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Although I did participate in this year’s GMTK jam, I found this game through Lightners Live Plus ^_^ (which I spent quite a lot of time on, haha).

Reached Level 11. The concept is cool, although I did feel like the game lacks a bit when your character nears death - when lots of enemies crowd around you, I feel suffocated, and there does not seem to be much to do other than hope for an early death (or sometimes, squirm around and pray for the best?). Either way, that part of the game feels out of my control, and I would like better control of my character especially in those situations. (Honestly, even a quick “Instant Death” button in such a case would be nice 🥲 Sometimes it takes quite a long while to wait for death.)

I played a couple times :) Although suffocating was uncomfortable, the rest of the time the game did flow quite nicely.

Everyone in the comments is chatting about crashing the game… but here’s my favorite build (it works almost every time):

(Writing in Rot13 for spoilers because it ruins the game)

Qnl 1: Ohl n [Fvatyr Ohyyrg] oybpx naq n [Pbyyrpg] oybpx, naq znxr gur ybbc [Fvatyr Ohyyrg] + [Pbyyrpg Pbvaf] + [Rzcgl Fcnpr] + > [Rzcgl Fcnpr]. (Lbhe UC jvyy yvxryl tb qbja gb ~80. Qba’g jbeel nobhg vg.)

Qnl 2: Ohl n [Serrmr] oybpx naq chg vg va gur 3eq cynpr va gur ybbc. Gur ybbc vf abj [Fvatyr Ohyyrg] + [Pbyyrpg Pbvaf] + [Serrmr] + [Rzcgl > Fcnpr]. (Lbhe UC jvyy tb qbja gb ~40. Qba’g jbeel nobhg vg.)

Qnl 3: Fryy gur [Fvatyr Ohyyrg] naq [Pbyyrpg] oybpxf. Ohl n [Serrmr] oybpx. Znxr gur ybbc [Serrmr] + [Rzcgl Fcnpr] + [Serrmr] + [Rzcgl Fcnpr].

Gung’f vg :). Qba’g ohl be fryy be zbir nalguvat. Lbh’er fnsr hagvy gur raq bs gur tnzr.

I had fun :)

The thing that messed the most with me in understanding the mechanics was that after successfully eating the jam+tail, you can keep moving, and if you pass the move counter this causes you to lose instead of win. This happened to me in the first two levels, and it took me a bit to understand that this is likely a bug and not a game mechanic I misunderstood. :(

That being said, the artwork and story were charming ^_^ very much would want to hear more about the Wuhong/Ouroboros rivalry.

Lmao my thoughts exactly ahahahaha.

I enjoyed the aesthetic :) Controls were a bit clunky - I felt as if the timing for catching the loop could have been a little more forgiving (or alternatively, could have been more indicative as to where the success window is).

Awh, thanks so much for the kind words! (And yes, I am honored by the comparison to Snakebird)

We’ve actually discussed mouse controls, both during and after the jam! Turns out that although it initially seems more intuitive, there are edge cases where what action has to happen after doing a mouse-drag is not even well-defined! Turns out that playing with controls where you drag with the mouse actually gives you a slightly different game than if you control with a keyboard >:).

(We only fully realized what this means a few days after the jam, and the lack of mouse controls in the game is solely due to our personal priorities :))

As a mathematician, I approve of this game.

(thanks for making it I needed this)

Wellll, let me know next time you publish a Sokoban. 👀👀👀

That’s a great suggestion and we did consider it, but unfortunately:

(writing in ROT 13 for spoilers)

Vs lbh znxr lbhe onaq tb va na “Rvtug”-funcrq ybbc, zbivat npebff vg jbhyq unir gb znxr gur snpr vaireg vgfrys juvyr pebffvat gur zvqqyr bs gur ybbc. (Vg’f cresrpgyl cbffvoyr gb pbqr, whfg znxrf vg zber pbashfvat sbe crbcyr fvapr cerffvat “Yrsg” ercrngrqyl jvyy trg lbh fghpx va gur zvqqyr bs gur ybbc)

Thanks for playing our game! <3 (All credit for the great puzzles goes to @iDragon76)

The mechanic is neat! Took me a few tries to figure out that loops around the flower is what mattered and not around the entire herd.

I was anxious towards the end and thought ‘oh no, there’s no way I’m surviving much longer if these waves go on to infinity’ so seeing a big scary wolf and seeing that reaching this wave was intended calmed me down a little, haha.

Would have enjoyed to see more of those wolves earlier! It was a nice change in pace.

