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A jam submission

MazaicView game page

Unscramble a mosaic dungeon in this puzzle platformer
Submitted by Zac E (@ZacEmer) — 1 day, 17 hours before the deadline
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Mazaic's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Audio#64.0004.000
Graphics#64.3334.333
Gameplay/Design#193.3333.333
Fun#203.3333.333

Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

What would you like feedback on?
I'm especially curious about onboarding and flow.

What did you update?
Changed the rules so that there is no target map to match, but rather players just have to try to get all the rooms to match. Added a little tutorial, another room layout (now there are 4), and a few cosmetic improvements.

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Comments

Submitted

Figuring out how to play needs to be a lot clearer. It took me several restarts to understand what was meant by "get the room layouts to match". A few small levels of tutorial would help immensely here. The general idea is neat, but once you know what to do it's becomes tedious maneuvering around the rooms to get them to match each other. Maybe if the goal was to get each room into a particular layout, or if the game rolled a layout that you had to get the others to match up with. Also the slot machines feel a bit unfair - as a player I know what I want the rooms to look like, but I am at the mercy of RNG for what the slot machine will do and it doesn't much change how I interact with the game.

Aesthetics are very nice, though I would like the player to stand out a bit more from the rest of the level. When not moving, I find it easy to lose where I am.

Developer

Thanks so much for the great feedback!

Submitted

Hey, so I played this game back during the jam, and when I played it initially, I was confused why there were two maps and what I was supposed to do, but now I was confused about why there was only 1 map. I went back to this page and read that you updated the rules, and I think my confusion about what to do came down to this being player choice -- I, the player, can choose whether I want to make the map all 1s, 2s, 3s, or 4s. So once I figured that out I had no more confusion.

I think I may have preferred the way it was before though, because the problem with making the rooms all the same and giving it player choice is that it makes replays less interesting. You can do a 1 game, 2 game, 3 game, or 4 game, but the challenge in this game comes less from the actually navigation of the rooms, but more in figuring out the mechanics and what you are supposed to do. I think the game would be better served as a navigation/puzzle challenge, but then of course that's massively more difficult to do in the context of random map generation. Plus it's not obvious how you might communicate which tiles allow access to which rooms if it was a navigational challenge.

But, I want to mention as I thought the first time, it looks and sound good, the game feel is great, and it's fun to move and jump around.

Developer

Thanks!  The idea behind changing the rules was to minimize the confusion from two maps and give the player move agency in how they solve the puzzle.  The sort of changing plans in the middle (kind of like making a hand in Rummy style card game) doesn't seem to happen enough to make that increased agency actually interesting.