itch.io

Missing a few QoL features (like undo and having the numbers in the hints grey out individually when the corresponding squares are placed down), but otherwise great game, easily up there with Pictopix and Picross Touch over on Steam.

I did the secret puzzles + collage in one sitting, most of the collage puzzles were super easy but I'm not complaining. 

I appreciate that the puzzles never went larger than 20x20. 25x25 and 30x30 puzzles aren't hard per se but they quickly get obnoxious. I also appreciate that you did not fall into the trap of penalizing the player for making mistakes, as that inadvertently gives the player information they can use to reset and cheese the puzzle while also adding nothing positive to the experience.

Some traps you did fall into are symmetrical puzzles and the aforementioned collage. Whenever the hints along one axis are symmetrical, you can actually simplify solving the puzzle. For example, if the top hints are all symmetrical and you see, say, [1 5 1] in the row hints, you can just fill in the middle 5 squares and be guaranteed that it's correct. This heuristic has never failed me. The collage is a trap because being part of a larger image means that most of the puzzles will be caught in a round shape or flat line, resulting in several full/empty rows and columns, or in one puzzle, it was all 10s so I didn't even have to solve it because there was nothing to solve. Again, not complaining. The super easy puzzles feel like a little reward for all the hard work so burning through them rapidly is cathartic.

Another trap to watch out for is that some nonogram implementations like to check your solution against the map the puzzle was generated from instead of against the hints, resulting in valid solutions being rejected because the puzzle has multiple solutions but the game only accepts one. I don't know which method yours uses, as you managed to avoid such situations, so great job on that. Puzzles with multiple solutions typically happen when the source pixel art has dithering.

Overall, very polished, I had a blast. My overall time was 25:29:06, though itch will not let me paste the image, apparently. 

Edit: Maybe if I try uploading...

So uploading works but not pasting.

Dude I am so Dex right now. It's crazy how Dex I am right now.

Edit 2: After getting around to playing this one, yeah I agree, it gets hard fast once the counting mechanic is introduced. I got to level 19 and called it a night.

Edit: Sorry about the confusion. I was on the page for UFO 50 Nonograms and somehow switched to another game's page without noticing, and replied while under the mistaken impression that OP's comment was about the other game. My bad.

If I may weigh in, I'd say that some of the puzzles are a lot harder than others, but nothing has been overwhelming for me. Over the years, I have played some truly ridiculous nonograms that took multiple hours to solve and the puzzles in this game come nowhere close to that (in fact I've solved every puzzle so far in less than 10 minutes each). One thing I appreciate is that the puzzles don't get bigger than 15x15, as while larger puzzles aren't hard per se, they can get tedious and exhausting, I've played many nonogram games where not even mid way through, they devolve into nothing but 30x30s and it's just obnoxious. I also appreciate that this game doesn't fall into the trap of dinging the player for making "mistakes", as that not only sucks the fun out of it, but also inadvertently acts as a free hint because the player can just reset the puzzle and use the information they got from getting dinged to their advantage. All in all, this is a very competent implementation. It's up there with Picross Touch and Pictopix over on steam. Very cozy. Very binge.

TL;DR I think the difficulty is fine where it's at. OP probably just got frustrated because the randomizer hit them with a harder puzzle that they weren't prepared for, i.e. the problem isn't the difficulty, but the difficulty curve. That can be smoothed out by manually assigning each puzzle a difficulty rank based on solve time and how stingy the hints are, and changing the randomizer so that the lower ranks are weighted heavier. Or just use a bag randomizer going through one rank at a time.

I looked into it and it appears to be a bug in a UE5 feature called Lumen Global Illumination (the bug being that the engine isn't feature-probing and polyfilling for it and just assumes the card has the feature). Adding a setting to disable that (or switching to a better engine) should do the trick.

My GTX 1070 can handle 99% of games just fine, but yours has a bug where, through whatever method or shader you're using for the shadow compositing, the shadows and everything under them appear pitch black and makes it hard to see much of anything. Who turned out the lights?