I also appreciate how the wolf waves appear in a spiral around the herd, giving good synergy with the loop mechanic. (Took me a few waves to realize that’s what is going on)

My EULA scrolling was too slow, both when playing on Desktop and on Mobile :(. Am I missing something on how the dragging mechanics works?

Other than that, I had a blast. :)

I enjoyed all the puzzles! They were more difficult than they looked 👀.

Simplistic artwork is my vibe, so I enjoyed that as well.

An undo function would have been really helpful though! I’m used to puzzle games having Z be undo everywhere, so it really caught me off-guard in the later levels where I found myself resetting a lot after mis-presses.

That big zoom out in the end had me thinking for a moment that I’ll have to solve all 16 puzzles 😭.

I’m always glad to see Sokoban games in a jam. ^_^

Oooohhh!

the last few

How far did you get? 👀

Thanks! 🥰 Hehe yeah, the controls take a hot minute :).

20 levels is actually on the low side in this game mechanics’ potential! Turns out there’s a * lot * of edge cases in the mechanics that can cause all sorts of weird behavior - and the levels here do their best to explore them, but in this game jam we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s possible!

Just as an example (writing in ROT13 because spoilers):

Vg vf cbffvoyr gb znxr n pbasvthengvba va juvpu n zbir ybbxf yrtny, ohg nsgre znxvat vg, lbhe “Yratgu Yrsg” one orpbzrf artngvir! Guvf vf vzcyrzragrq, naq cbffvoyr va bar bs gur yriryf (rira vs whfg sbe n yvggyr ovg). Abar bs gur yriryf erdhver lbh qb guvf va beqre gb fbyir gurz, gubhtu.

All puzzles were designed by @iDragon76, and both of us enjoy playing difficult puzzle games, so our game caters mostly to that audience. :)

Hey! I had fun trying out the game (played a few rounds until I sorta got the hang of it) But I’ll admit I don’t think I understood all of the rules?

Could you maybe explain them to me? 🙏🥺 I’d love to go back and give em another shot :).

Specifically, what I’m wondering is: How do you customize character classes? And what are the different class abilities? If it’s relevant, I couldn’t figure out how to use any of the buttons in the menu bar in the bottom middle.

The game did become sort of trivial once I realized that (Writing in Rot13 because SPOILERS): Vg vf rabhtu gb nggnpx rnpu rarzl bapr, fvapr jurarire gurl nggnpx zr, V pna vzzrqvngryl tvir gurz gurve pneq onpx. Guvf xrrcf zr fnsr naq riraghnyyl biresybjf nyy rarzvrf.

Anyways, would be glad to hear about what else I can do with your game :).

I enjoyed the quirky wall of text, and the game loop had a very nice charm to it that kept me hooked for quite a while longer than I expected. :)

My only complaint is that there were multiple times throughout the game where I felt lost. As in, am I going in an intended direction? I had to make some leaps of faith, and after landing, couldn’t tell which direction was the right one (sometimes it was left).

My jam partner and I found the ending by chance, so I got to see the game complete. But I feel we mostly got lucky.

So I do want to ask: Is there an intended order/path in which players are supposed to reach the end?

I did enjoy seeing the little glitchy bits throughout the map (very fun) but also, I could not always tell if I was progressing forwards or backwards.

CUTE 😍😭

I… experienced something.

Not really sure how to put it into words.

Thank you.

The cute pixel-art animals are spectacular! Drew me in immediately 🥰.

My only bother was that the Snake controls were a little clunky. Maybe it was just my laptop? but making really tight turns required me to let go of one key before pressing the other, and I would much rather not have to focus on that when having to press two arrow keys in quick succession.

Thanks for the game!! I had fun. ^_^

Instant nostalgia to “This is the Only Level”.

This was fun! And it’s always nice to see a fellow friend who likes making Sokoban games 🥰.

(And kudos especially for making it in PuzzleScript)

Took my jam partner and I a good couple minutes before we figured out precisely how to control the locationc of our swings.

The game became a lot more interesting after that 👀.

Very cute!! At first glance I was skeptical, but we enjoyed it a lot!!

The story was really quirky! Ahaha I had quite a lot of fun.

Some of the puzzles were less my thing, but the story deffo kept me going.

Outlines might help! Although I do not know if there is much that will help with a too-large overload of shapes. Maybe giving shapes colors could also work, having the different colors blend together?

The puzzles were cute!

