itch.io

If 3 rhombuses form a hexagon (or ‘cube’), they can be rotated, moving the corresponding platform. You can also see the 2d representation as a stack of cubes, and with each rotation you add/remove a cube from the stack. The biggest constraint with that representation is that tiles in front can’t be higher than tiles in the back (so you can only raise a tile if the two behind-adjacent tiles are higher than it, and similarly only lower a tile if the two front-adjacent tiles are lower than it).

The first part from this video of 3Blue1Brown might help you understand the logic behind the main mechanic (in fact, it’s that video which gave me the idea of the mechanic).

Else, yeah there could be some improvements in the difficulty curve of the basic puzzles as it can be a bit steep right now.

I’ll start with the positives and the main one is definitely the art. The game is beautiful with lots of details in the environment, the opening cutscene, some nice ideas like the addition of the camera showing the start of the ride, to see if a cart is waiting, etc… The audio works fits the game quite well too, I especially liked the details in the menu with different sounds that pop out overtime.

Now, for the negative, it’s definitely the gameplay. Right now, it doesn’t work at all as you can’t have much impact, don’t know how well what you’re doing is effective and the score system also seems a bit broken as it seems the best way to score high is by just sending everyone at full speed as you’ll get most people that way (scored above 8000 with that strategy). If you send a cart at low speeds, it will block the whole track for nearly the full day and carts behind it won’t be able to go fast. Maybe a shorter track and a higher minimum speed could help. Knowing the preferences of more than just the next-person in line could help with planning strategies. Maybe another possible evolution to solve these issues could be having less carts to manage but micromanaging the customers instead, packing them by groups based on preferences while managing their wait time.

Also, a small issue in the UI: There’s no difference between a positive and a negative score in the UI right now and you only discover it at the end (my first run was negative due to lots of crashes and I only discovered it on the score screen). There should be either a minus sign appearing in front of the digits, or the background of the numbers should be full green in positive and switch to full red in negative (rather than half green half red like now).

Solved the first 3 levels but gave up on the 4th as it required not only to time a frame-perfect jump on yellow’s dash with green and then hope that somehow using blue wouldn’t mess up with green’s frame perfect timing so you could end up using it as a platform with red at the end. Which seems impossible to me (or would require grinding for at least several hours to hopefully get it right).

The idea is definitely great and allows for lots of cool things in level design, but right now it’s frustrating due to the high difficulty of the platforming. The precision required is also way too high as even if you understand how to solve a level, you might be unable to solve it due to the high skill level required. The frame perfect jump in level 4 is a good example of that, as not only you need to time it but also do a quick move left right after before doing an upward dash so you can go upwards. Another example are the paths you can only take when verticaly and not horizontaly, those require to be pixel perfect for no proper reason and so you might try 10 times to have it right once. And add to that using your previous selves as platforms will push them down, meaning not only you can’t take your time but you will also break their path doing so making planning routes a bit of a mess.

There’s truly the basis for a great puzzle platformer with that mechanic, the graphics work pretty well and feel polished too and audio is good overall. But the difficulty is absurd for a puzzle platformer where the main challenge should be in finding the solution to levels, not performing said solution.

The game concept of a puzzle platformer where you can switch gravity is rather classic but something that works well and can always be extended with further mechanics. Controls & game feel overall work fine.

I had two main issues with the game. The first being the lack of indication of what the purple thing on the right side of the level was. The two buttons next to it having no prompts and looking the same as buttons you’re supposed to stand on. On my first playthrough, I didn’t understand it at all and after not finding any other ideas, I managed to go upwards by climbing on a box & switching to child (riding on the box as it went up with the switched gravity) which wasn’t the intended solution at all. I only understood what I was supposed to do after reading the comments here and seeing the mention of a catapult & that you were supposed to press E on the buttons.

Next issue is the energy system which feel a bit out of place as it brings nothing in the current version of the game. You can still do everything even without energy, just a bit slower, and I’m not sure what it could bring to the actual puzzle-platformer gameplay.

For the visual part, I’m not an artist either but I concur with what Solo Man Games said below, UI needs some work especially with the fonts (too many of them) and a bit more contrast could help. Also a point that could be nice to give the different ships more identity is giving them slightly different shapes to match their skills/stats and not just a color swap.

Now, as to general gameplay feedback, the shield mechanic is a bit unclear at first as nothing tells you it is there and also why does it make the enemies run away? Also with it having no cooldown or limit, you can abuse it by spamming right click and destroying every bullets that come close. I feel like it should be reworked with either an energy bar that refills overtime and gets consumed when used or as a proper active skill with a cooldown (press shield, get protection for 1-2s so you can get out of a tight situation).