A typical frustrating response I get to any performance issue is "just get a new GPU lol", but I reiterate that my GPU is not the problem as it has no trouble running most games. The only issues I tend to see at the really high end (like, New Dead Space high end) are low framerates and games simply not launching, but that is exceedingly rare even today. So this is not an "I need to shell out thousands of dollars for a new GPU I don't really need" issue. This is a "there needs to be more graphics settings" issue. A blanket High/Medium/Low setting in this day and age is just not enough. There's too much variety in people's hardware setups to capture in a single 3-way toggle. If the game isn't going to have automated feature probing and fallbacks/polyfills then the settings need more granularity. Plus my GPU can handle the game on high perfectly fine (in fact I'm not even sure what the differences are--low and high look the same to me). It's just that I can't see much of anything because anything under a shadow gets rendered pitch black. For example, a setting to change the shadow rendering method (or even turn them off) would fix the issue that I'm having at the expense of a small amount of visual polish, but that's a trade-off I'm willing to make because my eyes aren't getting any younger and graphical fidelity is easily on the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to what makes a game fun.

I almost considered not saying anything, but what I see in this game seems more like a wider pattern where devs are starting to make too many assumptions about people's hardware, or assume that just because it works on their own rig that nothing more needs to be done. I would think that a UE5 game wouldn't have to do anything and that UE itself would handle hardware compatibility, as it ought to, but evidently this is turning into what webdev was about 10 years ago where any JS/CSS feature you use had to be carefully checked on MDN for cross-compatibility and came with polyfills and feature probes to make sure it'd work consistently across all major browsers. Though I don't think it has to be that way. I think every game would be fine having a "minimal graphics mode" or something of the sort which turns off all the filters, shaders and effects so that just the most basic rendering is done, and that alone would be enough so that if anyone is having issues with the game (like me with the pitch black shadows), they could just drop into that mode and be able to experience the game at the cost of some visuals. The dev can work with feedback and slowly add more refined features over time, but at the initial stages, that would do so much more than a high/medium/low quality setting straight out adobe flash.

I gave two examples. They're on consoles without a secondary directional input or the secondary directional input isn't used for aiming, so the only way to turn is with the primary one. That's what tank controls are. In Metroid Prime, the C stick is used to switch visors. In Perfect Dark, I don't remember what the C buttons do, but they certainly don't aim your weapon.

I always found it incredible that people can play an FPS well on a gamepad because every time I've tried, I can never get past the tank controls that it usually entails (Perfect Dark and Metroid Prime come to mind, I've beaten them but it was not easy), nor get good at aiming with the right analog, and I end up eating the dirt. But playing one on a phone? That sounds like a miserable time.

If you find a 4-letter word in a generated puzzle offensive, let me know here so I can add them to the filter. Make sure to check the swear word list first so you aren't sending me duplicates. Also make sure the word actually shows up in the program. You can verify that with a ctrl+f search in the swear word list.

If possible, provide a reason why it's offensive to you, too. This will help me to sort out joke responses from serious ones, as well as annotate the less-obvious swears

The game is currently broken in the itch desktop app and I have no means of debugging it. You will have to play the game in the browser until itch fixes whatever is wrong with the desktop app.

Edit: it works and then it doesn't work and then it works again. Whatever is wrong, it's not a problem with my code.

Itch, please fix this.

Oh and since it requires a secure context, that probably means that the itch desktop client won't work with it, unless there was some *other* reason `crypto.randomUUID` is unavailable.

thanks crepls :)

the images didn't post. Why would the WYSIWYG editor show the images if it wasn't really going to post them? I had to upload them to a discord server and then post the links to them

the issue appears to be resolved

The LB server is having issues at the moment. Apparently it crashed. We are aware of the issue and are working to fix it.

The game is free, but if anyone wants to throw some donations my way, I would be forever grateful :)

I wanna be the best guy

Humorous game, but it's not 1D in any sense. As in Flappy Bird, you move up and down while the 1 towers move in a direction that is perpendicular. Even if you imagine that you're looking at a 1D slice of the screen where 1 towers appear and disappear, you are still imagining a 1D cross section of a 2D plane.

This is also not the first. I played a game several years ago that actually was 1D, and it amused me as well. It was a linear platformer, only one direction. I forget how the obstacles worked but it either involved gaps or doors. Either way, something impeded your progress and you had to do something to press on.

