itch.io

Unfortunately the robot factory is broken. It requires 500 power to operate, but there is no building that allows increasing the power cap.

It's a Godot 4.beta10 game. Which has the necessary issues with web builds.

The technical reason is that Firefox does not yet officially support this header:

Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: credentialless

The workaround is opening it in a new window. I uploaded a new built that advises to try that option.

I agree that it needs more feedback. I focused too much on the visuals and not enough on the actual gameplay. The goal is indeed to change their orbit so they burn up in the atmosphere, without burning up yourself. The game is kind of broken though, as sometimes debris spawns in an orbit that already crosses the atmosphere. Those are still added to your score. If you are too far away, debris can despawn even though you've correctly changed its orbit so it would've gone into the atmosphere. Anyway, great that you enjoyed flying through space.

This game is indeed quite zen.

Interesting puzzle game. The double links made the later levels a lot harder, but I still managed to solve them all.

I like the concept, but had a hard time controlling the slime.

There's a description of the game's controls on the game's page. See https://bcmpinc.itch.io/orbital-garbage-collector

That probably means you ran out of energy, or it overheated, or maybe it short-circuited. It's part of the game to figure out why it got stuck.

I frequently had that everything on screen would just disappear or that I'd randomly died. Another issue is that I had no idea what I was looking at. So the first time I was randomly strolling around and after 40 seconds started to try out stuff like what are those glowing lines along the walls. Can I touch them? At some point I saw question mark boxes so I tried to pick up those, but nothing happened. Or I encountered a sign of other live moving around. Should I touch those? I died, so apparently not.

For you the developer it is clear what everything is, but not so for the player. You have to somehow communicate this to the player. Either by using concepts that they are already familiar with, like spikes and pits or scary looking enemies. By outright telling them, or by making sure they experience what they are early in game.

I considered that, but the problem is that I cannot properly estimate it. For example, if you'd try to move from the end point to the artifact, travel time would be infinite, but you couldn't possibly know without trying.

That cat is so cute <3.

Did you wait for the actions to reach the line where it says "now"? There's quite a bit of lag between scheduling an action and it being executed. This is a core mechanic of the game as the planet is a few light-hours away and thus signals takes a lot of time to travel between you and the rover.

It might also be that while reading the instructions, the rover's battery died. In that case the energy cell would read 0% and the system log would indicate "Energy cell critical. Shutting down". There's a restart button there as well.

Figuring out why the rover is not responding is an intended part of the game, but lacking a proper tutorial section, this doesn't work when it happens right at the start.

Getting the stairs in place was a problem that I was already comfortable with solving. It is the same trick I used to get the pieces of text on the walls together. Though it took me a while to realize that was what I needed to do. Getting up the stairs was easy once I realized that the problem wasn't that I looked away while climbing the stairs. Climbing stairs like that makes absolutely no sense in real life, so it required some out of the box thinking, which is why it's my favorite puzzle.

One thing I missed was a run key. I tried using ctrl for that, but that was a mistake. Ctrl+w is a browser hotkey for closing your window. Though having tighter and shorter corridors as someone else mentioned, might be a better solution.

I was close to winning level 3, but then all my plants died out. For some reason I still managed to win that level. I had no issue with waiting there as I could speed up the time. (Which didn't work as well when there were still plants, as my PC couldn't handle the computational load).

Level 4 and 5 where more challenging, as indeed evolution is out of control. I like the idea. Though might prefer a little more feedback on my actions. When the target crop is the most common, you have no information on what the rest is doing so making corrections becomes impossible. One way to provide more feedback is to have histograms about the length of the plants and the roots.

My strategy was to kill of most plants, then set the parameters to what I believe is best for the target crop and hope for the best.

The artwork for this game is absolutely amazing. The game itself though... there's no way to keep your hp high enough if it gets cut in half every other turn.

Interesting idea, though I feel this game leans to much on luck. If your first tower refuses to go any sensible location its game over in the first round. Maybe if you start out with at least two towers there's still a bit of strategy in there. Might also be useful if the path the enemies take is clear.

I'm a big fan of escape room style games. This mechanic fits that theme really great. The texts on the wall are a nice addition and helpful too as it helps the player get to understand the mechanics of the game. The puzzle where I had to climb back up the stairs had me bumped for a bit. Every time I tried to climb it the stair disappeared beneath me. I did manage to finish the game though. Well done.

I was curious about this game but unfortunately it won't start for me.