Also, an addition of a cooldown timer or animation on the active skills would be nice.

The later waves felt a bit too long with just too many enemies, having some new enemies even if it’s just slightly bigger variants of the basic ones with a bit more health and firepower (kinda similar to the mini-bosses right now) would make it a bit more interesting than having to go through 150 of the basic enemies. On the opposite, mini-bosses and bosses waves are too short and the enemies there could use some slightly more complex AIs than just rushing into you (and a bit more health so they aren’t cleared in 5 secs).

Now for the two extra ships:

Military one’s gameplay didn’t really match its description & military theme. You’d expect a raw firepower ship, yet its gameplay is focused around placing bombs and luring the enemy into them. I liked playing with the bombs but it’d be more fitting for a small & quick rogue ship imo. As to the bomb upgrades, they felt a bit lackluster (notably the cooldown & detonation time upgrades didn’t felt like they had much impact) and when the game loop lasts only 10 waves you want each upgrade to bring a big improvement as you won’t get a lot of them in a run. Now, for the other upgrades, not only the Arc spread is actually a downgrade as you want aim else you won’t hit enemies, but it also does nothing if you pick it before the extra bullets upgrade. I’d rather merge them into a single upgrade and with extra tiers so you can get 5 and maybe even 7 bullets at once, to get that raw firepower feel (to counterbalance the spread with number of bullets). Also the bombs’ damages are a bit too op as you can one shot the bosses with them.

The religious ship felt like it had too many things put in it with its 3 active skills. It also wasn’t clear that the Sacrifice Wave & Ordeal skills were one-use only (I was waiting for their cooldown until I got them again in the upgrades). Both are quite op though, so if they weren’t one-time use they’d need some nerf. The crusade daggers felt good overall. Throwing them is a bit weak and near useless, or you’d need significantly more daggers as, due to the spread and lack of aiming you’re not guaranteed even one of them will hit unless you’re truly close to enemies. But if you’re close-range, you’re better off directly running into the enemies with them, which is an effective though high risk strategy. However, there was a bit of the same issue as to the military’s bombs with the further upgrades as in they don’t hold that much impact (ie. +1 sword? that doesn’t have a big impact when you start from 8).

Indeed, it’s also an issue from doing a demo for a ‘short’ game with such a compact environment, you both have to show that there is more to the game than what is available to the demo and can’t exactly remove parts from the level design (only a single panel was removed to put the end of demo panels instead & to block further progression). Although I guess it could be made clearer that some panels aren’t meant to be for the demo parts, maybe putting a Locked icon instead of the rhombuses on those for the demo could help so players don’t lose time thinking of ways to get to places they can’t reach anyway.

The first yellow panel isn’t the end of the demo but very close to it (there’s another place you can reach after rising Area 1 using the knowledge you’ve gained getting to the yellow panel and the fact Area 1 is now higher).

While the game up to the first yellow panel is mostly linear (you do a whole loop through the map, going through all 4 areas until you get to that panel), after that it is all non linear as you will have to explore the areas again as you use the yellow panels to reconfigure the connections between each area, creating new possible paths for you to reach the places that were unreachable in your first exploration of the map.

I presume that I am not supposed to reach the other Yellow Square panel.

The other yellow panel you’ve seen is indeed unreachable in the demo.

Somehow missed this game during GMTK despite searching for the couple games that went with that concept. Bit of context needed, 6 months ago I released Snakeloop (Steam|Itch), a puzzle game with the same base concept of a puzzle game based on Snake but where your goal is to eat your own tail.

I played all the way to the last level, which I failed to clear so far, and it took me a bit over 1 hour (although it’s obviously quite biased as I worked a year on a game with similar gameplay).

The game feels quite polished already, there’s quite a lot of levels already and the inclusion of a level editor is a nice thing. Now for the downsides, first is the flow of levels which feels quite weird with some of the tutorial levels being way after the first appearance of these mechanics (boxes & gates). Then the biggest issue imo is the amount of mechanics, there’s too many of them, they don’t always synergize well together and worse some are kinda incompatible with each other. Ie. there are 4 different ways you can do loops depending on the levels: loop anywhere (default one), loop on a plate tile, loop filling all the tiles and loop around galaxies. That’s too many different mechanics that can’t really go together. Imo it is best in a puzzle game to have few mechanics but have them fit tightly together and do the most with their potential, rather than having many mechanics that can be mismatched or aren’t used fully. And even with few mechanics you can end up with lots of different levels if those mechanics work well together.