The only way it would work is if you mean 1D game as in a game about 1s and Ds, completely divorcing it from the meaning of being one dimensional, and if that's the case, then this is clickbait, shame on you.

god-tier

game softlocked on me 🥴

I like the way RE balances difficulty. Enemies are always difficult to put down/evade, but the difficulty setting tweaks some basic variables, like enemy damage output, and how many items/enemies appear in each room. So on very easy, you can take a lot of abuse (something like 6-8 grabs), there's fewer enemies per room, and healing items/ammo are abundant, while on hard, you can die in 2-3 grabs, healing items and ammo are few and far between (yet still abundant enough for a surplus by the end if you play your cards right), and there are a lot more enemies roaming around. You might also notice level design-wise that the game has lots of narrow corridors to force you to get close to zombies. Or one of my favorite examples in the RE1 remake: making you walk right next to the giant shark that just lunged at you, to pick up a key. A similar mechanic in your game would work wonders--something that forces the player to get uncomfortable to make progress. Imagine, for example, having to jam a hydraulic press with a rickety piece of junk (let's say it's a steam punk style machine and you're jamming the object into the gear assembly) to crawl through it, all the while you can hear the gears chewing away at it. And then having to crawl back through it only for the gears to win the battle just as you cover the last inch. Maybe even make a cutscene out of it. The protagonist jams it in a couple times, the gears spit it out, and when it finally sticks, she says something like "I don't know about this...". That would be nerve wracking and memorable!

Just spitballing ideas ;)

I hope the dev cycle goes well for you, man.

This demo is incredible. The movement feels very similar to RE3, very fast and smooth. The VA (voice acting) also reminded me of RE1, and I sincerely hope that it's intentionally like that, because the hammy VA is part of the charm. The end puzzle was a toughie, I had to brute force over 128 combinations before I solved it, which brings me to the two negative points:

* There is no "file" system, i.e. you can't take notes and memos with you. I could've probably saved a lot of guessing if I had the notes I'd previously read on-hand

* Enemy AI is weak and easily evaded. The only time I ever got hurt was when I decided to engage them in combat

I'm sure both of these will be ironed out in the final release, but player/tester feedback is always valuable, so I think it's worth mentioning. Looking forward to the full release. This is definitely going on my "games to watch out for" list!

Considering half of the absolute garbage that *does* get on there, it would be an actual war crime for them to say no to you.

It's a relief knowing that you weren't being scummy and it was just a bug. Your patch worked and the game is just as excellent as when I first played it on the pico-8 website. 0/5 -> 5/5 we're doing it live

Since you're going for an implementation of classic tetris, I should inform you that your game lacks a "random bag". The random bag is what keeps the RNG in tetris fair and possible to continue indefinitely, and it is absolutely part of the standard and has been since even before the NES game. Here's how it works:  Every turn, you pull a tetromino from a pool of 7 unique and randomly sorted tetrominoes. Once you've gone through the pool, it is re-sorted.  A common analogy for this is pulling names out of a hat. Or a "random bag". This means it's possible to get, e.g. two line pieces in a row (back to back), but it's not possible to get three square pieces in six turns. This is what happened to me at the beginning of the game, and it's how I know you didn't implement it. It's a violation of the rules because the RNG can potentially create impossible situations (like when the game spawned several S and Z pieces in an unrelenting fury that quickly ended my game).

There is no game here. Just a screen telling me to go to a website. So going by the "game" that exists here on itch: 0/10 keep that bullshit on kongregate.

The concept is ridiculous and the execution is serviceable, but what really sells this game is that it's also bloody hilarious. I cracked up countless times choosing the most ridiculous options available.

One of the best implementations of Picross I've played. And that's comparing it to versions that don't have limitations.

Level editor doesn't seem to work, though. I saved the level I made and couldn't find it anywhere. Not through the game's menus, not in my filesystem. Nowhere.

Just out of curiosity, is it possible to transfer the save file from the browser version to the desktop version? I'd like to play it off-browser if possible, but not if I have to re-do all of that work again...

