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And the flickering button bug rears its ugly yet expected head on yet another idle game. I think that makes the fifth one in three weeks? Not as bad as some other instances of it - but when hovering over a button to buy an upgrade, the button appears to flicker, and sometimes ignores clicks (unlike other instances of this thought where you have to click MANY times to get it to register, this one just misses a click about 30% of the time).

Is EVERYONE publishing idle games on here now vibe coding with the prompt "and please break my buttons"? Or what's going on?

I wanted to like this. I really did. It started off well. I liked the look of it. I've always enjoyed Metroidvanias. I found timing the attack to hit enemies without them hitting me took some work to finally figure out, but that's probably a me problem. 

But the up arrow to climb off the ledge feels really awkward (and frequently doesn't work for me - I'll bounce off the ledge, and then just grab it again instead of getting up, and have no idea if that's a bug or if I'm doing something wrong). Down + UP at the same time is almost painful to  use the parry (and I honestly never figured out whether the parry was supposed to work on some of the projectiles or not - the floating balls in the spike area either couldn't have their shots parried, or my timing was just bad). I probably should have just given up on the keyboard and gone to dig up my gamepad.

Also the brief delay on movement after getting hit tripped me up in the spike area CONSTANTLY. I'd get knocked into the spikes, try to jump, not jump, and by the time I realized the jump didn't trigger, I'd take another hit from the spikes. The knock-back also made it so that I couldn't even get through the spike area after something like 40 tries, because I ALWAYS got knocked off the platforms - the balls ALWAYS seemed to shoot when they were lined up with the platform I was trying to jump on. And blocking the shot? NOPE. Knock-back into the spikes. I'm sure someone will just say "Skill issue" - but trying to get into melee range of something with a projectile attach that knocks you back every couple of seconds over vanishing platforms that exists for only a few seconds over spikes that ensure you have to start the whole sequence over every 15-20 seconds just stops being fun.

And I get that you were going for some narrative thing with the whole quicktime event with anxiety as a penalty for missing - but as far as I can tell it has no gameplay purpose or effect except to make people like me need to take 4-5 attempts to use a checkpoint (and I guess to make it take longer to run a boss fight).

Ah, the flickering button problem surfaces again in yet another game - 4th one I think I've seen in about three weeks. I'm pretty convinced now that there's a bug that these AI coding tools are somehow trained to keep reproducing. I look forward to the day when coding becomes art, science, and engineering again, instead of prompt-and-pray. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to live to see it.

Until the author figures out the prompt to fix it, just click the button really fast - you'll probably eventually catch it during an enabled frame.

Please do not let this wall of text I ended up writing discourage you. It ended up long, but is not meant to be discouraging or imposing lol.

I did see where you said this is your first game, and I wouldn't elaborate on all this if I thought learning how to understand and begin thinking about UX wasn't going to benefit your projects. So...

I was tempted to not say anything, because the other comments already talked about the controls, but I've written comments on this topic often enough now that I should probably just make a blog post somewhere, so I'll help add some usability/UX modelling to this:

The first player who commented about not using a mouse for a game like this was entirely right about that part. But it's not an issue of two hands (necessarily), it is usually an issue of it being the wrong input method (a mouse is designed for spatial interactions - when using it strictly as a button input it violates the mental model of what a mouse is, and adds an unnecessary barrier for laptops), and also under-utilizes what's more-often-than-not the dominant hand.

Also AD move with WS+mouse attack has the somewhat weird effect of splitting your attack inputs across multiple hands, AND making the left hand have to handle conflicting things - two keys are move, and two keys are aim, which means more mental processing is needed to keep track of the conflicting actions in WASD. Not that it's wrong - but is something to be aware of when planning out control schemes.

Using two hands can be (and often is) a very good interaction model though, because it's often good to separate "concerns" between hands. Most people naturally use two hands for things, with each hand doing things to complement each other - for example supporting something with one hand while interacting with it with the other, or with many video games one hand handles movement, the other actions, or one hand - often the dominant hand - handles spatial movement requiring fine motor control like looking around/aiming with a mouse, while the other hand handles "commands", etc. Putting everything on one hand, even if everything fits comfortably, is more mental overhead.

