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Well, I just really like puzzle games and solitaire games, so this just fell right into my niche! 

Yeah, wanting to avoid the bag system makes sense for what you described (same thoughts as what I called 'making it a solved game'). 

And yeah, very understandable to not want to open up the code again (for a variety of reasons). The different plane types would have made this much more interesting! Cause, theoretically, a perfect game would have you continuously getting the exact same tile every time, so having some variety of planes that act different to break that theoretical up could've been cool! Though, for what it's worth, the transition looks very smooth. For a game that you were making while learning the engine, this seems mighty impressive to me! Congrats for managing that!

Will definitely check out Urbion, thanks for the suggestion!

Damn, I thought I fixed all the bugs that let the string elongate infinitely. Especially if both of them are moving... suddenly realizes the edge case that I introduced: if both characters have the input to move held down, but neither is actually moving…  Well, thanks for brining that up. 

And yeah, no slingshot. The string pulls based on the characters, not the center node of the string. 

Thanks for the motivation that you think the game could sell well! We are considering continuing development since we also think that it's a unique idea that can become something great! The string definitely needs a lot of polish though. There just wasn't enough time to refactor over and over until I found the best way to implement it, so I went with my first thought and just debugged it as best I could. I have thought of some ways to improve it though. 

Anyway, hope you enjoyed it despite the extreme difficulty! (which was not planned btw. Blame the difficulty on string jank :shrug: ).

:D

The theoretical max is 16, but I'm thinking the practical max is probably closer to 14, since even that would take crazy luck.

Edit: OK yeah, so, I can consistently get to 10 (occasional bad luck puts me below, but 10 is average at this point). Anything above that requires good luck. I'll let yall know if I break the 12 barrier. 

One more thing, do you think you could add a tiny update with a 'restart game' button (preferable accessible even if you didn't run out of moves)? (I'd understand if you didn't want to, but I'd be super thankful for it)

OK, so, first off, thanks a lot for fixing the screen shaking in the webGL build, it became much easier to look at (and I also beat it on my first try without the shaking, so I get to blame the endless shaking on me losing before). 

A cool idea! The flipping from 2D to 3D is awesome! The 3D tunnels sometimes not being quite straight breaks immersion a bit, but well, 'tis a game jam. 

Overall, super cool that you got procedural generation working! It fits the theme really well and is a fun game to play!

A very interesting application of the theme!

OK, it took me a bit to figure out how to play, but I really enjoyed the process of figuring it out! Testing my theory as to finalize in my mind what did what was great! And then there's the actual game itself!

As a huge fan of puzzle games, I really enjoyed it. My main criticism is that there isn't really any way to influence what tiles you'll draw, it's completely random as far as I can tell. While in one sense this is a good thing since it forces you to play around what you get, on the flip side, it's a negative since you're at the mercy of RNGesus, and since I can't help but view this as a type of solitaire, in which everything is deterministic (though there is also a bit of luck there, but it's still deterministic), I can't help but view the luck of the draw as a negative. 

I'd say a bag system, where you're guaranteed to get one of every tile before you can get another, but the two sides have independent bags could really up the level of strategy that goes into the game, cause then you'd be able to carry over the tiles from one bag into the influence that belongs to the other bag. It would also let you hypothesize as to what would come next. 

Of course, the bag system could also lead to the game becoming solved (much like how one version of tetris that uses bags become solved), but the turn limit almost fixes that. At most, you'd be able to fully cycle through a total of three bags, and since you need to swap sides, that would mean you have an average of only refilling your bags on each side once, and then dipping into half of the next bag, which would maintain your randomness factor. 

OK, I'm done drooling over my hypothetical strategy solitaire game (if you couldn't tell, I've uhh, played a lot of solitaire, and several different kinds of solitaire). 

Overall, great game, and I will thoroughly enjoy it (and will possibly be the only one to still play it in 5 years when I randomly remember that it exists). 

Puzzle/solitaire enthusiast score is a solid 7.2/10. (I wavered a lot between 6.8 and 7.5, so just settled for the middle). 

Edit: I just got to 9, so I'll stop there so I have time to check out the other games. So far though, this one is the most in my niche, so it gets the medal for 'the game I am most likely to play in the future'

Edit 2: I just got 11 

A fairly simple concept, and umm, well, I'll list out the bad before the good (sorry in advance). 

* No quit button (or retry button after you fail. I had to alt-F4 out of the game and launch it again)

* No death plane (I uhh, fell through a hold and randomly moved until I got the lose screen)

* The character feels *very* slippy

* The terrain doesn't really match (you can go up and down irregular 'steps' and seemingly just ignore them)

* I uhh, hadn't realized at first that I had to collect the coins. It took me falling down and being forced the examine the level to realize that there were collectibles (I totally ran straight towards the monster thinking it was a cave that I had to enter, only to fall down...).

OK, so, other than all that:

Great art! It's always an extra challenge to go 3D in a game jam, and the art shows effort and a unique style!

I'm gonna not say much about the gameplay cause it's really short and very simplistic. Some sort of obstacles/abilities to get past the obstacles would be needed to make it a challenge. 

It's a good base to work off of, but feels more like a prototype than anything else. 

Lastly, sorry if you feel like I'm being very harsh on you. It's a game jam, so not everything can be perfect (or even close to it). I'm trying to give criticism by pointing out everything that I found wrong so you can do better next time/places to improve on this game. Congrats on actually making something at all!

A very cute game, but umm, I don't quite understand fully. 

The second level felt extremely difficult, what with the pellets dropping at one end of the screen, then the next at the opposite end. (this happened a lot). And since you can only traverse about a third of the screen (at best) between drops, the most I ever got was 3, so I kept losing. Until all of a sudden, it gave me the win after getting just 1. 

