Quite amazing how far beyond a run-of-the-mill Einstein puzzle this is.
Vg frrzrq gung gur qrrcre yriryf erdhver gur ragver chmmyr gb or n frdhrapr bs jbeqf, fb vg qvq srry n gnq ovg thrff-naq-purpx ng gvzrf. Gurer ner nyfb fbzr nzovthvgvrf orpnhfr Ratyvfu nf n ynathntr vf xvaq bs n zrff (rk: “rvgure N be O” pbhyq or rkpyhfvir be abg). Fgvyy ernyyl vaperqvoyr gung fb znal chmmyrf pbhyq or bireynccrq bagb bar nabgure!
Very cool. The levels in the screenshots look impossible without delving into the mechanics of the game.
(rot13) Frrvat gur terra fanxr cbc hc va gur m-nkvf jnf n ernyyl avpr erirny. V gubhtug sbe fher gurer jbhyq or n oyhr fanxr ybpxrq vagb gur erznvavat 2Q cynar ng fbzr cbvag. Gurer znl or fbzr vagrerfgvat yriry qrfvtaf va gung, V guvax.
Hi folks! The rule set of this game is working as intended but I'm not really satisfied with how these are communicated within the game. The in-game feedback for why you've entered a losing time loop state is practically non-existent. You're welcome to give it a go anyway as you can still win and all that, but I might recommend coming back to this in a few weeks after I've had time to revisit and polish. Cheers!
Thanks for playing! Yeah, I had to bust out paper and pencil to plan out the intended solution. I should have the timey-wimey causality constraints implemented shortly. I'm a bit further off from being able to provide helper visualizations for the timeline and nested item tree. Honestly, might just be a better puzzle experience to let the player map that out on their own.
edit: timey-wimey causality stuff is up
Used this jam to break into learning a bunch of 3D dev skills. I had the chance to work on a bunch of modeling, shaders, and audio. Sadly, I burned down a bit too much time to close the gameplay loop. Leaving this up, however, to show my work, even though there is still a day or two of solid effort to get to what I would call "done".
Looks like Bingus did not sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The gameplay loop felt brisk and snappy. Great visual and audio feedback on everything that was going on. I ended up falling into a strategy of just turtle-ing up with my shield until I happened to draw into a nuke. I saw that the deck size is limited, but I never got particularly close to zero except to see what would happen (softlock). Overall a fun little card combat game!
I thought the news cycle-based take on the stonks mechanic was pretty fun. Being able to buy the dip hard and then hold until some hype blew the price back up felt really fun. One can imagine adding shop mechanic to allow you to buy/sell in multiples or to get insider info on the news before it breaks. Fun little jam sim on its own tough!
I really like this take on the theme of risk. After a couple of plate clicks, you usually have a visual set of suspect napkin locations. After a few more clicks, you can get all but one of those locations to change. BUT, perhaps you missed an immobile location elsewhere? You really do have to make some risky decisions about how sure you are and when to commit to a move.
You can copy + paste at https://rot13.com/ to unscramble. I just didn't want to put it in plain text since I plan to ship a post-jam update which includes the mechanic. Telegraphing exactly what it is would detract from the reveal.
Great puzzle concept! You were able to do a lot with only a few basic building blocks on a 5x5 grid. I liked how each new mechanic was paired up with a level to force you to understand some rule about that mechanic. The only one that felt a little unintuitive was the spike behavior for specific on/off timings; some of the solutions felt like my mouse ought to get spiked, but survived anyway. Maybe this is a consequence of some mismatch in animation state vs. internal puzzle state? Otherwise, the tricky puzzles were all rewarding to solve. The one with the yellow biscuit on the teleporter in front of the red rat had me stumped for a bit, but I think that just makes it my favorite of the bunch. Kind of love it when you're asking yourself if the devs accidentally made the puzzle impossible before reaching that key insight.
Really fun! Awesome job!
Taking an interpretation of "unique" to include exceptionally strong in some facet, my list of unique or underrated games:
Visuals:
Haze (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3850677): Highlights the impact that detailed visual flare can have above and beyond just the hitbox areas.
Tower of The Biscuit (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3851771): Great visual feedback on scoring both during the build phase and at the end of each round.
Risky Fishing (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3850495): Each round ends with giant fish piñata-like explosion to tally up the final score. This gets really impressive when you've just gotten through a really good run. Making loot/reward feel good makes the game feel good.