Not that designing to support single-handed input is a bad idea - somebody may be balancing their laptop with one hand, or for various reasons only have the use of one hand - but that's a very difficult thing to do, because now you have additional problems to account for - the fact that you have very limited space to put all the controls, as single-hand reach is MUCH less than the amount of keyboard you can cover with two hands, AND you have to account for the fact that you may have multiple conflicting actions to perform with a single hand. For example, if you have to jump, and attack, while dodging left and right, you now have four actions all needing twitch reaction timing, at least three of those needing to be handled by some combination of your non-thumb fingers. There are... potential... control schemes that could allow for that somewhat comfortably - but they'd be weird, and non-standard, and you'd still be using at least one of your ring or little finger for twitch movement - which would be quickly tiring.

For these reasons, the second poster who commented about putting movement on the left hand, and actions on the right (but still on the keyboard) - or alternatively movement on the right and actions on the left - will be right more often than not. (there are some limited cases, like if you only needed left, right, jump, attack, you might get away with a single hand WASD+Space, with W jumping, space attacking, but even that's a bit awkward). With the number of actions in this game, it's very easy to think of combinations that are almost impossible to hit comfortably (like trying to heal while attacking something above you, or move left while attacking up).

I know that was a lot to read, and some of it may be a bit rambling, but if anything in there piques a bit of curiosity about UI/UX design, then my work is done ;)

Not bad. Similar to the other commenter, I was a little confused about how to gain influence until I just sort of suddenly got enough to build the first influence building. I'm not sure if I got a random event I didn't notice, or if it's because I reached 100 thralls - so a little extra info in game might be nice.

Also, with the progression balance, I noticed the first time I was stuck at around the second era (I might have researched the 3rd, but then made basically no progress in it, if I remember). After torpor, I blitzed my way to the 5th era barely even feeling like it was slowing down until it just.... basically stopped. The sudden need for thousands relics that you've barely been able to buy producers for just turn it into a waiting game. There's really not much point in doing anything else until those accumulate (which they did while I was writing this, so guess maybe I'll Torpor #2 on era 6)

The weird thing to me though is the buttons. They just sometimes don't work. I also notice they flicker a bit when the mouse is hovering over them. This is actually the second time in the last couple weeks I've seen that behaviour, so I'm starting to wonder if this is an engine bug that people are tripping over, a mistake in a tutorial somewhere... or a bug that AI likes to produce when vibe coding idle game loops.

Ah. I see. Let me guess - a future goal for "add bot to ground station" was supposed to clue me in to that? ;)

Joking aside, glad to hear you're looking into the pacing and clarity. I did find myself starting to get a little lost on where I was going next, what my goal was, but I think what you've got here is kind of cute so far, and has some potential!

Looking interesting so far. One small issue I ran into was the "missions" (like "Collect 50 Pollen", etc) apparently mean "starting now" - which normally isn't a problem, but is a problem if you already launched all the satellites before the "Launch a satellite" missions shows up. I don't know how much impact that has on the game or gameplay hints, but it's at least a thing that can happen.

Game becomes virtually unplayable after a while. I'm not sure exactly what caused it, but it's not a memory leak or anything that can be fixed by refreshing the page, as the frame-rate dropped to something in the range of 10 SECONDS PER FRAME. Firefox on Windows 11.

That level took me many tries, but it just clicked for me. I'll try to lay out some hints here in a way that hopefully won't spoil it too quickly, and without making any assumptions about what you may or may not have figured out so far.

There's two mechanics that you need to reach the leftmost chest

1. The mechanic introduced at the beginning of the level where you can move chests sideways if you're in the keyhole
2. A less obvious mechanic that you have to discover to get the top chest out of the top area, that pushing a chest doesn't rotate the key

The second mechanic is what you need in order to line up the key with the blocked chest, but if you push a chest into the lower left room, you can't get it back out or reach its lock. So you have to carry a chest in, and push it back out.

The chest that starts in the big room can be carried in, because it can be carried left/right with mechanic 1. But you need the key facing up, on the bottom row, to do that, which you can't do.... unless you use mechanic 2, with a chest on the bottom row.

Eh, far worse bugs happen in professional software (take it from a professional software developer lol). I applaud you having the motivation for coding side projects - I haven't had that level of motivation in years. I'm personally less concerned about there being a bug in a random itch game, and more amused/confused by the specific bug. I honestly can't think of how it happens by accident. I'd be curious to know what the bug is once you figure out the fix - if you're willing to share.