Me at world 1: how's this mechanic ever going to become a challenge. Just wait until the timer switched and continue.
Me at world 2: Oh, that's how.

The simple smooth graphic style is great. I had trouble with the bird's hit box being a bit larger than I'd expect, but managed to beat the game in the end.

Tthe keys popping off is great. I got a score of 114. I ignored the function keys as the first time those popped up I hit f5, reloading the page. 

I like the diversity of the puzzles in the game. Having the camera follow the gun and not the robot was a bit tricky at times though.

First time I played it my helper bots went haywire and started planting lots of trees closely next to each other. My browser did not like that. My second play I knew what the goal was and finished the game in a few seconds. I like the idea, though the game needs a bit of tuning so that you have to balance expanding the forest and chasing down checkpoints.

The witty advise of clippy is hilarious. I struggled a lot with the rocket as new popups kept popping up. The invisible cursor, which I expected to be hard was actually quite easy

I finished the game. That's a lot of puzzles you've made in 48h.

The game looks great and the robot feels really responsive. It still needs some kind of goal though, either a score like number of tiles traveresed or a finish. Having different tiles and have them start popping up as you progress in the game would make the game more interesting.

I got a score of 456. As the game does not require the use of a mouse, I'd have preferred if it could be controlled with the arrow keys. Having both available would be even better, so players can choose.

I did the fake 3D thing because I wanted to try it out and I think it looks cool. Initially I also had planned to have more layers, so you could see elevation, but in my tests the difference was barely noticeable, so I scratched that idea. As it currently is, it indeed does not add much to the game. I feared that in 2D the image would be too flat and that you could not make out the edges of the cliffs, but with the shadow in place it works quite well. Here's an image of the 2D map:

Got 43 points. Took a few tries as most games take a while to figure out how to play them, meaning a new game popping up usually results in a game over. I've seen other games in this jam with the concept, but so far this one is the best.

Thanks, the pictures of the different growth stages helps a lot.

I had planned to make multiple scenario's which ramped up in difficulty, so that the player has time to figure out the controls at the start in a level that is basically drive from A to B. Though adding a tutorial popup that explains how to do that is definitely a good idea.

The game is quite complex for a gamejam and I didn't think I would be able to finish it in time. Though I'm glad I tried as I did succeed in implementing the basic idea of the game.

When I played the game for the first time I had no idea what I was looking at, other than marbles on a track. I assumed it was just pick a marble and hope that it gets at the end first. Though then the cards started popping up which surprised me. I didn't play full screen so I could not read the text. When I had 5 the message about cards slowing you down popped up, so I started clicking them. Then when I got 4 of the same colored cards, the game suddenly ended. So I thought maybe that was the goal, which was quite confusing. I didn't know whether I'd won because I'd already forgotten which ball I had chosen.

The description helps a lot. Now that I understand the game better, it's quite fun.

Herding cats was one of the ideas I had for this jam, nice to see an implementation. Did I finally manage to get a pack of cats into the trap, the moment I walk away they all leave again.

Marbles <3. I got 20 tickets for guessing correctly \o/. Guessing 0 or 1 seems like a good strategy. Would be cool if you started out with say 5 tickets and playing a game costs a few tickets.

Herding cats was one of the ideas that I had for this game jam. Fun that you made a submission around that theme. My best score is slightly above 40k, though I've no idea how I did that.

Yay marbles! Though it isn't clear what I'm supposed to do in the game. Can you maybe add a description?

I love the rock paper scissors plants. Though I had difficulty figuring out the mechanics of how flowers grow and die depending on their surroundings. Is it supposed to be that sometimes flowers cannot be harvested nor removed, or is that a bug?

Interesting concept. When you switch to new controls the difficulty really ramps up, especially when they switch left and right. I do wish you didn't slide into spikes whenever you're on a slope though.

I imagined Eugene to be Mr. Oshiro from Celeste, running around his deserted hotel. The game gets fun when you rush to a part that only minutes before you were really struggling with. However, when hitting a surface at an angle I often had a different block light up than the one that was visibly struck by the bullet. This made it near impossible to hit blocks reliably. I believe the issue is that collision is checked for the entire rectangle, rather than only the center of the bullet.

I managed to get all the fires extinguished.

I love the hand drawn art.

Due to the horses running upon start I had lost all wheels by the time I started playing. I still managed to get to the end though. Clicking replay I noticed the cart is much faster. Having the cart not move at all without wheels would make it important to keep sufficient wheels alive. You'd also need a restart button. Interesting game mechanic.