unfortunately I ran into a lot bugs that got in the way of playing the game, such as modules not going in places they should fit after deleting, or multiple modules being selected at the same time.
Cool art and music! It was a bit hard to tell the hitboxes of the objects until you click on them, especially when they were overlapping. It would help a lot to have a faint outline that's always visible, or maybe a button to toggle outlines.
Cute game. The map seemed a bit too big for how much was in it, especially when you need to backtrack a long way to heal. Was there any purpose to the key room? I think I defeated the boss but never needed the keys.
The concept is cool and for the most part the levels make good use of it. The part where you have to jump across the red and yellow key blocks felt inconsistent, where sometimes you hit the platforms while holding space without getting a jump. The last level didn't really feel like it interacted with the mechanic, since you only need one space press and it's not made much more interesting or difficult to do in minimum presses. A game like this with a leaderboard for completing levels with minimum presses could be really fun.
The concept of building a mech and exploring is really cool. Just having damage and and armor stats without much feedback on what they do makes it hard for the player to make reasoned decisions. It would also be nice if it showed how much food and fuel you need to travel somewhere, baring any events that add/remove them. I couldn't figure out how to make it to the first town.
Nice puzzle game! The camera made it pretty hard to tell how everything on the level was connected, and all the transparent platforms were a bit hard to visually parse.
Interesting puzzle concept and neat art style. I enjoyed the middle levels a lot but the last two felt a bit too tedious with so many dwarves. As others have mentioned the animations are a bit slow. Maybe having a ghost preview image of all the dwarves when you hover over a time slot could help.
The graphics are very polished. I wish there was more complicated gameplay with planning out your ship or micromanaging turrets. If there was more part variety and interactions between different parts it could be pretty interesting.
This was a fun game, I made it to round 13. The enemy coloring made them difficult to see at times, especially when they're only in your peripheral vision since you need to focus on dodging bullets.
Solutions: https://imgur.com/a/bcNBVfM
@zungryware I definitely agree that the mechanics are not introduced gradually enough. The second level has 3+ new mechanics required to solve it. I do think the concept deserves a post-jam update with more levels.
@endurion Thanks for letting me know about the slowness. The physics should be independent of framerate. There's another step to get the extra jump height, although in hindsight I should have made the level more focused.
@doommustard The block is supposed to just be a block. The purpose of it is that (rot13) ubyqvat bagb n oybpx gung vf snyyvat hc ybjref lbhe tenivgl.
@zungryware If you're still interested in retrying it, I have released a post-jam update that has more levels and hopefully does a better job of teaching the mechanics https://kaliuresis.itch.io/space-stitcher
@mango-malarkey is there a log.txt in the same folder as the exe?
@fahim-faysal Thanks for the great feedback! I agree that zooming out or having smaller levels would help. The main reason for the current zoom level is that the current rendering is recursive and only supports going through 2 stitched rooms, since going deeper requires more complicated visibility checking.
I'll have to think more on how to better organize the hub. I like the idea of having everything be in-world but I do see how the current layout would be confusing.
The encouragement really helps. I was starting to run out of steam by the time I finished the post-jam version.
The atmosphere and art are great! There were a lot of blind jumps where it would have been nice to have some indication of where you're supposed to go without trial and error jumps to your death. I'm also not sure if wall jumping is intended or if that's just buggy platforming.
It's neat that this is in pico 8, I was expecting it to be a puzzle script game based on the art style. My main complaints are that you don't have an undo button and restarting requires bringing up the menu, but that wasn't a big deal for any of the puzzles. The puzzle mechanic is interesting. While it's not the deepest mechanic I've seen in sokoban games, it's good enough for the length of the game and the level design explores it well. I didn't notice any issues with the order of difficulty that some other commenters mentioned.
This is an interesting idea, I finished the main 10 levels. Sadly the best strategy seemed to be spamming a bunch of lines until the numbers matched, it would have been cool if it actually forced you to make well thought out structured diagrams. After 3 or 4 levels it was a bit repetitive. Something like each demon having a different symmetry group you need to match or some other restrictions like only use circles might be neat.
I was able to accidentally win my first time by spamming pander before I realized what you're supposed to do, but with some balance to force you to actually think about the different abilities and jurors it could be interesting.
Cool game and great music! I'm not sure exactly how the different combat mechanics were meant to interact, but there are definitely interesting directions you could go with it. The intro was intriguing and had me wanting more.