Oh, no, it's even MORE absurd than that. You can buy upgrades, but you need to click really fast to purchase any because (it would appear) that the button flickers between enabled and disabled while you hover it, and you can only purchase if you hit it during an enabled state.

I can't imagine how or why that happens. That's broken in a way that feels like it should have taken real effort.

I'm.... not convinced about that skill trainer. I found him, I set it up to loop on him, and left it for most of the afternoon. Got up to something like 18 strength and I don't think I'm doing any more damage to rocks than I was when I started (I say something like 18 because I don't remember, but by the time I broke the white rock I'd looped enough times more that my strength was 21). I'm not even sure I'm doing AS MUCH damage as when I started. But each full action bar adds maybe two pixels to the progress bar.

I also have no idea what the different impacts of strength vs "today" strength are - but "today" strength always starts out at 0 - not sure if they're supposed to be added together, or how I'm supposed to understand those stats.

And, if I'm being honest, the looping mechanic doesn't really seem to add anything to the game. It just makes it have to repeat the same thing over and over and over again, which granted is kind of the definition of idle games - a repeating game loop. But the "time loop" mechanic (which isn't really even a time loop for the most part - even the tips largely dismiss it by describing it as simply "not remembering" the previous day... which is funny given that you exactly repeat the previous day - except where you've actually made changes that aren't reset.. but I digress) doesn't even provide that "numbers go up" psychological reward loop/dopamine hit that idle games normally would. You just pick the next rockyou want to beat on, and then watch the same loop happen over and over like 100 times until the rock is smashed. I think it's an interesting mechanic, I'm just not sure this gameplay loop realizes its potential.

I managed to find everything except the third scroll, 4 coins and I assume two hidden heart potions (assuming there's a total of 16 hearts

Pretty sure one of those heart potions is in a cow level, part a bunch of spikes - but I can't tell because it seems if you don't have a scroll, you can't select any scroll after it in the inventory, so I've been limited to nothing but double-jump for the whole game. But better than my first two attempts at playing it where I got the spike resistant scroll first... and the game still gave me the double-jump skill when it auto-equipped that scroll...

"Autocomplete" in this case is a bit fuzzy (the behaviour will be most familiar to people used to using command shells like Bash or Zsh, etc). Pressing <Tab> will show you all the possible completions from the letters you've already typed, completing it automatically if there is only one option. So when you press <Tab> without typing anything you''re getting all the possible commands. It's just unfortunate that the first two are "get" and "help", so hitting <Tab> makes it look like the output is "Get help...".

G, S, H, C, P,  R,  and W will each give you a couple of possible completions and need an extra letter before they are unique so they can autocomplete.

Huh, on my laptop it seems like I can drag using the touch screen, but can't drag using my track pad.

But I'll say while trying to figure out why I couldn't actually do the drag and drop, I was very grateful for the fact that pausing the game resets the enemy attack timer. ;)

The wire end points are interactive, the target points are apparently just incredibly finicky and inconsistent. With enough tries though, you might get it. But if you do, you later get the ability to repair lights by assembling a puzzle.

If you get to that point, I recommend not playing on a laptop. Not because the trackpad makes it harder to solve, but because it's a lot less tempting to throw a desktop across the room.

Dear dev: Not a bad game concept, but please fix the click/drop/whatever detection. In the headlight repair "minigame" the light might be the least broken thing.

Played about one and a half levels. I think it has potential, but the controls feel very slow and clunky to me, and the visual effect makes it very hard to read the hint text.

To the issue of the controls, it's somewhat painful to have to wait through the walking animation to press the next key, especially when it's the key you're already pressing. And with the walking speed being as slow as it is, that means waiting a full second (if I timed it right) after you press a key before another key will register. If you're even a little early, your press is ignored. This makes movement feel very slow and awkward, especially when you're going down a long hallway where all you're doing is pressing one key over and over every second for 10-15 seconds or so.

Once I figure out what all of that means, I'm going to really hate you, aren't I? 😂

Remain the ooze? You can be the ooze in the second branch? Is there a way to become the ooze after the portal that I just haven't made it to yet? Because if I become the ooze in the main story line I no longer have the option to go to the altar.