I am curious - as these are optimization puzzles - how did you go about making sure the solutions you require are optimal? Would the game allow you to complete the puzzle if you somehow used less than the amount of pixels requested?

Wow that’s a lot of polish! I had a great time with the art.

I noticed that in the late-game levels, shapes overlap each other quite a lot (and in the last few levels, completely), making it uncomfortable to tell what the target sizes are.

I rather liked the challenge of fitting my cursor to the shape - just not the challenge of figuring out which shape belongs to which.

The gameplay reminded me a * lot * of the “Pose Mii” minigame from “Wii Play”. So there was nostalgia in it for me as well. :)

Ah! I almost got it, then. But having the details in front of me instead of guessing them really helped clear my mind for solving the puzzles. Ideally I’d want puzzles that make the rules clear on their own, instead of having them explained through text - but the rules here are a bit technical, and I can’t seem to think of what sort of gameplay would help me understand what I missed. Tough game.

I went back to the game (luckily it remembered I was at Hivemind) and finished the rest of the levels. :) Thanks for explaining what I missed!

Gosh I love Sokobans!

I’ll admit the rules felt like they could be clearer: I got all the way up to Hivemind before I stopped - and although my intuition for what works is getting better, I feel like I am expected to have understood more concrete rules by now.

I was amused at how quickly puzzles turned from Sokoban classics into counting object amounts and figuring out parity issues.

If you’d be so kind as to maybe tell a little more about what sort of functionality from each object type gets merged, I’d be more than willing to give this another go!

Yeesh. I totally lost track of time exploring every nook and cranny. This is precisely the sort of game belonging to my niche - very glad I got to try it.

The art and story were very on point, and the music had leitmotifs that were very easy to follow. No complaints at all.

Haha, I get it, it’s space air hockey.

I tried playing a couple times, but kept getting lost a few rooms in (the blue-ish room, you know the one).

The two things that bothered me most:

1. The camera zoomed in a lot in the hallways, and that made it really difficult for me to see where I was going. A little bit of zooming in is cute (and can be great game juice!) but I felt like it was a bit overdone.
2. What ended each of my playthroughs is - I think - that the ball got so big it clipped out of the screen. Is this what you meant by “it will explode”? Because it didn’t feel very intentional. Mainly, I felt a bit confused, since the game hadn’t ended - so I could not tell if I had lost the ball forever, or if wandering around enough might result in finding it again.

What I loved:

1. The music! It was really calming, and fit the space-y vibes. Honestly this was most of what kept me wanting to play for a minute longer, even after the ball exploded.
2. The lil’ scribbles in the background! Exploring a new area and finding scribbles I haven’t seen yet felt very rewarding.
3. Although I had trouble actually playing the game, I did very much like the gameplay premise. I’d never have guessed that you could make an exploration-based game out of Pong. (and I love air hockey; because who doesn’t).

Playing this game was thrilling!

It felt odd to me that to add knife pieces on, I could pick whether to click or drag them - but to take them off, there is only an option to drag. (Especially since in the late game, dragging becomes quite a hassle).

The artwork is especially charming, and I felt it fit nicely with the sound direction. Although it is true that you did not create any of the audio assets, the fact that they worked well with each other is great in itself.

In your game page you wrote:

but this is as far as I can go as my first jam + solo But for your first jam, this is insane!

The gameplay def could be sharpened up quite a bit, but don’t we all know how hard it is to make a game alone and in two days.

I very much enjoyed all the cutscenes, breaks between levels, and surprises popping up in each level. My favorite games are the ones where you can tell the person who made the game knows precisely what emotions they want the player to feel. And this is one of those.

Hope to see you in another jam!

Whaaat, that was crazy! I honestly was a little bit less of a fan of the puzzles themselves - I felt as though there was a lot of potential with the mechanics that was missed out on. But the way the puzzle elements were presented, and the way the little people would walk around the screen kept me captivated for the entire run. Loved it!

My favorite bit was watching the mouse move all the way to the bottom corner and have the taskbar pop up. Very well executed animation. :)

The Narration was pretty funny to listen to - and it shows how much care you put into making the little details in each of the cutscenes. I had a great good few minutes. Thanks for the game!

I played for quite a while, haha.

Here’s a screenshot of my best round:

https://img.itch.zone/aW1nLzEyNzY1NzE2LnBuZw==/original/8RHO9y.png

(I’m not embedding it in the comment to avoid giving people spoilers)

Once I found out I could do that, the different level layouts didn’t affect my playing style so much.