Also, the intro cutscene was quite long, so I'm glad for the (surely unintended) skip feature that I activated by alt-tabbing out of the game then back in. 

Overall, a very cute game, and as Jordan said, clearly much more was intended to be done, but in typical game jam fashion, there simply wasn't enough time. 

In my opinion, the best thing about it is the art (which is very cute). 

Pretty sure you mean fire boy and water girl!

Thanks for the praise, it means a lot! Really happy with the idea we went with, and the art really does look great (as does the music)!

Yeah, a bunch of us on the team are planning to continue development, so look forward to some polish eventuallyTM!

Thanks for the feedback! The difficulty (I think) was in part due to the jankness of the string, and some mal-layered ground tiles not refreshing the jumps didn't help. We might want to either lengthen the string a bit, or just make things closer together. I think we had designed a fair few puzzles around the string being max length, but the string not being perfect just ended up making them really difficult. (though almost everything comes back to 'the string needs more work' to me).

I'm happy that I implemented coyote time hearing how much you used it! Those 5 frames must have been valuable! 

Thanks for the level 3 praise (I built that one <3)! (though the level layouts were made by Kiran (Kiwi_HD on the discord))

Without making any promises, a few of us on the team are thinking of continuing development (I know for sure I would like to once my schedule clears up, though not sure if that motivation will last), so the feedback is greatly appreciated!

Hope you enjoyed playing despite the frustrations with the string, and the difficulty of the levels!

Also, thanks for praising the art and music! Our art and music talents worked really hard during the jam to make some great stuff!

So, I don't have any sort of game controller (long live team keyboard!), so I won't be able to try that. 

Being able to snipe towers across the map, yeah, that's a fair concern. So, lemme just up the difficulty in programming and say 'maybe the mouse should snap to the towers a bit' XD. 

And yeah, running out of time in a game jam is a very typical thing, so no worries. 

Interesting idea, but needing to click exactly on the towers made it tough to shoot. If you could click on the line between you and the towers, if would be easier to shoot (though that might be tough to implement, so I understand why you didn't do that). 

At a certain point, the enemies build up so much anyway though, that there almost isn't any point to even try to kill them. You can circle them in a fairly easy patten and consistently dodge, so only new spawns are a concern. 

Overall, a nice application of the theme, but like, without any incentive to fight, the game just, isn't all the fun after a bit cause I find myself just running around in a circle. 

I could see this evolving into a roguelite (if you keep working on it), with different levels (featuring different enemies) that you move to after beating each level's boss, different starting equipment (like, a gun that could do a buckshot, but has knockback, or a beam between you and the pillars, but locks you in place for a bit) and some other items that you pick up along the way to increase move speed, or general attack damage, etc. 

Gonna blame this one on my 4K monitor, but the UI got a bit messed up. 

I never saw the metronome timer to help me regain the beat when I lost it in the top left that you showed off when you demoed the game, and during the credits, I saw a duplicate of the credits hidden behind the credits. 

Ended up with a score a bit above 30000. 

Overall pretty fun! And a great feat for a solo dev!

Oh yeah, also, I felt like I could move faster if I moved diagonally, but I dunno if that was me imagining things, or if the movement vectors were actually adding upon each other. 

Yeah but like, they didn't have a string between them. SO um, HA! We win (or something like that)

Hope you enjoyed playing!

Yeah, the string is a problem. I spent at least 60% of the jam working on it, and got it to be 'stable', but it's still pretty jank. 

It 'weighing down the characters' as you put it is due to me fixing issues caused by both of them moving at the same time(specifically them moving away from each other, and falling with the string suspending them in the air). So, when both of them are moving due to user inputs, the center node of the string only moves at half speed. 

The level design vs the control scheme is uhh, something I don't think any of us thought of during the jam, but is certainly a good point!

And yeah, as a proof of concept, we on the team think it has great potential, but we also agree that there's some issues that would need to be ironed out to truly flesh out the game. 

Thanks for the feedback, and I hope you enjoyed playing (even if you couldn't beat any of the levels)! 

All good! I'll try out the downloadable build soonTM, prolly just over the weekend (which is when I plan to play as many of them as I can). 

Had just wanted to look at yours cause it had looked great when you showed it off in the closing ceremony, and you had a webGL build for me to try out!

Yes, the screen shaking isn't stopping, so once I get hit, the shaking is constant.

Whenever I got hit (my first hit was always to spikes, so I don't know if the saw also causes this) the whole screen started shaking. Especially noticeable when in 3D. Great game, very cool, but the shaking made it hard to play. 

Second dev note: don't swap after you die to spikes, it breaks things. (On the same note, if the swap breaks, just die to spikes, and don't swap before the scene reloads, and it'll fix it)

A note to all downloaders: V2 fixes a bug.

Sorry for late reply, I had tried the windows version. 

Funny that you mention the water, cause that was an asset we pulled from the internet. That and the astronaut model were the only art assets though, everything else was made by our awesome art people on the team. 

Thanks for the feedback on the game! The explanation side of the game is lacking cause we kinda ran out of time... 

Raft was not our inspiration for the game, but I can see what you mean. 

I can't extract the game from the zip. It's giving me an error:

0x80004005 - unknown error

on file: mono-2.0-bdwgc.dll

And that's stopping the unzipping. 

Yeah, a better feedback system for the interactions is something we planned on, but didn't have time to do. Most interactions do have feedback (in the form of either an item appearing or disappearing from the inventory and a small sound), but some interactions (like the bridge) have no feedback at all. And an indicator list for all completed tasks would also help, I don't know why we didn't think of that... (probably the lack of sleep). 

Thanks for the comment and the kind words! Our art division pretty much didn't sleep at all for the whole jam to make it look so good!