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A jam submission

InvertioView game page

A bog standard match 4 puzzler, at least until Seija got her hands on it... (Click on the "Level 1" text to get started)
Submitted by dichotomousCreator, skullstho (@skullstho_live) — 3 hours, 45 minutes before the deadline
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Invertio's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Use of Theme#34.0734.148
Challenge#74.0374.111
Gameplay#133.9644.037
Concept#164.0734.148
Overall#183.7823.852
Story/Writing#232.6552.704
Audio#253.1643.222
Visuals#293.4913.556

Ranked from 27 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Team Members
DC (myself), skullstho

External Asset Credits
A number of sound effects courtesy of http://thinksoundeffects.com. Font courtesy of "avrahamcornfeld" on Github; see included license for more details.

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Comments

(+1)

Thanks to this game I became somewhat decent at Match-4.

I ordinarily don't like traditional puzzle games much because a lot of them are just about high-scoring or doing the same thing over and over until the "last level". As such I naturally don't play puzzle games much and am not skilled at all with them. Invertio however shakes things up every time and eventually got me to complete it entirely.

Hey also, in Invertio if you give up in a level (by pressing Escape IIRC), the next time you enter it, the trigger conditions are all wierd and most often makes the stage unwinnable. At least you can close and reopen the game but that's annoying.

Otherwise, good job for converting me into puzzle games, even if for this time. I've featured this game in a video:

https://youtu.be/bFHWSZ1BOBw?t=1650

Developer(+1)

I am pleased to report that the trigger conditions bug you mention should be fixed; I found it as occurring if you retried the same level multiple times in a row, and the updated version on the game page shouldn't have it any more. It was sadly one of a few things that slipped through during the initial period; new version fixes a bunch of that stuff (did you know bombs were meant to have a tile next to them indicating which tile they blow up? I broke that last minute before submitting >_>), and does some minor rebalances/tweaks plus adding 10 more levels.

That said...the video was fantastic and seeing Invertio showcased like that was super satisfying. It's kinda hard to express the degree to which that's true, especially with what you said about match 4 games generally. I'm checking out the rest of the video now; honestly I was kinda wiped after the jam and didn't get much opportunity to actually look at the other games, and I'm a big fan of this "portrait + dialogue commentary" style of video (I don't know if you're familiar with a "MegamanOmega", but he uses a similar style and has done a couple videos on Danmakufu scripts I made a while back). Plus the editing/showcasing for each game is definitely on point. So yeah, just...thanks for doing this. Major feels good moment for me and I'm sure a lot of other people too.

(+2)

Wow, this was a lot deeper than I expected! At first it seemed like a simple Tetris deal, but I was really impressed when it kept expanding with all of the unique items effects that worked together to create different challenges. I ended up playing about 16 levels of this before it got too difficult for me, so I spent a good amount of time with it compared to most of the jam games (wish I could have rated this during the voting period...)

Also, I love the portraits. Visuals are already solid overall with the UI and block type choices, but I'm glad things like the character expressions were a detail that was able to fit in time.

(+1)

Ragequitted this : (

Last game I played with this mechanic was Hello kitty for NES, I never thought I had to live this hell again.
But even if I suck at cascade combos, this really fills the necessary needs for any puzzle entusiast, maybe the speed of the horizontal controls should be improved, because its imposible to save a game once you reached the top.

Submitted(+1)

Well polished puzzle experience! Haven’t played this style of tile-matching game before and I got filtered hard by the cascade level.

I like that Aya’s leaf fan is just the Canadian maple leaf

It’s real amusing when Seija’s gimmicks lead to her own demise in the midst of my flailing about, very appreciative that most levels are forgiving enough that bricking out won’t happen unless you’re really trying to.

My only criticism is that you don’t know the exact details of what each of Seija’s effects does until she hits you with it, and even then you just have to infer what it is based on the counters and icon. A description that appears on mouse-over or similar would be great. Also full-screen mode.

