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The Anomaly's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Use of Theme | #3 | 4.300 | 4.300 |
| Visuals | #10 | 3.200 | 3.200 |
| Creativity | #12 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Overall | #15 | 2.733 | 2.733 |
| Overall Enjoyment | #17 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
| Gameplay | #19 | 2.300 | 2.300 |
| Audio | #24 | 1.100 | 1.100 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
I liked that I didn't realize I was playing a puzzle game until level 2 or so. There was definitely an aha moment. Weirdly, I feel like this game benefited from not having a tutorial. Reminds me of some of those puzzles in resident evil games where you gotta like divert enough energy to the right things or whatever (idk i hope you know what i mean) and it seeems overwhelming at first, but then as you get a feel for it you kinda just figure it out.
I wish there were better visual queues as to what is happening with the score, and what the win objective is for each level. I played about 6 levels, and i think it's getting the pink bar full? but I'm still not sure lmao
Yeah getting the pinky/magenta bar filled advances the level 馃槀 Thanks for playing, and it sounds like you did great! As I wrote on the page, it's definitely not balanced and I wasn't even sure if the game is finishable in its current state, haha. Not that it has an ending, it goes to level 10 and nothing further happens even if you reach higher levels than 10, which you can lol.
I imagined it as a kind of combo system where you try build up the blue bar (dubbed mass) to advance the pink bar (dubbed stability). At first the puzzle is easy; its easy to build mass and stability. Then it becomes more complex because later some consumes has to be used correctly to advance. The last levels are more chaotic with crazy conversion rates, mass(blue) is starved and the player has to find a loop where he can chain certain combinations to raise mass far enough to afford to eat the big converter (like -5 blue + 5 pink) or something like that. What definitely isn't communicated but was necessary for balance was the feature that trying to convert mass you dont have, the mass you have too little of is taken from stability instead, to prevent a free conversion/free points. so if you have 2 of each, then get -3 mass +3 object, stability will put you at 0 mass, 4 stability. If you try it again with 0 and 4, then you still have 0 and 4 (because you lose 3 and gain 3). What started as a simple system quickly became complex with specific rules and emergent puzzles from the mechanics I had lined up. It was a real mess 馃槀
It's a good game! Miss the audio/sfx but I liked it! Nice colors.
I did too 馃槀 thanks for playing and the kind words!
Love it! I think the art is pretty good, the colors are nice and the animations are cool. The theme implementation is strong. I love the gameplay and how you need to balance out which pellets you eat to pass. Maybe gameplay is a bit too simple, maybe adding some more obstacles or even pellets that move vertically could ramp up the difficulty a bit. Great work!
Hey, thanks for playing, and for the kind words! Due to rapidly changing direction of the game, it was hard to actually figure out what was going to be the thing players had to overcome. It ended up being that the player was not being able to progress if the player didn't solve the puzzle of sequence of what to eat to progress, but I agree its a mess ultimately. Could use some depth and some hazards of some kind, but it was fun to make for what it was haha
really love the use of colour in your art, was very punchy!
Thanks a lot, thanks for playing!
I think the theme fits really well here, given you're a black hole CONSUMING objects. It's puzzle themed arcade runner game-loop is something I haven't really seen before, having to figure out what pieces do what. The visuals were also great, I loved the pixel art-style and the setting in space, and with the parallax backgrounds make it all the more better. I would probably put labels on each of the bars to indicate which is what better. Overall a good prototype that could possibly turn into a full-fledged game if polished and built upon.
Thanks a lot for the kind feedback! After a certain point I wanted to try going for a text- and number-less aesthetic, but didn't get the polish in to actually communicate anything as well as I intended it to. I first tried a dynamic level scaling where you could actually de-level if you kept doing things wrong, but settled on a level-by-level format instead. Was a lot of fun and learned a lot, at least 馃槀