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A jam submission

Bee TrailsView game page

Help out bees by connecting their hive homes in this honey-sweet hextris puzzler
Submitted by SecretPocketCat (@SecretPocketCat) — 1 hour, 9 minutes before the deadline
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Bee Trails's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Presentation#34.4064.406
Fun#163.5313.531
Overall#233.4583.458
Theme interpretation#672.4382.438

Ranked from 32 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

It looks like I forgot to come back for more. Had a bit of time this morning. Here's as close as I can get to a roasting. Even this level of roastage is making me slightly uncomfortable, lol.

The intro screen had some typos and was generally a confusing read. It didn't make for a good first impression. I was left wondering "a lot of what?" after the first sentence. I was familiar with this definition of "lot," but it took some head scratching to figure out that "lot" was referring to the entire level / hive. This sort of gets cleared up in the next paragraph. I think you should have used asterisks for the winks and nudges in this text that isn't actually rendered markdown. I might have been more generous with the theme points if there was a bit more effort put in here.

It had instructions, so I didn't feel the need to read the game page until later which is when I discovered you could rotate pieces. Ideally I would have at least known this was possible from reading the intro screen.

The simple animations were a nice touch, but I'm not crazy about the animation when rotating pieces that consist of more than one hex. I think this would be better if the hexes rotated / animated "as one." There's also a bug here when you do a full rotation the piece seems to "jump."

The control issues were my main problem. Even in the github pages version, dragging pieces around is super janky. (I have a recording of this if you don't already know what I'm talking about)

There's a bug with the animated background where its speed doesn't get reset if the game ends by the timer elapsing, forcing you to play the next level in seizure-mode.

Developer

Wow, thank you for the wonderful feedback!

The initial screen was a last minute addition and a great reminder to plan for a proper tutorial. Once again I failed to do that. I hope I'll do better one day 😅. Arguably on-screen controls that go away once the player rotates a piece for the first time would probably be enough in this case.

The main jank in the gh version I'm aware of is moving the piece quickly, which feels just terrible. If I were to do a post-jam version, I'd probly revamp the whole drag and drop part of the game incl. rotations. Maybe I'd remove the snapping and just highlight the target hexes instead. 
I quite like the multi-hex rotation tween, but I'd a venture a guess it's style over substance and rotating whole pieces would be more readable.

Sorry about the headache-inducing BG. It seemed like a nice touch that the speed would be based on remaining time - shame that I messed it up 😅.

(+1)

I thought this was really slick. It didn't really even need a tutorial, although it took me a second to realise I could rotate pieces! Slow learner. 

Developer

Sorry about the rotation - that's totally on me and thanks for playing 🙂

Submitted(+1)

Fun idea for a game! The harder levels especially were fun to play and I like the graphics. Sounds would have made the gameplay much more enjoyable.

Submitted(+1)

Cute little game, very good presentation, controls are a little wonky and I don't know when I've won, but this could be on steam

Developer

Could you elaborate on the wonkiness? Is it about the bug mentioned in the description or something else?

It simply ends when you run out of time and you get a score 🙂

Submitted(+1)

Very polished game, good work

Submitted (2 edits) (+1)

I think this could’ve been a great game if you had the time / resources to playtest, fix bugs, and add music / sound effects during the jam. I love the game’s design and the tweens in the UI look great.

EDIT: Also I just tried the Gihub Pages build and had this not count as a win:

Developer(+1)

I'm a bit sad I didn't fix the main bug in time and that the SFX are missing, but otherwise I'm pretty pleased with the entry.

Sorry about that map - I've seen it just once I think and I believe there's a bug in the map gen (one bee was hidden by a different hex).

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

> dragging sometimes goes wonky  on later hives

I found this to be the case even on the first level, maybe this is due to the game starting fullscreen now.

edit: nevermind, I think I was mistaken.

I got 264 for now, but maybe I'll be back later!

Developer

I'm pretty sure it happens because I scale the projection but forgot to scale the movement by the same factor, but the scale for initial levels is just 1 (and that's why I missed it 🙁).

264 is a very good score. Pretty close to cracking it as finishing later levels gives so much time there really is no endgame. I might do a postjam version and I'd have to redesing that.

Submitted(+1)

I keep coming back to this one, just love how polished it is. There isn't audio but you can hear the game from the visuals, you know? I did run into rotating not working a few times, especially the first time I played I was really confused. Otherwise though, nice work 👍

Developer

I had some SFX in mind when working on the tweening, but my time management was terrible as usual.
The rotation, esp. the related bugs, could you some work, sorry about that.

Developer (1 edit)

 For the record, this my personal best 🙂: 438

 Today I got 1660, so the later levels aren't as hard as I have thought 😅

Submitted(+1)

I got 108!

The first few times I played I didn't realize you could rotate the pieces 🤦‍♂️but I still managed to get 41 somehow 

Developer

108 isn't bad, see comment above though🙂

People really dislike reading the itch descriptions - there's a gif that uses rotations and it describes them, but it's totally my bad I forgot to mention them in the initial screen, sorry about that.

Submitted(+1)

Very polished look. Puzzle games are not my jam, but there were things to like in this one, for sure!

Submitted(+1)

Submitted(+1)

Fun puzzle game! Not sure how I feel about the timer. Might of had more fun without it.

I had an annoying bug on the third level where the piece position and the cursor were getting desynced and pieces wouldn’t rotate sometimes. This was on web.

Developer (3 edits)

I was unsure about the timer, but I think without it it might lead to AP and I was aiming at "playing by one's gut feeling", so this seemed a better fit. If I had the time to make actual lvls with more mechanics, I'd have probly skipped the timer though.

Sorry about the bug - there's a link to a fixed version in the  itch description. (I fixed like 2 minutes after the extended submission period...).
If you have rated and you'd like to try later levels, than you could check that out 🙂

Submitted(+1)

I like the little animation flourishes and just how simple yet complete this game is.

Is there a way to capture scroll events so that it doesn't scroll the page too? Or maybe fullscreen mode would solve that.

Developer

Good call, switched the itch version to open fullscreen, so that should no longer be an issue.

I should have realised scrolling might cause trouble on the web - silly me.

Submitted(+1)

I really like the art style and color palette, so simple yet so much fun. Together with the animations and transitions, you can feel the love you put into this game. 

Only the background stripes are a bit distracting because they move so fast. Otherwise, cute idea and nice execution!

Developer

Thank you 😊

The stripes actually speed up as the timer goes down, so it's the fastest in the end. Unfortunately, I have a bug there, so it gets progressively faster.
I was hesitant whether to put the animation there at all 'cause I remember a similar thing caused motion sickness for some people in one of my older games. I wanted to add it as a toggle the the options, but those didn't make it 😅

Submitted(+1)

Very polished and fun game! The animations and style was lovely, I had a great time playing :D

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

I love the animations! You might want to add a hint somewhere that Q / E rotates the pieces, I don't think that's explained anywhere

Developer

Good catch - added to the itch description at least. The mousewheel works too BTW. 🙂