Update: Upon further investigation, I've found that this game uses IndexedDB to store its data, in a database named "localforage" (ha-ha), so I started up the desktop version, built the starter deck, saved, closed the game, and then ran `sudo updatedb` followed by `locate indexeddb`, noting that all indexeddb entries on my filesystem contain "indexeddb.leveldb" at the end of the directory name for the given database. I found two directories of interest:

1. /home/braden/.config/chromium/Default/IndexedDB/https_v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net_0.indexeddb.leveldb

2. /home/braden/.config/Dungeon/Default/IndexedDB/chrome-extension_hdafelngejkamllnafekfdmkffiafpjk_0.indexeddb.leveldb

So to test if #2 was the desktop version (why it didn't store in .config/Tofu Tower, I have no idea) by backing up the contents and deleting it, then restarting the desktop game.  I confirmed and then attempted to copy the browser data, but the game didn't accept it and also went to a new game, so I restored the backup. Evidently, there is some sort of "security" in the indexeddb, which I find kinda retarded but eh, if you need to protect the integrity of your cookies, I get it. For the purposes of a game, though, this is useless and it probably should have just used localStorage.

At this point: I see two potential solutions

1. You make an import/export feature for save data so that the user doesn't have to be an I.T. expert to transfer the data. One easy way would be to store the variables to be saved in an object and JSON.stringify() it, when when importing data, JSON.parse() it.

2. I find a way to edit an IndexedDB in a way that doesn't get rejected by the game, so that I can manually copy over the key/value pairs shown in my chrome dev tools.

I would strongly prefer the first solution.

Update 2: solution 2 is not working at all. The file 000003.log, which contains the actual save data, is formatted in some esoteric binary format that not only does my OS not recognize, but I can't even find software to deal with this format. Inspecting it in a hex editor just reveals obnoxious patterns that are seemingly designed to make it annoying to edit manually.

So an in-game solution for backing up and restoring saves is definitely necessary. Please consider adding one.

Solid 9/10. It starts out slow and boring, and kind of confusing (like why the f#$% can't I put more than one card down!?), but I decided to give the game the benefit of the doubt, because I know Naka is an intelligent guy, and I wanted to see his vision unfold.

...7 hours and 150 cards later and I'm on the 60th floor of the dungeon.

This game is HARD. And it gets very grindy after you break into the 40th floor. Very grindy. I don't think it's right to give my summoner only +1 EXP for killing a monster that one-shotted 30+ cards of mine. Such a powerful monster demands a much greater reward, and it's out of proportion with the previous floors, which built up experience fairly quickly. It took me most of those 7 hours just to break the 60th floor, and when I finally did, I had to sneak past two "overwhelming forces" in a row on floors 58 and 59; it's like the game literally didn't want me to get to floor 60. That was ridiculous. Like, if you haven't fought an overwhelming force (they're orange instead of white) yet, don't even bother. Your only hope is to stealth your way around them. If you get in a fight with them, you're dead. Try to run, they'll one-shot you even at full health. Try to fight, and you'll exhaust your entire deck before you've even taken off a quarter of its health. They're impossible to beat unless you're WAY over-leveled for the floor you're on. Like, if you can break floor 60, then you can probably beat the rare overwhelming force enemy on the first 20 floors, and you might burn out half of your stock just doing THAT. That's how OP they are. So naturally, when you're going for a floor break, seeing the message "You sense an overwhelming force" is going to make you utter the word "shit", because you know that you only have one chance to MAYBE stealth your way past them, and if you get caught, you're fucked. One of my failed break-60 attempts ended because an overwhelming force spawned RIGHT NEXT TO ME.

What sucks the most (more than getting spawn camped by the most OP enemy in the game) is when you get Pac-man'd, i.e. fuckin' inky and blinky decide it'll be funny to corner you and gangrape you, one-shotting two cards every turn, and since you only draw one card at a time (instead of replenishing your hand to 5 cards regardless of your current card count, like a normal card game--remember that yugioh episode where yugi lost because he ran out of cards due to a peculiar rule regarding post-turn drawing? Neither do I), that means that two monsters cornering not only disallows you from stepping back to strategically take a hit in place of your cards, but you get to watch your field continually shrink as the game's broken mechanics and overpowered monsters fuck you in the ass until you're out of cards on the field and they two-shot your summoner (this is only further exacerbated if you're unfortunate to run into an excess of non-monster cards). Normally, it's a simple race against time to kill one of them before they overwhelm you, but on the higher floors, you might as well just give up, because it takes a million hits to kill one enemy. Died more times to that than anything else. Needs some serious re-balancing.