This game is infuriating but I think that's intentional. It could have worked better if it kept track of which line was currently being drawn so you can't cross over except at a vertex. That would also make it easier to implement continuous drawing instead of coloring entire segments when you hit a certain point. It felt weird that later levels get easier because the whole screen is covered with lines.
The summoning mechanics of this are very cool! We had similar ideas for summoning based auto-battlers. It was fun to discover what the different components do. I liked that it lets you customize things to the extent of making creatures that are detrimental to your team. I would have like to be able to separately control the target from the trigger, since that would add a lot of fun options for abilities. Damage buffs persisting between rounds was a bit strange and seemed too strong. It eventually reached the point where both sides just one shot each other, and as far as I could tell there's nothing I could do to prevent that.
I found that the infinite loop soft-lock happens fairly often unless you use damage buffing effects, since there are a lot of damage reduction effects. I also had the game crash with this error message, which happens when trying to perform an invalid swap between a small and large item: ```xml ___________________________________________ ############################################################################################ ERROR in action number 1 of Step Event2 for object cSummoningIngredient_Draggable:
Unable to find instance for object index 104393 at gml_Object_cSummoningIngredient_Draggable_Step_2 ############################################################################################ gml_Object_cSummoningIngredient_Draggable_Step_2 (line -1) ```
Overall great game. It has a nice magic-tinker and chill vibe that I really liked. Nice work!
I loved this game!
As others have said the game does not explain its mechanics clearly and the ui is not the most intuitive. Even with the itch page descriptions it took a while before I had any idea what was going on. I would have liked the exact math of combat to have been spelled out (for those wondering it's attacker's attack - defender's defense, with attack being doubled for opposing elements). Showing the math in the damage numbers or a combat log would be even better. Being able to see the propensities of enemies instead of having to memorize them all would also have helped a lot with learning. There's a bug where using propensity items increases the defense number but doesn't actually increase defense, which made things even more confusing (I played on the HTML version).
Once I got past the learning phase it was very fun. There are some balance issues like training being way better than any other option, making runs heavily RNG dependent. Until the boss you mainly just need 1 or 2 strong minions to win fights, so summoning more than 5 minions wasn't very helpful. I found studying to be nearly useless, since even if you know the elements of the bosses attacks it's hard to get more than 5 strong units. The reason training is so good is based on the design of how defense works. Facing a team of 5/4 enemies, a 4/3 minion is useless while a 6/5 minion is invincible. This means the outcomes of fights swing rapidly with a small amount of training, and a single strong unit is sufficient to take on a team of 5 since weaker units do minimal to no chip damage. The description of training says that body minions only gain defense and soul minions only gain attack, but that would make spirit minions way stronger than the others, so I think the way it actually works in game is better. Balance is very hard to get right in a jam, so it is understandable that it's not perfect.
The boss generally seemed janky/buggy. The timer ticking to 0 is very ominous and great for setting mood so it's sad it stays at 1. Room actions being available but useless during the boss fight was a bit confusing. I had to fight the boss a second time after bringing it down to 0 health. Maybe it was supposed to be a phase 2 but it's health stayed at 0 so it instantly died again. The boss sprite also stays on screen after starting a new run.
Overall the mechanics are fun and deep and the music was great. I wrote a lot of nitpicks but that's only because I liked the game and thought a lot about its mechanics. Great job!
Nice strategy game. The abilities were cool and there were potential synergies. It took a long time to get to the point where using the fancy abilities is better than just doing basic attacks, but I think that's just a numerical balance problem that's hard to get right in a jam. Resonate was very op, and as soon as I got it I was instantly killing every enemy by leaving a mana on the ground before the start of each level. Resonate also seemed to still apply even when I left all my units behind.
I had a soft-lock where an enemy was jumping around forever on the edge of the map. Seems like the game is trying to push it out of an invalid location but never settling down. It initially teleported to the edge when another enemy walked into it. There were a few other bugs like not being able to pick up orbs from enemies that died mid suplex, the ability buttons not blocking movement, and some bugs with the pathfinding/walkable areas on slopes, but those weren't as game breaking.
Capture.PNG
Capture.PNG Oh no, what horrific monster have I summoned? I had a lot of fun figuring out how to prompt jailbreak this :joy:. It's a pretty simple application of an LLM, but still very fun to play around with.
I was able to barely finish on my second attempt. The first time it took me a few minutes to figure out what I was supposed to do, I thought the circle in the instructions was referring to the summoning circle. Having a bit more visual feedback like particles or a color change when you're inside the focus circle might have helped make that more clear. I actually found the difficulty of focusing to be about right for me. It's difficult enough that I was forced to actually focus to do it and it's almost meditative, especially with the mood set by the sound effects. I'm a (not very good) osu player which maybe helped me a bit with it. The sound design is impressive and I loved the ending. Nice work!
