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A jam submission

Pleroma & KenomaView game page

A solitaire zen game about the space between light and dark.
Submitted by Oneirical — 2 hours, 17 minutes before the deadline
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Pleroma & Kenoma's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Innovation#24.0004.000
Theme#33.8333.833
Enjoyment#53.8333.833
Technically Sound#54.1674.167
Overall#93.4173.417
Graphics#103.5003.500
Audio#181.1671.167

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted (2 edits) (+1)

OK, it took me a bit to figure out how to play, but I really enjoyed the process of figuring it out! Testing my theory as to finalize in my mind what did what was great! And then there's the actual game itself!

As a huge fan of puzzle games, I really enjoyed it. My main criticism is that there isn't really any way to influence what tiles you'll draw, it's completely random as far as I can tell. While in one sense this is a good thing since it forces you to play around what you get, on the flip side, it's a negative since you're at the mercy of RNGesus, and since I can't help but view this as a type of solitaire, in which everything is deterministic (though there is also a bit of luck there, but it's still deterministic), I can't help but view the luck of the draw as a negative. 

I'd say a bag system, where you're guaranteed to get one of every tile before you can get another, but the two sides have independent bags could really up the level of strategy that goes into the game, cause then you'd be able to carry over the tiles from one bag into the influence that belongs to the other bag. It would also let you hypothesize as to what would come next. 

Of course, the bag system could also lead to the game becoming solved (much like how one version of tetris that uses bags become solved), but the turn limit almost fixes that. At most, you'd be able to fully cycle through a total of three bags, and since you need to swap sides, that would mean you have an average of only refilling your bags on each side once, and then dipping into half of the next bag, which would maintain your randomness factor. 


OK, I'm done drooling over my hypothetical strategy solitaire game (if you couldn't tell, I've uhh, played a lot of solitaire, and several different kinds of solitaire). 

Overall, great game, and I will thoroughly enjoy it (and will possibly be the only one to still play it in 5 years when I randomly remember that it exists). 

Puzzle/solitaire enthusiast score is a solid 7.2/10. (I wavered a lot between 6.8 and 7.5, so just settled for the middle). 

Edit: I just got to 9, so I'll stop there so I have time to check out the other games. So far though, this one is the most in my niche, so it gets the medal for 'the game I am most likely to play in the future'

Edit 2: I just got 11 

Submitted (2 edits) (+1)

The theoretical max is 16, but I'm thinking the practical max is probably closer to 14, since even that would take crazy luck.


Edit: OK yeah, so, I can consistently get to 10 (occasional bad luck puts me below, but 10 is average at this point). Anything above that requires good luck. I'll let yall know if I break the 12 barrier. 


One more thing, do you think you could add a tiny update with a 'restart game' button (preferable accessible even if you didn't run out of moves)? (I'd understand if you didn't want to, but I'd be super thankful for it)

Submitted(+1)

:D

Developer (2 edits)

This is much more commitment than I was expecting from anyone. I am thoroughly impressed by your high score. Thank you so much!

> I'd say a bag system

This would have been pretty easy to make (a simple array of integers), but I decided against it, as it would allow you to do some stuff like "okay, this game has had 3 "1", so I am much more likely to get a different number on my next draw..." which can lead to situations like "damn, I would have done better had I counted my tiles better". I suppose I could have added counters showing how many remaining tiles there are of each type, but that's exiting the 48h timeframe.

My original design was a bit different. I wanted to have multiple different types of Planes and flavour to match. For example, a "dark" plane that slowly tends towards darkness every turn. Or an "assimilative" plane that causes the rows next to it to slowly converge to match its assigned polarity. However, Sunday, I got caught up for nearly 4-5 hours making the transition between black and white seamless when you press "5" - programming-wise, it is super cursed. I was learning the game engine and the Rust programming language at the same time.

I don't really want to touch this again for a little while. But eventually, the shame of having "unsafe{}" and "static mut" in my codebase for any employer to be horrified by might get the better of me and bring me to improve my game.

Check out the physical card game "Urbion" if you liked this. I took inspiration from it for the "balancing rows" core mechanic, though the whole swap-sides-and-claim thing is by me.

Submitted(+1)

Well, I just really like puzzle games and solitaire games, so this just fell right into my niche! 

Yeah, wanting to avoid the bag system makes sense for what you described (same thoughts as what I called 'making it a solved game'). 

And yeah, very understandable to not want to open up the code again (for a variety of reasons). The different plane types would have made this much more interesting! Cause, theoretically, a perfect game would have you continuously getting the exact same tile every time, so having some variety of planes that act different to break that theoretical up could've been cool! Though, for what it's worth, the transition looks very smooth. For a game that you were making while learning the engine, this seems mighty impressive to me! Congrats for managing that!

Will definitely check out Urbion, thanks for the suggestion!

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

I got 10 planes! (proof: )

Edit: 12 now

 Initially I was confused, especially since the UI looked like this:


It was only after I zoomed out my browser tab that it looked normal. For a game with minimal instructions, the gameplay is surprisingly intuitive after one game. A very cool puzzle, but I do wish there was a bit more to it. I know that you probably feel the same way, so if you end up continuing to work on this, I'm excited to see where it goes. Good work!

Developer(+1)

I bow to thee, master of the highest of ELOs.

Odd bug with the zoom, as it works perfectly on both my laptop and desktop. I think it has something to do with 1920x1080 resolution. A friend of mine had a similar issue. Not quite sure how to fix it.

I did in fact plan to add more stuff: a bonus for snatching multiple Planes in one shot, as well as unique modifiers like "as long as row 3 is not claimed, all markers move 1 towards black every turn". However, I spent hours on the black/white transition filter (and learning the game engine), so I lacked the time to implement those.

I don't think I will continue developing this game, as I am quite busy with the main game I am working on. But I am glad you enjoyed it!

Submitted(+1)

It's supposed to replace sudoku!