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Inscalar's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment | #892 | 3.588 | 3.588 |
| Creativity | #1043 | 3.765 | 3.765 |
| Overall | #1150 | 3.608 | 3.608 |
| Style | #1932 | 3.471 | 3.471 |
Ranked from 17 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?
A Sokoban style game where player controls a small drone that scales down to enter cubes to solve puzzles
Development Time
96 hours
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Music from Immersive Dark Ambient Music Pack by WOW Sound
Sound effects used were made by: flashtrauma, qubodup, samsterbirdies @freesound (CC0)
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Comments
Wow really liked this! Great concept, interesting puzzles, super straightforward to interact with - lots of potential for more. Great job!
Wow, this was astonishingly good, the atmosphere is amazing, I prefer it to Patrick's parabox, for sure...feels like it fits better. Hopefully you can keep fleshing this out to be a more polished product.
I'm sorry I was raised humble and I can't accept such high praises, Parabox is for sure better!
Thank you very much for the kind words Starfool.
I would like to make it more polished but it all depends on if I will have time :c
I loved the atmosphere in this game! The background ambience/music really added to it. Playing as the drone with such an atmosphere made it kind of unsettling. There is a scary feeling as a human to imagine being a robot who is stuck in a "loop" of solving puzzles in such a cold, eerie environment, where the reward for solving is another puzzle but even harder.
The mechanic of using the insides of the boxes to solve the puzzles was interesting enough to keep me playing and keep my brain occupied. I liked that. Sorry that I will mention the atmosphere and worldbuilding again (but it's what I love the most about games...), I loved the mechanic also because it felt like I was basically shifting between different worlds and it gave a new perspective to both of them. By changing perspectives like that, it made it even more immersive.
I would really like to see this expanded, maybe adding more environment art and background to support the world-building.
I also kind of liked the way you have to undo moves until you get back to where you made a mistake. I can see how that can be frustrating when you have to really go back, but I liked the idea that you are maybe a drone that simply has a linear memory and has to go back step by step, instead of reloading a specific point immediately.
Great work!
Hey, thank you for such long and detailed feedback.
I can explain a little bit about the undo if you would like to have a little look behind the curtain:
It is like this both as a design choice, but also it has a technical factor. Basically, I don't expect many mistakes to be made more than ~5 moves before, as the game usually doesn't let you progress further if you made a mistake that long ago. This is however not true in the later parts of the game, where indeed you might've made a mistake ~20 moves ago. That being said, with the whole world being connected and continuous I can't just let player restart a level. In that case what would they even restart? Current cube that they are inside of? It can't be this way because the cube affects other cubes(worlds), so reseting just one doesn't really work. This could also lead to exploits where you can re-arange stuff inside of a cube, get out of it and then restart the level for it to fall into a position that it started at, which might not be available anymore due to some moves done.
Long story short: Due to the technical implementation and some design decissions, you can undo to the very start of the game which I think is super cool, but you have to do it move by move.
Great, thanks for going into detail!
I certainly like this approach and it is indeed very cool that you can undo literally everything. Which also reminds me that I love how it is one continuous level/environment instead of more smaller separated ones.
Glad you liked it :)
Really loved the vibes of this one, and being able to enter the boxes/control the lasers from within was really, really cleverly designed. My brain kind of broke by the fifth (?) level, but that is typical for me with puzzle games 😂 I think my only immediate feedback is that sometimes moving between rooms was confusing since it didn't just push you through when you stepped in, and I think where you were entering/exiting the boxes was a little unclear and disorienting at first.
Great work overall! Really liked this one.
Thank you very much for kind words.
Yes the trigger boxes for camera change weren't prefectly in line with the decoration. Easy fix, but noticed it too late :c
I liked the atmosphere and puzzle design, especially lasers going into the boxes the internals of which you can rearrange. And having multiple entrances/exits - that was kind of a “oh, I get it” moment for me, took a while to realise that.
Good to have the undo mechanic, it turned out I needed that.
In general, I would like a bit more polish (like, animations, maybe some particles and so on) and faster character movement.
Nicely done!
This is probably the fastest character movement among all of my games :D
Believe me I would also like to add more polish to the game!
Thanks for nice words Teapot!
not gonna lie, this broke my brain a bit, puzzlers are not my thing
I like the visuals simple shapes but with reflections and and some eye candy background too. The undo in particular is impressive.
Got a lot of talos principle meets factorissimo (factorio mod) vibe playing through it.
as a point of improvement, entering/exiting the cubes could have some animation or flourish to better communicate where you just came in or exited from, it was a little disorienting for me in some cases.
It was supposed to have that, but you know how it is :D
Thanks for participating in the stream, here's the VOD clip:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2232184306
It reminds me of Patrick's Parabox. Was that an inspiration? I was stumped for a bit on one of the puzzles, but I persevered and made it to the end. I don't have much specific to say beyond what others have already said, but I thought it was fun.
Yes! Patrick's Parabox was indeed an inspiration. The game that made me go into the direction that I did was actually Moncage, although the final product doesn't show much resemblance. Parabox and Talos Principle were mechanical inspirations, while classic Sokoban and Talos were puzzle inspirations.
Pretty cool mechanic, going inside the boxes to further solve the puzzle. Also like the atmosphere and smooth effects youve got going on. Solid! :D
Thank you!
I'm much more of an atmosphere guy, rather than a technical developer, so means a lot to me that you enjoyed it ^^
love these types of games, REALLY loved how the lasers continued in the boxes within. fun mechanic. lovely atmosphere and vibe. puzzles were fun to solve and not obnoxiously hard!! thank u, i had a fun time
Wait, didn't you made something similar before? Or maybe all the unreal engine sokoban felt the same to me.
Okay, I give up on the last level, that was just mindbogglingly hard. Exceptional good idea! As the other comment mentioned, I would actually shrink the inner levels and put them on the cube. I think this is one of the few games that could benefits from less visual clutters - like for example, it was never really that clear to me which direction is the laser coming from and going, and where are they supposed to go, etc. Overall I still really liked it though.
Never done a sokoban before, but the general style is very similar to my other games.
Thanks for the kind feedback. Wasn't really expecting so many positives! There are a lot of things that I would fix if I could go back in time and the visual clarity would be the #2 right after showing the insides of the cubes on them :D
I do enjoy puzzle-in-puzzle type games, and the puzzles in this game seem solid. I would play more if my brain weren't fried from coding. One issue is that it's difficult to reason about the puzzles without being able to easily see the insides of the boxes, which is rough because you have to set up the boxes just to be able to enter them.
Hello!
Thanks for playing.
What you highlighted here is probably the biggest problem of the game in my opinion and sadly a problem that I didn't get to solve.
It comes from the fact that the whole game was based around you actually BEING ABLE to see what is inside of the cubes but that mechanic proved very technically challenging (I'm not the best tech artist) it took me a lot of time to try it without success and I had to drop it almost last minute.
Now after all is done I have hundred ideas about how to make it work, but it is a little too late.