Regarding bugs, I’ve had the same bug as Animamundi below with the victory animation breaking on 2 or 3 levels (don’t remember which). But a major bug was on levels with 1-way portals: Using Undo on these levels breaks all the 1-way portals with their sign all changing to the same one (and if you take any portal, they’ll all disappear).

Still, I’m quite curious to see where this project will go and will keep an eye on its development.

(note: I already played the gmtk version a month ago)

I like the new features. The skin collection makes sense and is nice to have, although it feels a bit useless right now other than being able to view the different artworks as it has no impact on gameplay. Maybe there could be unique effects associated to each skin?

The new enemy progression tree also adds further depth in the strategy, although it wasn’t clear at first how you’d gain the blood drops (took me quite some time to notice it was at every wave), highlighting it with a feedback could be nice. In its current state, it feels a bit lackluster compared to the talent tree as it’s very linear with few choices or strategy to do and the effects of each upgrade can be a bit unclear.

As to balance, I played in Hardcore mode (not sure of the diffs?) and like Dragon’s Isle Software below, I stopped a bit after wave 50 as enemies’ health was scaling way too much compared to the damages (as it took minutes to clear waves). The VHS God upgrade seems quite op, especially with its 40% evasion.

Also, a small bug when you hover on an upgrade, if the upgrade gives 1 or 3 different stats, the +X texts in the stats ui don’t align properly (it’s fine with upgrades that give 2/4).

It’s in the plans to turn this into a full game although I’m not sure yet of how it could be done while keeping a reasonably low production time (under a year or ~6 months ideally) while having a length of 2-3 hours and a good enough production value.

Hey, I’m the developer of another Snakeloop (Steam|Itch) released a couple months ago with the same base idea of a snake puzzle game where your goal is to form a loop to complete levels.

It’s interesting to see how despite sharing the same base idea, you went with completely different extra mechanics (poop, ice & hunger). Some nitpicks i’ve got is the lack of an Undo button (kinda mandatory for this kind of puzzle games although hard to implement within a jam) and having different snakes for the poop & hunger mechanics even if it was just a color change so it is clearer when a level has those mechanics.

Also, if you have any plans on continuing this game, it’d be best to change its name so the two games don’t get confused with each other.

When I first discovered the math riddle, I knew I had to try making it into a puzzle mechanic at some point.

Thanks, it definitely broke mine to get the rhombus panels working, it’s quite a weird tiling to work with as it’s neither a 2d grid nor exactly a 3d one.

Tu chantes une chanson.

Thanks for the feedback and glad you liked the game.

You’re not the first to miss or forget that there’s an Undo and only relying on Restart. Not sure though how the feature could be made more explicit without making it intrusive.

As to the graphics part, it’s definitely not my strength as a dev. And indeed, adding a bit of details would be the logical next step to improve that side of the game. I’ll see what can be done.

Hey,

I’m looking for feedback on my current project which is a minimalist puzzle game with a simple idea: It’s Snake but your goal is to form a loop by eating your own tail.

Feedback I’m most interested in right now is both in general game feel & polish as well as whether the difficulty curve feels right & how long it takes to complete all of the 48 levels (might take a bit of time to go through them all though).

Itch page

Glad you liked it. Any feedback or suggestions to do ?

Thanks

It’s an interesting parody of Undertale with a lot of references of old school Pokémon games. As a short game it works very well.

It lacks a bit in subtlety but that’s intentional, though I’m not sure how that’d fare on a longer game that’d last more than a few minutes as constant 4th wall breaking might become old quite fast.

I’ve got a bit of an issue with the controls as there are parts of the game where you interact solely with the keyboard (dialogues & pokemon style menus) while others were played with the mouse (the undertale style fights & main menu). I feel like this should be standardized so you either only play with the keyboard or with the mouse, but not both so the player isn’t lost as to what he should be using at a given moment.

Hello, I’m looking for feedback on my game Breakout Survivors which as the name subtly hints is a mix of classic Breakout and Survivors-like/Bullet Heaven.

The main things missing right now is the whole audio part (we’re working on this with the composer right now) as well as some more content (more kind of balls, artifacts, etc… to add more replayability & new strategies to try).

I’m open to all kind of feedbacks as well as suggestions.

Thank you in advance for testing the game.

Thanks for playing. Right now, there’s indeed only content & rough balance for ~12-13 waves. More upgrades and content are planned in the coming weeks.