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Square Up's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment | #1646 | 3.286 | 3.286 |
| Overall | #1781 | 3.393 | 3.393 |
| Creativity | #1920 | 3.464 | 3.464 |
| Style | #2020 | 3.429 | 3.429 |
Ranked from 28 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
you build bigger squares out of smaller squares in this action-puzzler
Development Time
48 hours
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
(all assets are original)
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Comments
Very clever but very difficult game! I didn't realise I could clear things until I saw the gifs afterwards, but it seems like it would require some RNG to do that consistently, unless I just completely suck. Since sometimes you'll just get the sizes way out of order and be forced to lock yourself out (reminds me of suika game in that sense). Anyway overall it was a really fun entry :)
i thought the same at first, until my friends and i developed some strategies to deal with it as we were playtesting it. (truth be told, a lot of this game feels like it came together like a happy accident!)
i think the trick is that since small blocks are such a bottleneck, you want to minimize the amount of them in the way of making the 64x64 block: if you first focus on making a tall stack, you can safely place excess small blocks on top of it. the well fills up pretty fast, but you usually get the time to merge any small stuff you were probably forced to place on the floor by the time you're forced to put a bigger block on them.
...of course, sometimes the RNG does still screw you over. (sorry! i don't have a tetris-like bag system or anything.) but i can make it to 5 clears somewhat regularly. ~~(sometimes 6 at which point the score counter bugs out because of messed up fixed point math but don't worry about it)~~
Nice and minimalistic block connecting game! The smallest ones frustrated me a lot
honestly i don't disagree. but my friends and i figured out tricks to make them less of a nuisance. they're still kinda hard to see though
It's a very minimalistic and compact game! It feels great when the blocks are replaced with new ones.
Who needs bells and whistles when you can make the perfect cube stack?
It's a game that would make 2048 blush.
making *me* blush!
It's fun! Simple and effective
nice take on tetris! is there a button to speed up the falling?
not really... besides the instadrop, technically you can softdrop by holding down, but it only goes as fast as pico-8's built-in keyboardlike autorepeat. and the game does speed up on its own eventually, but the curve is pretty bad... it so yeah, some maneuvers are pretty annoying right now.
i did my best to figure out the controls for a game with pieces of wildly varying sizes, but i focused on making the game playable at all first. I'll keep working on it later, because i like this game!
Wow I loved the mechanic of throwing the pieces, and the indicator of where they will go was literally a lifesaver. Fun idea!
Great take on tetris! :)
Simple but very well done! Some music could do wonders.
i'll admit, it wasn't on my mind (not that i had the time for it), i think silence is appropriate for this. i might consider making something dr mario "chill"-esque later though
Very cool idea for the jam. Also, somehow Pico-8 games always looks really nice. : )
Feedback from my side:
The game feels a bit slow and does not really seem to speed up by much when you square up. Background music would be nice as well (but do not know how easy that is with Pico-8 and its constraints).
thanks!
yeah the speedup was a rushed last-minute addition... honestly serves more of a purpose of preventing people from playing forever and getting bored and overflowing the score than actually feeling like a good curve right now...
to go into the technicals: it takes 60 frames (1 second) for a piece to fall from gravity, and this timer reduces by 5 frames (1/20th of a second) with each max square cleared. so it's basically imperceptible at first, but the change proportionately becomes bigger as it goes on, and it becomes virtually unplayable after long enough. it also introduces feel-bad misplays because i didn't implement separate lock delay and piece entry delay, which is definitely one of the first things i want to improve once the jam's over...
also honestly i've made music with a tracker before, but yeah i haven't practiced with pico-8 yet. i would also rather have silence than something that gets grating quick... but it seems the lack of music is a common critique, so i can give it a shot someday.
Wooahh!! Super cool to see a Pico-8 game submitted! Love to see it! Awesome work!
honestly i think it's the ideal game engine for a jam, right? fast iteration, small scale...
i mean i probably won't win any contests this way, but i don't mind, that's not what this is for