Congratulations on making your first game *and* submitting to a jam. :)

The concept you came up with struck me as quite innovative and interesting. One aspect I enjoyed while playing was that it can be approached both as a more passive "toy" where you spend most of your time observing the interactions or you can be more proactive in your interactions with the game world by adding shapes or dragging things around.

It was fun to spot the different "creatures" that formed as a result of the shapes joining and the experience reminds me a bit of looking for shapes in clouds. :)

When I started playing I did find it a bit confusing to understand how the different game mechanics worked so it would probably be helpful to document a little more the game play process. (e.g. click here to choose the tool to drag/sell/add shape then click a shape to do X etc; this UI element shows you Y information etc.) But I'm also aware that documenting things clearly takes time! :)

I also wasn't 100% sure whether the shapes joining or not had any determining factor other than chance?

The novelty of the concept led me to think of some interesting variants/spin-offs it could be fun to try if you were to extend the game:

•  A "dark mode" where the background is dark & the shapes are pulsating luminous neon colours that leave trails behind them as they move.

•  A way to "design" the interface on each side of the shape to make it more or less likely that any particular shapes join together when they collide.

Thanks for sharing your game, it was fun spending some time playing with it. :)

Edit: Oh, also, I meant to say: nice work on making an AppImage for your entry--I'm of the opinion that AppImages are probably the best way to distribute software for Linux that actually works. :)

looks good but it's hard to get funding for polygon research you know ? I guess that's the life at the Polygon Lab

This was a neat little simulation!

I think the codex book got stuck the first time I played, but on my second play, it filled up with all my shapes nicely ^_^

I wasn't sure if I was expected to guide the formation of particular shape combinations myself, but I enjoyed just watching them do their thing.

This feels impressive for a first game. Well done!

One other thing to note is that your executable does not have permissions on Linux. It would be good to make a note on your jam page that Linux users will need to set executable permissions in order to run the game.

This is something that is specific to Unix-like operating systems and their filesystems. When loose files are uploaded to Itch, they can not preserve these permissions. When included in a zip file, those permissions can be preserved, but they can't be set from Windows. If you are on Windows and would like to try managing that yourself, I made a tool that can help with that.

For some reason it reminds me of sea monkeys.  I never had any when I was a kid.  Now I do :)

Some chill background music would have been cool.  And maybe some way to influence shapes.

Or maybe when shapes combine to make a more valuable shape there could be some "juice" - some sort of sparkle and sound effect.

Please try my game and let me know what you think!  Thanks!