Developer

Glad to report that we're fixing that post-jam; I'm going to put proper effect descriptions in the first level where a mechanic is introduced, and there's supposed to be a whole other icon for most of them that helps illustrate better (it...didn't show up due to a surprise bug I didn't notice I'd introduced with a late change). Dunno how many people will come back to have another look, but it can't hurt.

I forgot to enable window scaling AGAIN after messing that up for sunflower maintenance; it's like a flag in the godot editor or something, super easy. I told myself I'd do it next time after sunflower maintenance, but whoops :v

Lotta stuff that just slips through during game jams, I suppose. Also got a few more levels planned (they're super easy to make), and something of a change to the RNG so it can't give you long runs without a specific tile. It probably helps that I don't really play this sort of tile-matcher either; this is also why each level unlocks two more, so you can just skip over stuff you can't/don't want to bash your head against.

(+1)

Tetris, but with varied abilities that add challenge all done in the theme of character abilities!  It even has a lore reason for it as you play against the dreaded Seija.

Submitted(+1)

This game is super interesting. I feel that there are lessons in puzzle game design to be extracted from this, but the game is also fun on its own. With some visual polish to the level select menu and UI, this could easily pass as a non-jam game with the amount of content available.

Submitted(+1)

played up to level 14, puzzles good. colours kinda tripped me up but i guess thats the point

some gimmicks are kind of hard to work with but most are neat, especially the "bottom line falls from the top" one

Submitted(+1)

I had fun. I finished the first 15 levels. "The opposite of a shoot-em-up is a match 4 puzzler" got me lol.

Submitted(+1)

Interesting take on the Match 4 genre.

The different effects in each level and ways to trigger them helped gave the game a lot of variety despite the short amount of time given to develop it.

Submitted(+1)

Polished with some background graphics, this would be absolutely super

I like the neat little challenges on each level, and the art is quite nice

(+1)

As someone mentioned - would be better if menu was controllable with a keyboard, since gameplay is keyboard only (for now?), had to look back at submission page for instructions

I like how there are more and more gimmics on the levels and most of them seems to be just in the right place, portraits are well made and figures themselves while simple, plays nicely in.

One inconvenience - inverted figures. While they are part of Seija theme, they are hard to differentiate (remember different colors in Tetris for each figure? All to make them easilly distinguished), and for now the only use of them I seen is Invert spell and really, the only thing this option does is messes exact drop when effect happens, as it's unaffected (feels like a bug, so even this is should not be an effect)

Developer(+1)

Yeah, the level select screen had a minimum of time and thought put into it; definitely needs to be more obvious that you click the level text. There's a reason we've put that in four separate places now >_>. Having it be keyboard controlled would probably be even better, although my wildly optimistic projection for post-jam is that there's so many levels that scrolling through with a keyboard is a chore.

The tile inversion attack is definitely not supposed to stuff out matches; that'll probably be some kind of race condition bug. The tiles themselves, though, are in a weird spot. Some of the later levels DO take advantage of the tile inversion by having triggers on one half of a pair but not the other, and...well, originally they were placeholder dev assets and I then found that while playing them increased the demands on the player's attention since you have to focus on differentiating them, failing to do so and messing up a placement felt frustrating but in the same way Seija screwing you over in any other way felt frustrating. That plus time constraints plus the levels that needed them made me ultimately decide to see how leaving them in would go, and I think they're just "part of the game" now, for better or worse. I might be doing a couple updates post-jam (at a minimum to make it obvious how to start playing ._.) but ultimately I don't think I'll be changing those.

You are absolutely not wrong that doing that essentially breaks a cardinal rule of match puzzler design, but if there's a place to try doing that and see what happens, it's a game jam game.

Developer(+3)

Since I completely overlooked how confusing this would be on booting the game up for the first time: The text that says "Level 1" in the top left is, in fact clickable, and does, in fact, start level 1.