I managed to summon pickles! I liked that you can sprint diagonally to move faster, it helped a lot when walking back and forth to the bat cave. I was a bit confused about how to use the knife, I was able to kill things by holding the view diagonally but it seemed like I was missing something to use it properly.
It seems there are two level 7's, and the second level 7 relies on the simultaneous hearing mechanic that isn't explained until level 8. That issue aside I enjoyed the game. I agree with other commenters that you could get more levels out of this mechanic. One interesting interaction that I noticed was being able to ring the bell with a box, although I'm not sure if you could make an interesting level around that.
This is so much fun for such a simple concept! Everything is very well executed and the levels are all unique and interesting. Great job!
The idea of crafting monsters to fight for you is cool. The crafting ui would greatly benefit from any kind of text or tooltip description of what nodes do. It's unclear what effect a lot of them have, especially since most of the time the player is zoomed out figuring out where to go, and the graphical icons are very small. It was also confusing to tell which ones I had to stop in and which I would get passing through. Even just a name for each node would help, although a full description is much better. I would have preferred having a blank circle with a text label over an icon with no description. The fights also lacked any kind of visual feedback; it was not clear what was dealing damage to what. Even very simple attack and damage taken animations like wiggling their sprite would help a lot. Damage and health numbers would also be great. Another thing that could have been done to improve clarity here is to make all fights one on one. This would have made things much easier to follow and strategize around while keeping the core game mechanic and not increasing your workload.
Overall nice concept but it's missing some crucial elements.
The story seemed a bit convoluted, which I think added to the confusion of what I was supposed to do. Once I figured it out it worked well, although it didn't seem like there was much to do beyond just dragging things onto the portal. The ability to move/delete buildings would have helped make the factory optimization part more engaging, and would let you tune things so that optimization actually matters. This game had a lot going on but I think it could have benefited from being simpler and more focused.
So much fun and incredibly polished in every aspect. I'm amazed you can make something this good in 3 days. I would definitely buy a longer version of this game. Amazing job to all of you!
I managed to get a 1:56.24 any% on the speed run version, I might come back to try to crack top 9.
Fun movement mechanics. I was able to climb vertical walls with wall jumping and double jump, which felt like it bypassed a lot of the game. I can see why you removed double jump for expert mode on the post-jam update. In the post-jam version I wanted to play on potato mode since I had frame rate issues, but the short draw distance doesn't work well with how large the level is so I had to settle for the lower frame rate.
Neat concept! The fact that it's so easy to try different juries made it a lot of fun to play around with and see how different people interact together. I managed to get 4 of the winning juries on my own but had to look up a hint for the last (the attorney general one, there's a bug(?) where logan and lynne brought her up as a non-sequitur without alice there, which confused me a bit). The decisions don't always seem to correspond perfectly with the discussion and there were a few parts where it seemed a bit unpredictable whether certain conversations would happen or not. Other than that the system was fairly logical and I was able to think through how to assemble a jury with a bit of trial and error. Great job!
@zinkler Thanks for the kind words! I tested the game again after reading your comment. It's possible to beat most of the bosses, but I think I tuned things too much based on the strongest team setups. A few of the abilities are only useful if you plan around them, and can be detrimental otherwise, so the average random team is pretty bad. If I had time to tune things I probably would make those more rare and make simpler abilities that are always useful more common.
I love that experience you had summoning the boss. Things like that are exactly what I was hoping for :)
Better visualization was definitely something I wanted that I had to cut for time. My original idea for that was to have a word cloud showing you the strongest matching words, so you would be able to see words grow and shrink as you type. Combining some of the elements so you have less you need to look would also probably have been good.
I love the art style but the lack of color does make it a bit hard to see what's happening when things get chaotic. Overall very good game. Nice work!
Controlling multiple factions and trying to balance them to destroy each other is a cool concept. There's definitely some interesting things you could do with the idea.
I don't think a darkness level works great for this type of puzzle game, it mostly meant I just had to blindly guess what looks like the intended solution is instead of actually knowing why I want to pull a specific lever. Other than that it was pretty good for a short puzzle game. I found the first two levels gave you more imps than necessary at the end since you can move the imps between levers from across the wall, but maybe that is intentional to make it easier.