And the inventory management system is shit. It's just shit. Look, man, if you have 100+ cards, clicking those arrows to scroll becomes a huge pain in the ass pretty quickly. I end up spending 20+ minutes powering up cards and adding new cards to the deck just because I have to sit there clicking that scroll arrow for a million years.  There are a lot of simple improvements that could make it much easier. Keyboard controls, page up/down buttons to scroll 9 items at a time, the ability to swap cards from your inventory into your deck en-masse instead of having to click every single card followed by the swap button individually, and the ability to "lock" the left-clicked card in the power-up menu, so I don't have to go back and forth to nearly the top and nearly the bottom over and over again, which is EXCRUCIATING and reminds me of Earthbound's clunky item shop UI. Those are four things that would significantly improve inventory management. and I REALLY think it's necessary, because the current system doesn't scale well at all. I'm having this much trouble managing a little over a hundred cards. Imagine how horrible it'd be to manage a thousand cards. Maybe I want to REALLY stock up to raid a dungeon and force my way to the next 20 floors through overwhelming numbers (seeing as they'll just one-shot my cards anyway, unless they have 500+ HP). Not a viable option with the current inventory management system.

Also, the music is extremely loud and not that good. The second part is highly subjective, yes, but I ended up muting the tab after about half an hour because the loop was getting annoying. But above all, the volume needs to be fixed.

And although the artstyle has this "deviantart" look to it, it's actually kinda charming, and grows on you after a while.

Aside from that, the game is surprisingly fun. I usually hate card games in the vein of hearthstone/yugioh, but the fact that I can look at all of those flaws, and rant this much, and still give this a 9, pretty much sums it up.

Fix those issues and buddy, you've got yourself a spot on my mental "favorite games" list.

Yes, I beat the game, or "failed", as it was called. Up and down the tower. Got the "congratulations" screen and everything. I made the review after having created an account and logged in. The screenshot was taken during that time by looking at the stats from the main menu. If you're basing your assumption that I only went halfway on that screenshot, then there's probably a bug in your game. 

It wasn't really that hard. It's like an easier version of I Wanna Be The Guy with a very Super Meat Boy-ish style (I have to imagine you took some inspiration from SMB). And to anybody who thinks IWBTG and this game are hard, you're mistaking tedium for difficulty. No, this game is not hard. You wanna see hard? Play I Wanna Be The Boshy. That game is ridiculous. That game will crush your soul and make you weirdly good at tight platforming. But mostly just crush your soul.

Anyways, if you pay attention to the level design, there is a puzzle in every room (or in this case, multiple puzzles), in the format [tedious part->tricky part]. Your job is to figure out how to get through the tricky part. The tedious part just takes extra time (and sometime just consists purely of waiting), adds to frustration and whittles down your patience, unless you can stay calm and laugh off deaths. There are some hilarious ways to die. 

The point is, you have to UNDERSTAND what to do to get through it. If you are just mindlessly trying to force your way through, you will be stuck for a long time. You need to form a strategy. You have to die a few times to learn what does and doesn't work. You also have to be willing to throw away chances at the tricky parts trying different things, like running off a ledge without jumping. Also, using a gamepad/wasd makes it a lot easier. If you're playing a platform hell genre game with the arrow keys, you are doing it wrong. Horribly wrong.

Also, unlike a typical platform hell, I didn't see any noob traps. Noob traps come after some of the tricky parts, and usually involve something like a random spike coming out of nowhere specifically to catch you off-guard, kill you, and make you do the whole thing over again. This game was completely fair.

Overall, the controls were very intuitive and I had a blast with this game. I beat it in about, let's see, 47 minutes with 332 deaths. But don't take my word for it. See the stats for yourself.

Props to you, EvilObjective. You did a great job. I'd give this game a solid 8/10.

-Braden