Thanks. I had thought a while back that the crane game might have been what I was missing - but for some reason every time I tried talking to the cow, he always just told me to let him know when I wanted to play, so I thought maybe I didn't have enough money.

I can't remember if I ever actually tried speaking to him twice in a row until just now when you reminded me of it.

I can tell I'm going to be facepalming a lot playing this if that's how I started lol

I feel like I'm being trolled, or I'm just missing something really obvious, as I've never even managed to find the key to the car. It's my weakest start to a game ever. I can usually at least solve the first puzzle/level lol Still the game has a certain... something to it. Charm might be the right word.

Level 2 needs a different approach to "breaking" the big guys. In level one, you broke out by "deleting" part of a leg with an orange block. Breaking a leg here won't work because you need every block, you can't afford to sacrifice any.

But you don't need to actually remove parts of the big guys to break them - you only have to make them look different than the small guy. The arms can be affected too.

Use that to line up the two big guys with the big guy with short arms to make the middle one a proper big guy so it can be moved.

You need to finish with all white squares containing an orange block, and no orange blocks left that aren't on white squares. You don't need to end with as many orange blocks as you started with.

Ugh... that level. Yeah, that one took me a while. I don't remember the exact positions of things right now without going back and replaying it, but the basic setup is that you need to position an orange block such that the first big guy you move can be "broken" by a white-on-orange in a position where its legs are blocking your ability to move a big guy into the stuck orange space (I believe the position you want is to place an orange block three spaces above the blocked orange block).

You then use the spare orange blocks to clear out only enough of the water to let you move the second big guy's arm into that space. If you positioned things right, , a leftover water block should remove one orange block when you do that, letting you free up the two blocks remaining from the second big guy so that you can move all the free blocks into position.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or serious, but as I have a downvote, and you're a negative comment, I'll assume you're serious. So... here you go, step by step:

1. Move leftmost orange box right two or three spaces
2. Move the three orange boxes in the upper right section into a horizontal line one line above the white line.
3. Push the three orange boxes left until they are all sandwiched between the white targets and the three-unit black wall above, making the wall, boxes, targets and water resemble a large version of the player.
4. Move the now controllable massive "player" up and over onto the first orange block to open a path for the stuck blocks, destroying part of the leg (which will make the large player no longer controllable, returning control to the normal player.
5. Bring the previously stuck orange blocks up through the opening you created
6. Put all 5 orange blocks on the white spaces

I just tested this, so I know it still works. So if you were just trying to be funny and weren't the downvote, then I apologize if I offend by dumbing it down this far and missing the joke, and if it's still unclear to whoever downvoted, please let me know what still doesn't make sense so I can dumb it down further.

To everyone who is stuck on level one (and/or thinks level one is broken/impossible), it's doable. The problem is that the key mechanic of this game is non-obvious. I'm pretty sure I never would have figured it out at all without the hint from wellchan in the first conversation thread. If you need a clue, take a look at their post.

To the developer - while I appreciate a new mechanic in games like this, if the intent is for the player to discover the mechanic, you might have wanted to make it easier to run into accidentally, because I don't think it's easily guessable.

To anybody who needs to know the new core game mechanic, not just a hint, read on:

if you create an image of the player character using the blocks and environmental elements, that "avatar" becomes the character that you can move (with its own interactions with environmental objects and blocks.).

Interesting. I couldn't think of a food - I figured out all the rules, but had to find a list of foods of appropriate length and see which ones fit the other rules. Found one, but now I'm curious if there are multiple answers. At some point I might have to go through the entire list and see if any others fit.

I'll agree with almost everything you said, and also add that the jump seems incredibly flaky as well, as half the time you want to jump, it just doesn't seem to fire. Almost like the physics and the graphics don't agree when you're on the ground or there's a delay between hitting the ground and when you can jump, or... something. I never figured out the pattern - I just accepted that at least half the time I hit spacebar I was going to return to the checkpoint..

I think what might have worked against it was the rest of the similar "placards". There's a number of them around he game, and of course lots of them in the museum, and every one of those when you read them after solving, they just give you a bit of info about the thing that you just solved. So by the time I got to that last one in the museum, and spent a while solving it to see something fairly obvious on the wall, I never even considered that looking at the placard again would provide anything beyond "It's a diving mask", and maybe some commentary.