Bark Bark Biscuits (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3851061): Really great scene transitions here. This makes progression feel intentional and not rushed (vs just hard-switching directly to the next scene).
*WILDLY UNDERRATED* Gorblo vs. the Haunted Critters (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3846656): Really just has everything? You wouldn't even suspect this to be a game jam game if you encountered it in the wild.
Audio:
Die On The Tether (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3848007): Incredibly immersive audio for looting derelict spaceships. Audio is not just music and triggered SFX, ongoing environmental sound can carry immersion a long way.
Great takes on risk:
Risk-o-matix (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3848239): Pits the slow grind of loot hunting against the risk of challenging stronger enemies for quicker loot progression. The player gets to set their own pace on difficulty without getting forced into something that is too challenging or too boring. You don't need to explicitly set a difficulty in settings to make that happen.
*underrated* DEPNULL (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3851617): Balance the odds of winning on a slot machine vs. the risk of breaking it. But also, you have to eventually break it in order to continue. Building systems that turn the perceived bad thing into a critical tool can lead to some very interesting dynamics.
Grapple Snacks (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3850262): You grapple onto biscuits with the ultimate goal of eating them, but then you no longer have that grapple point to work with. Some forethought on sequencing is definitely required in the later levels. Takeaway is that surprisingly puzzley aspects can emerge from ostensibly non-puzzle genres.
Unique gameplay:
*underrated* Bomb or Kill (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3808626): Tasteful use of AI to create a scenario that will test a completely different skillset than your used to in a videogame.
*underrated* Spinergy (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3849658): You don't need a story in order to have fun building a number factory.
*underrated* Carbon (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3849620): A really great exploration of a central puzzle mechanic.
Makin' Biscuits (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3842227): Cute Factorio.
Cloud Top Bakery (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3849626): Really creative tutorial setup. You get the rules of the game in text plus a live micro version of the game to play around with to see how everything works. I also love the title screen pixel art which does perspective outside the usual top, side, isometric trio.
*underrated* The Greatest Biscuit Heist (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3852044): Hard skill-based movement, but a great example of implicit difficulty scaling. As you get closer to the prize, it is inherently more difficult to control your character due to the longer tether.
Lucky Loop (https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-14/rate/3851875): Establishes lots of different "archetypes" for roguelike upgrades and deck (wheel) construction
I glad you liked it! Not the most timely tip, but "z" will undo one step at a time rather than "r" which wipes the slate clean. In any case, the question stands. Why allow the player to accidentally bonk when there is a dedicated wait key? The reason is that there is a game mechanic that is in the code, but not used in any levels. I had wanted to include a suite of levels with this other mechanic, but getting the UI done ended up taking me right up to the final hour of the jam. Disabling movement for a bonk felt like too much risk to do at the last minute, and so it awkwardly stayed on into the final jam build.
The mechanic if you are curious (rot13): Lbh pna pbageby zhygvcyr qbtf. N ybg bs qrfvta fcnpr bcraf hc vs lbh nyybj bar qbt gb zbir juvyr nabgure fgnlf chg ol ohzcvat ntnvafg gur jnyyf.
Design-wise, levels are coming from one of the following:
1: Show some relevant rule or behavior that is important to the puzzles in isolation.
2: Build some complications around a central theme.
3: Stumble into something interesting completely by accident while building and playtesting another design.
So for #1 I'm a big believer in "show don't tell" wherever possible. I wanted to have some number of tutorial levels simple enough to show one thing at a time (ex: get all biscuits to win, lose a biscuit to a guard and lose, get seen only with a biscuit, etc.). This is pretty critical to build up the players toolkit so that solutions to later puzzles feel deliberate and not arbitrary.
For #2, you kind of have to mess around with your own system to get a sense for how things work and what constraints can be enforced. Discoveries here might be stuff like: "I can punish the player for losing a guard at this specific spot by putting down multiple biscuits in different directions" or "once a guard is one tile behind me, I can never lose it" or "if I put a biscuit on the shortest path from the player to a guard, I can force them to collect the biscuits in a certain order". You can then build up a little arsenal of building blocks to start going for bigger ideas.
Finally, #3 is just going to happen from time to time in a way that I'm not clever enough to intuit from the start. The snake level kind of came together this way. I figured out how to build up the snake in the usual way, but then I wanted the user to have to lose it all again in order to make it to the final biscuit. Running around in test showed that you can loop back and squash down the length of the snake one square at a time by looping back repeatedly.