This was a cool game! I found an exploit where you can place multiple towers on top of each other if you flick your mouse from a valid spot before clicking. It's not really helpful and it blocks future upgrades but it was fun to do. I think the game could lean more into the core mechanic more and force more strategy around the realms. Right now the only difference was the road shape. More enemy variety and different tower types would naturally help with that. You could also have effects that cross between realms somehow, like a unit that can teleport enemies into a different realm. Overall great job for a first jam!
That was a cool puzzle game! I wish the positioning of the earth and nature wizards mattered more, since the positioning and direction are the only things you control and need to think about. I also think the earth and nature wizards were also a bit too similar, since controlling the walls vs. waiting for the timer never mattered. There are a lot of cool things that could be done if you let the wind wizard push other wizards or redirect the fire and ice wizards' projectiles, especially if you could have multiple wind wizards in some levels. Overall good job!
I had to check the comments to make sure I wasn't crazy about the pigs being impossible. Also wish you could pop the bubbles when you click on them. Overall great entry. :)
This is a cute golf game. Having some camera control would have been nice, since it was pretty hard to align things in certain spots and at one point Molly was completely behind the rotating wall. A manual reset button would also be good. Very good for your first game.
The core of the game is cute and fun, but the protector ai really needs some work. Even when I made enough of them to start lagging the game they would wander off to fight a distant enemy while ignoring the ones surrounding my base and killing my workers. The micromanagement ui was not good enough to compensate for the bad ai. I think turning off collisions between your units could also help with pathfinding. If not for those major technical issues I think the game would be pretty good, and I did enjoy the beginning part before enemies became a problem.
This is an interesting challenge. Character movement would feel a lot nicer with jump height being controllable based on how long you hold the button, and if there was a bit more sideways air control. That said it was kind of fun figuring out how to control jump height using coyote frames.
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.
Incredible! I'm impressed with the scope you managed to pull off during a jam. The end game had a few soft-locks where the ball would get stuck until I reset when moving up through layers too fast or I would get stuck with antigravity permanently on after dying, but aside from that it was a lot of fun and very well polished considering how big the game is. I'm curious what your original concept was and how much was added on or cut from your initial plan.
Nice twist on sokoban. It me took around 90 min to solve all the levels. A button to reset without having to exit to the level select would have been nice to have. I also ran into the undo limit once, I can't imagine it's using enough memory that it would be a problem to make it much bigger.
Interesting concept, but as it is it doesn't feel like there's good way to play strategically. As others have indicated having an actual number instead of just beeping speed would help a lot. Some way to flag known mines like in normal minesweeper would also been nice
@gargantuan-janitor Here's your reminder
@jimbly That sounds like a bug, but it is possible to solve without that. Those are the intended tools, they're roughly based on how real neural networks work with linear layers followed by a non-linear activation function (in this case the function is clamping to [-1, +1]). There are also a couple other "hack" tricks that can be useful.
@talif-moor Yeah, I knew it could probably use some explanation but I like non-verbal puzzle games and the thematicness of unsupervised learning too much to give up on that idea. I still think it could work without explanatory text but it would need a lot more fine-tuning and play-testing to make the visuals and feedback more clear. I've added some hints to the description to help explain the basic mechanics.
@gargantuan-janitor You can create links from non-input nodes by clicking near the edge of the circle, I'll add that to the hints. For the automatic case switching I chose to do that since there are some puzzle exploits from letting you manually switch cases, but maybe there could have been a better solution. It might also have just been fine to let people cheat to skip levels considering how difficult they can be, and the cheating method is not very obvious either.
My setup with wasm is that I write to a wat file (the text format for wasm) in vim, with a build script running the wat2wasm command whenever I save. The javascript side continuously checks the hash of the main.wasm file, and will reload it when it changes. I have the data separated from the update loop, so that it can be reloaded without losing state or having to refresh the page. At least for a project this small everything was nearly instant.
The graphics are a buffer that gets directly copied onto the canvas from the js side, and similarly the audio is just writing samples from a ring buffer into a js audio worklet. For data structures I have hard-coded addresses for everything, which would probably be a problem if the project grows but it worked out fine for a jam.
This was my first time trying this and I just learned things by reading the wasm docs (which are thankfully not too long) about a week before, so there are definitely ways this could be improved. One thing I originally wanted that I didn't have time to setup before the jam was a custom pre-processor that I could use to have macros, binary file embedding, and a more flexible way to layout memory.
