itch.io

is it already live on itch?

Awesome!

Do you think you'll get around to updating this?  I started a "polish your game" jam and this would be a great addition. https://itch.io/jam/polish-your-game-jam

I'm saying it's more sandbox-play than gameplay.

Yes, Sokoban is a clear inspiration, but hopefully I manage to make it fresh and different. 

it's more like infinite life, btw.

I love the idea of level design as gameplay. but this isn't really pushing that boundary very far. 

Neat! Like the idea and the art.  Unfortunate you can soft-lock yourself by pushing the bottle into the wall, it could use an in-game restart option. 

700 mb EXE download with zero screenshots = pass, at least for me. 

smells like spam. 

cool idea, fun to play! no way I can see to reset the level if you get yourself into a loop where the bot is going in circles infinitely tho.

wonder if you would consider it game  breaking to show a shadowy trace of where the bot went on last run. too often success relied on extended sessions of  move, rerun, move refinement rather than insight/aha moments. 

This was so much fun to play! I really wish for two quality of life bits tho - easier reset the level option  and omg way to select levels.  got stuck on first reverse magnet level, couldn't figure out how to reset, and in the process exited the game. now I either have to replay levels or move on. And still no idea how to reset when stuck.  BOO. 

fun! love the art style and font. HOWEVER after finishing the first level "next level" does nothing. 

In an earlier version they did - it was a bug but also a huge pain. As bugs often are. 

indeed you found one of the best uses of the 2nd source.

the level pass thresholds are low by mistake but it means that you can see all levels kind of like a sandbox mode. once the jam is over I'll tune it better. 

Except the losers, of course. Ha ha.

But seriously, this was a very solid set of games except for the 1 clear spam entry and 1ish that was kind of a stretch.

And for those that didn't score higher, often it was more about polish or clear instructions than the idea itself. I saw a lot of solid to fantastic ideas here.  

The scores speak for themselves and the ranking is sacred. https://tchevin.itch.io/mhas-dungeon-sweeper deserves it's top spot. 

But since I'm the organizer, I'm also going to award "best in show" to https://madenavaneeth.itch.io/mineogram  because it simultaneously did well in my 3 most important personal categories: novel, fun, and polished.  

And of course the coveted "I wish it had done better" award to https://alanrobinsondev.itch.io/beast-sweeper-fantasy-minesweeper because as the developer, I certainly wish it had done better ;-)

That's all. 

ps anybody else want to call out their best in show?

I'm a bit confused here. Is there any reason not to just reveal the whole board? there's no wrong place to click, or is there? Given how novel this is, I'm thinking it could use a little more explicit instruction. 

this is fantastic. Take the biggest issue with regular minesweeper, regions where there's no info OR way in, and gives you info that allows you to logic it out. This is truly a mixture of two games where the result feels like each contributes equally and sensibly. 

minor quality of life issue: line sums using the same font/style made me keep on forgetting they weren't regular neighborhood sums.  if you could style with a different font or with arrows that would break my muscle/visual memory.

Interesting. Encourages you to keep more in your memory for sure.  Also really slows the game down but I bet that's just practice. In the end tho, it's 100% the same skills as minesweeper. Aside from the novelty, I'd rather play original with flags I suspect. I wonder if there's an extra tweek or two you could add that would make this feel more like a new way to play and less like a new UI design. Maybe if points had some value (reveal mine, protect from death etc). 

I enjoyed it too!

oh goodness the sound effects! The hardest part of the game design. I could not find one's I liked. These are far from ideal too. 

Fun! I've never seen this kind of puzzle done with connecting wires but it's a fun twist. Also a fun twist: our games have similar names and somewhat similar graphics (gameplay has ZERO overlap tho).

two suggestions: save progress and increase the hitbox size! getting those connectors to latch was always fiddly.  

Fun! I've never seen this kind of puzzle done with connecting wires but it's a fun twist. Also a fun twist: our jam games have similar names and somewhat similar graphics (gameplay has ZERO overlap tho).

that's on my todo list! Barely made the submission deadline as is.

Any chance of a web build?

Neat! Closest to dragon sweeper of the bunch; I didn't get far enough to see what new content it offered over dragonsweper tho? Still we could use more dragon sweeper adjacent games so no complaints!

One issue is I didn't get how the thresholds for leveling up work. 2 exp per coin, but sometimes you didn't have to fill your EXP bar to level up, it seemed. that should be clearer. 

I love this idea. But it keeps on telling me I'm wrong. I suspect it has to do with the flag colors but I don't get how that works. 

What was the dev environment? Sure would have been nice to have a web build...

I would be far more interested in trying this if there were a web build OR screenshots. Leaving both out is kind of fatal. 

what do you mean by "more scores"? I have the feeling that it's just regular minesweeper, but without the standard "first click = safe" accommodation. 

I enjoyed the Tetris / Voronoi  variants! It seemed a little too easy to get stuck tho, since in effect the board size is much much smaller than the x/y plane.  Not a lot of paths to take.

I would suggest showing a single mine in the centroid of the shape as otherwise it suggests the count shown is meaningful.  

This is absolutely a minesweeper game, no question.  but it's held back strongly by a lack of a proper interactive tutorial. if you had started with a single match 3 goal and only 3 mines total, for instance, we could have come to understand how it works intuitively.  And the next step probably would be 6 mines match 4? And after that, maybe the first level you have currently. 

I started to get the basic idea of what was going on after 5+ minutes of messing with it, but that's too much. I do hope you give it another try, I love the mashup of different genres here. 

Thanks. When you say "possibilities" what do you mean?

What was the most confusing part? I'm not sure what more I would put in a tutorial... 

hard to get that balance right. the first 5 are trivial to teach mechanics, so those should be painfully easy. beyond that, things *ought* to ramp up. 

Heh! glad to hear somebody made it there.  I love twist endings, even if the twist isn't so big or novel. 

Wow, that is quite a score! I've had similar thoughts about 2x for odd or whatever bonus scoring rules for some levels. 

Thanks! I was worried the participants would be me, myself and I, so I'm enthused a focused jam like this worked out.  I have other ideas for focused jams I hope to put on - and also they force me to to actually start building the games I've been thinking about.

because of the long time to finish I only played lev. 1. I'm guessing the "closed" cube must come later?

I really like the way you can rotate the different faces of the cube and uncover new relationships, creating paths into dense regions that would otherwise be impenetrable. It’s a clever "twist" on Minesweeper-style deduction, and it makes exploring the board feel engaging and strategic. 

I played for about 15 minutes before realizing that, even on the easiest difficulty, I had only made a tiny dent in the overall search space. That’s part of the design, of course. At any given moment, you’re only seeing a small fraction of the full board because of all the possible rotations, which makes the scale much larger than it first appears (x8, perhaps?).

Because of that, I think it could be interesting to experiment with smaller sub-cube sizes, maybe even something as compact as 3×3, as a way to ease players into the concept or offer a shorter session option. The larger scale is impressive, but for me this feels like the kind of game I’d enjoy sitting down with for 15-25 minutes at a time, rather than committing to an hour or more to work through a full board.