I really like the Meatboy-esque instant respawn. It definitely keeps the meat grinder gameplay moving at full speed. Some of the instant kills at spawn might otherwise be unfair, but it doesn't really matter since you're just supposed to go all the time anyway.
Sad this jam doesn't have a dedicated narrative category. That ending reminds me of the Dark City movie.
It starts out easy enough to clear the level, but by the end there is some real danger to sticking around too long. I definitely felt the "risk it for the biscuit" theme coming through strong by the time I slipped out the door of that last level.
The art really came together well and it was fun to uncover little bits of lore as you make your way through the office.
The grapple mechanics seemed pretty familiar at first, but it turns out they can interact in a pretty cool way every once in a while: if you grapple while falling really fast, you can transfer that linear momentum straight into angular momentum and then yeet yourself off in whatever direction you want. I don't know that I got any explicit reward for doing this anywhere, but it was fun to schmove for the sake of schmovement.
I unfortunately was not able to make it all the way through the first big level. The first time it seems that I got caught in an inescapable area in the bottom-left. The next round through was going well until I clipped inside the wall and couldn't find a way to get myself back out again.
A+ on everything visual here. Sprites, animations, main menu, interstitials, UI, background... ALL of it is looking great. The SFX is also coming through really strong. I like how the sound played when you click on an enemy changes based on how close the enemy was. This is really great feedback when explicit visual cues of the radii have been withheld.
The only bug I encountered was being able to score multiple times off the same enemy if I clicked fast enough. This is toward the benefit of the player, so I didn't mind that much. I was on a roll already and this helped propel me into 5-star status. The only feel bad I have is for Bambi's owner, who will almost surely have to pay more at the groomers after Bambi successfully barked their way out of 99% of the cleaning regimen.
This game slowly morphs from an FPS to a survival horror somewhere around level 7. I went with an all-in explosion build, which seemed to help a lot with crowd control for a while. By level 12, it feels like I'm being surrounded by the weeping angels from Dr. Who and that the slow, suffocating embrace of a pack of grandmas is inescapable.
Really fun vibe.
Love the art direction here! The purples and soft glows work together with the music to create a chill, relaxed vibe. The gameplay itself seems a lot more hardcore. The levels go on for a bit, and so getting sent all the way back to the start off one hit is quite punishing. I also found the hit boxes to extend far outside the visible boundaries of the bat. I ultimately had to tap out on level 3 where there seems to be a really tight gap right at the intersection of a snake, fish, and ceiling worm. Tightening up the hit box or keeping checkpoints along the way (bat perches maybe?) would go a long way toward approachability.
That said, the sound-based auras of light around the various obstacles is a really cool idea. This is a nice substitute for the echo location ability while it is charging up.
I accrued a lot of in-game stress early on trying to guess the password from previous user commands. After noticing the 1:1 correspondence between password length and log output, things started coming together from there, though I did putz around with strictly-alphabetical passwords before realizing I needed to switch to numeric. From there, the general idea of the game becomes clear and starts to unfold more rapidly. I made it to the final level, but I ultimately ran out of time before draining any accounts. The final mission then restarted (yay!) but I died of a heart attack right after.
My overall impression is that I really needed the out-of-game hints on the game page in order to progress. The flow of the game would be helped a lot by working these guidelines into the commands and/or console hints. The final sequence can probably also last a fair amount longer without being too easy.
Otherwise, the exploration of various barriers and vulnerabilities did do a lot to build the immersion of being a hacker on the outside trying to hunt for some kind of ingress! I also liked the choice of music. It felt very data-spacey.
The art style reminds me a lot of the original Binding of Isaac (and not just because of the flies and poop). Scroller or not, the norm for character control is definitely keyboard. Going with mouse only is a bit of a risk, but I think you've nailed it here. The smoothing is snappy enough to feel like the fly is doing what I want it to without be so sensitive that it stops feeling like a physical object with inertia. Strangely enough, I found the flight trail to be pretty useful in breaking up the monotony of restarting a run. You can swirl around and doodle until you have something to do.
The burden mechanic works really well as a risk/reward control. Accrue too much ore and you'll have a hard time getting back. Adding in some extra penalty for dying along the way would probable accentuate this tradeoff further. Otherwise, the ore and upgrade economy felt pretty well balanced. I would recommend changing the default ore behavior to be "keep" rather than "discard" since I usually just wanted to keep everything while mining out a line of rocks.