I definitely wouldn't recommend doing hand wasm like this except for fun or to optimize specific functions, but I think a similar setup with a higher-level language before wasm would work very well. The normal way web builds are done is with emscripten, which is meant to let you run desktop apps on the web and consequently it has tons of bloat like emulating a file system which isn't really necessary if things are made for the web in the first place. As a comparison the last web game I made for ludum dare used emscripten and was a 2.58 Mb wasm file, while this one has a 15 kb wasm file.
@dhim Definitely agree that a different visualization method could work better. Having something with more continuity across zero would have helped make it slightly more intuitive.
I had a local git repo which is included in the source zip. I've put it on github just now: https://github.com/kylerNat/ld57-Neuronic-Netronics/tree/main
@baturinsky The first three levels were intended to be the braindead tutorial levels where the only challenge is figuring out the controls and there are only a small number of possible things to click, but I definitely still underestimated how confusing they are.
I hadn't heard of AssemblyScript before, it looks interesting. I was planning on doing C to wasm for next time, but AssemblyScript looks like an potential alternative
@loveapplegames There are a couple ways to solve level 5. The main intended way is to (scroll to reveal) ``` Make a loop of neurons, which will stay on forever. ``` The other method, which is a bit less practical, is to ``` Create a delay line long enough to pass the signal from the on case to the off case. ``` There's also a bug where deleting nodes/links does not count as editing your solution and doesn't clear your progress, but that is very much a bug and not intended or necessary to complete any levels.
I liked the art a lot. I think the infinite energy loops happen a bit too frequently, it would have been more interesting to me if they were something that I had to deliberately plan out instead of just happening on their own. Having to click between two blocks over and over to generate energy also felt a bit tedious, if the energy limit was lower (maybe even just on and off) or there were more moving parts you needed to manage it might have worked better. Overall nice entry, I know it's very difficult to fine tune puzzle mechanics like that during a jam.
Fun game. I made the pickup radius large enough that the game breaks and instantly goes to the shop after pressing play, so I'll consider that a win :). Then I kept upgrading magnet until I was getting $7498 every time I click play, which I think is the full map since it stopped increasing. The wall jump felt useless since a double jump feels like the same height without the wall restriction. It also seemed bugged where it would use up a double jump and wall jump at the same time. I appreciated all the snake puns.
Nice take on the theme! I considered doing something with garbage collection but couldn't come up with a good gameplay idea for it.
I found the cycle mechanic slightly frustrating, since they switched quickly enough that it just felt like there were arbitrary times where you're not allowed to interact. I think the big thing that contributes to that feeling is that there's no action that you can only do outside the garbage collection cycle. Either slowing things down and making the two phases feel much more distinct or making everything real-time in a single mode would have felt better, but as it is it's in a weird middle ground.
A part of me wants to nitpick that you're playing more as an operating system than a garbage collector, but I get that it's probably artistic license so you can have the funny program names :)
Very nice game!
My main complaint would be that it feels too zoomed in, where most of the time you can't see the effect of pushing buttons, especially the first time you encounter one. That level also feels like an anti-tutorial for the dwarf where it incorrectly teaches you that the dwarf ignores coins, since the first thing you see is that he walks straight through the coin that spawns along his path.
Wonky hitboxes aside, I actually like the speed of the original version more than the post-jam version. It feels smoother and more responsive without the delay between your movements. Maybe one way to make it feel more responsive without it being too fast would be if you cancel the current move when you release the button within some distance, so that you stay inside the square you were in when you released even if you already started walking to the next. Another option would be to make it so you only move when you press a button and not while you hold it, although that would more drastically change the feel of the game.
Aside from those issues I had a great time with it :)
Cool concept. Watching the value of everything get added up was satisfying. I liked the unit-y joke. It could use some more difficulty ramping. Past a certain point it seemed like there were enough items spawning and the profit margins were large enough that it felt impossible to lose just buying every unit.
Cool game! It would have been nice to have a visual representation of your orientation, since going down seemed to be important. As it is it seems you need to just get your pitch close to -90. I liked the reveal of the creatures. At one point I thought the game was doing some space warping to trap you when you get below 9000m, but it turns out I was just disorientated XD
@noobman64 Thanks! The reviving was intentional since I like hidden "life after game over" mechanics, although it probably needs to be rebalanced since if you just wait around long enough you're pretty likely to have a heart spawn near you.
@macron There actually are more health pickups, but I probably made them a bit too rare. It seems the general sentiment is that the game is a bit too hard. I still get surprised how much my perception of a game's difficulty gets warped by having made it, even when I try to account for that bias.