To be honest, I didn't even think to interact with the money bag the first time after I solved that puzzle because no solved puzzle I'd interacted with up to that point, with the exception of the teleport leaf (which I hit by chance), and the chest (which was obvious) had done anything beyond just providing some flavour text (and I don't even remember if the chest needed a second interaction, or if I got the shovel immediately upon solving it now - which means if I did need to interact with it a second time, that being a game mechanic didn't actually stick in my mind)

I was stuck in (I assume) the same place. I just figured it out. It's non-obvious, but sometimes you _really_ want to read the signs again after you finish the nonograms. (for example, if you "read" the money bag again after solving it, you actually get the money). In particular, there's one in the museum that gives you the item in the display, and it will help you get to things in "deep" water (like lakes, ponds and soup pots...)

I could be wrong, but it at least looks like the card game is kind of a combination of "rock-paper-scissors" and "high card wins". %WR is ... % win ratio/rate/something. The card with the strongest % after modifier wins, the modifiers are based on Aggro > Control > Combo > Aggro. But if that's the case, I'm not sure yet what determines how much each card is modified by.

A fun little puzzle platformer from a relatively simply mechanic. I spent maybe more time than I should have playing it just because I was trying to see how low I could get the ghost count. Finally managed 52, although I think there was a lot of luck involved.

I did find the ghost queueing mechanic a little awkward. If you use the arrow keys at the beginning of the level to try to plan ahead, and get one wrong (for example underestimating the height of a jump), you have to clear out everything after that one and redo it all, so I ended up often just adding a ghost or two at time so that I wouldn't waste time adding ghosts I was going to have to re-add later. This obviously wasn't a problem with the early levels, but a couple of the later ones.

And if a "soft goal" is trying to get the lowest ghost count possible, then a level retry might be nice. I found sometimes I thought I would need an extra ghost, and then managed to reach the exit early, and it would have been nice to be able to go back and figure it out without beating the game again.

Level 2 was kind of annoying because hitting the bats is entirely unforgiving - you bounce out, completely lose whatever alignment you were aiming for, have no real choice but to back right off and try again, at which point you're done because there's no time to try again and make it to the end.

But I'm glad I stuck it out, because getting hit by the lava in level 3 was absolutely worth it and completely unexpected😆

I wouldn't have used mouse click to skip text though. Nothing else needs the mouse in the game, and you can't jump when there is text, so I would have just used the spacebar for skipping text as well - one fewer controls to worry about, no need to reach for the mouse.

I think you might have an "=" when you mean to have a "+=" or something, since buying a wrench actually sets the click power to 5 rather than adding 5 to it. The rest of the options add, so I'm assuming that's a bug.

Oh, lol. I must have been tired when I did that level. I spent so long trying to figure out how to get a gravity block through that barrier that I didn't even recognize the Microban level 1 sitting right there in the "end game" (I'd forgotten Microban, but I've seen that as "level one" in almost every variation...)

I did appreciate the Sound Of Silence parody though. That was well done.

Lines 3-6 take on so much more meaning now too, that I realize I have to rediscover the solution to it every. single. time. 😅

Yeah, this one took me a bit as well - just solved it though.

That being said, obviously some spoilers follow.

So if you're reading this and still want to solve it by yourself you want to stop reading now.

Really... I mean it..

Alright, that's enough warnings...

In that screenshot you're exactly where you need to be. Push the left block up one, push the right block around to bring the right block up one space. Then it's basically solved.

I'm going to chime in here on the controls as well. I agree the arrow keys should have been an option, but there's a more subtle issue with the controls. The hand/hands (depending on how you play it) have mixed "responsibilities" that make it more awkward than it should be to coordinate. With the WASD/E/Space controls you're either using one hand, where that one hand is doing _everything_, or you're using two hands where one hand is handling movement and switch, and the other hand is managing (optionally) jump and place. I'd have to go read the research in more detail, but I believe this adds cognitive overhead to the control scheme. Also, by doing this it means the "movement" hand has to keep moving off the movement keys (occasionally needing to reach the "switch" key). There's not a lot of inputs required for this game, so it would be easier to be able to leave one hand on "movement" and one hand on "actions". Less travel, and less effort trying to make one hand manage different types of actions.

But other than getting me tripping over my own fingers trying to coordinate the place/switch/jump chains (and often failing by hitting the wrong button at the wrong time), so far so good!