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Hey Median, thanks for the review. I agree that more customisation would better. I did have plans to allow customisation of the colour pallet, but as I'm sure you're aware, Bevy UI is very much not batteries included and to implement colour customisation would require the development of a colour picking component which felt too daunting to implement well as a solo developer within the timeframe of the jam. Implementing the dropdown, slider, and tooltip components was already a daunting task.

The witness feature makes the camera follow the clicked on particle. It allows you to follow organisms as they move around, but toggling the follow state is a bit hard to communicate. Panning the camera at any point disables the following mechanic, clicking the tool also toggles it off.

I'm currently in the process post Jam of moving the simulation to the GPU which gives me a lot more control on how the particles are rendered instead of just being sprites and I'm excited to juice up their effects a little bit.

Any errors in the console you could share?

Hey wilsk, can I ask what platform you were playing on? There's definitely supposed to be audio. I have noticed some issues with Safari on iOS where if you don't tap the screen during loading the audio triggers can fail to fire correctly. There's some weird code workarounds you need to start audio on the web to stop annoying spam audio in the background of webpages https://github.com/DylanRJohnston/abiogenesis/blob/main/site/index.html#L72-L132

No stress, I didn't take it as such, my comment was meant as agreeing with you haha. Tone over text is hard 😅

Amazing, as others have mentioned, the desire to boomerang everyone in a single shot adds a very fun optional strategic element to the game. Love the aesthetic, music, and film grain effects. 10/10.

I can't believe you made a full 3D boomer shooter for the jam! Incredible! I feel like the hardest thing to get right in shooters in the gun feeling good to shoot and you guys nailed it! I was having good fun just killing zombies, but then I saw roguelike upgrades!

I did find a degenerate strategy against the big guys, by getting  close to them they lock into their attack animation, and then you can back away faster than they can attack, so you can sort of stun lock them. 

I'd love to know more about how you designed the 3D environment.

10/10 best game I've played of the jam so far.

Wasn't 100% sure what I was doing, but I think I was doing well?

Love the graphics / aesthetics of the game especially the CRT like distortion. I think with some roguelike elements in terms of powerups / builds it could be really compelling as a full game.

I did add spawning shapes to the game at the last minute, but I didn't have enough time to link them into the UI. It would make it much easier to build more complex shapes if you could pause and use things like donut shapes and concentric circles.

Thanks for the kind review Jan. It definitely is a lot all at once, there's a tension in a sandbox with giving players control over all parameters in the model vs being understandable. The original plan was to introduce the players to all the mechanics through a series of challenges but as a solo dev, and with the jam drawing to a close, I had to scrap those plans in favour of polishing the sandbox mode as much as possible.

Thanks for the kind review SoysCodingCafe. Great idea with the time options! I had planned on them for the challenges mode which would see you design organisms to complete goals, but as a solo dev, and the time remaining in the jam drawing to a close, I abandoned those plans in favour of polishing the sandbox as much as possible.

Receive and Bestow are the sharing options, apparently though they don't work given the iframe permissions in Chrome. I can confirm they work on Firefox and iOS however.

I did try originally to have the configuration state live in the URL search parameters, but because itch serves the game as a cross domain iframe you don't have permission to modify the URL.

That's an awesome flower though, mind if I steal it to put in the game as a preset after the jam is over?

Thanks for the kind review Nilay. The shipped version of the game is just a sandbox and so there is no explicit goal beyond curiosity and explore the possibility space of the model. I did sketch out about a dozen or so challenges / puzzles in my notebook, but as a solo dev and the time remaining in the jam running out, I decided to abandon those plans and invest the remaining time in polishing the sandbox experience as much as possible. I'm keen to explore those puzzles designs after the jam voting is over and I can continue to work on the game again.

Thanks for the kind review Nico! I totally agree about the need for challenges and in fact sketched out about a dozen or so of them in my notebook. But as a solo dev, with the time remaining in the jam running short, I decided to invest in polishing the sandbox experience as much as possible rather than deliver a half baked version of both. 

You can find remnants of the code for a scene manager and a challenges mode in the code still as I started working on it before switching back to polishing the sandbox. 

Thanks for the kind review, I did plan on adding some puzzles / challenges. I sketched out about a dozen challenge idea in my notebook but as a solo dev I ultimately ran short on time and decided to invest the remaining time in polishing the sandbox experience as much as I could.

I totally agree. I was originally planning on simulating the particles in a compute shader and that would have given me more flexibility with rendering the particles performantly, but I spent so long on the CPU implementation I didn't have enough time to try out the compute shader version which would have also locked the game to only working with WebGPU.

Thanks for the kind review DeVelox, I really wanted to add some challenges / puzzles where you have a limited space to construct an organism and send it off to complete a challenge. I sketched out about a dozen ideas for puzzles in my notebook, but around day 6/9 I had to decide if I wanted to keep working on polishing the sandbox or start working on the challenges and deliver them both half baked. The challenges of solo game dev. I'm keen to join a team for the next jam so I'm not so starved for time in what I can accomplish.

Great puzzle game, like Rabbival said, the graphic design it reminds me a lot of antichamber. Could definitely do with a run button though because some of the chamber rooms are quite large.

Really neat puzzle design. Although I think level 3 and 4 need to be swapped, unless I did level 3 the wrong way but level 4 teaches how to splitting atoms interact and I felt like I needed to know that on level 3. Great job on the puzzles themselves though.

Hey Lalaith, thanks for the feedback. The force matrix is asymmetrical so it unfortunately can't be reduced to a triangular matrix, currently the columns represent the force on the colour by the other colours, but there's nothing in the UI that indicates that. I'm still figuring out how best to articulate the concept.

> I think there could be more zoom states, as it is currently fairly binary.

This is a weird quirk of the web build and the way Bevy computes scroll amounts, I've implemented a fix now. Please note panning has moved to right click to accommodate particle brushes coming in a new version.
 

Hey Lava Eater, thank you so much for the kind review! I'm very excited to keep working on this game. I have a whole story sketched out and loads of ideas for new puzzles mechanics.

I love this so much! Really focused and polished execution of the concept.

Hey Wilsk, thanks for the review! Would you mind sharing your Firefox and OS version so I can try and narrow down the source of the stuttering issue I’ve been experiencing with Firefox. I’m on an M3 MacBook Pro, so perhaps it’s specific to Firefox on Mac.

Hey Pyrious, thanks for the feedback!

I definitely agree with the difficulty spiking too hard with the rotating blocks, most of those puzzles were made very late in the Jam and I didn't have enough time to get people to playtest and refine them like the earlier levels.

Regarding the music, I actually wrote a few more tracks but didn't have time to integrating them into the music system which had already ballooned significantly in complexity as I'd never implemented an audio system before. I hope you were able to locate the mute button in the settings / level selection menu and listen to your own music after it got grating.

If you didn't already you should check out the last level "Transcendence" as I'm particularly fond of how ridiculous it is.

Thanks for the bug reports! Unfortunately I discovered both of those problems after the submission deadline. 

The later levels definitely feel qualitatively different from the earlier levels because they were all made on the last day after I was happy with the QoL features in the UI. I think I made the multiple player character levels just a few hours before the the deadline. As a result they didn't get any real play testing and so don't feel as refined / intentional in trying to teach you something as the earlier puzzles.

I've also realized that the "turning" blocks are very very hard to intuitively reason about their behavior and they should be used a lot more sparingly and require a lot more training puzzles to teach you tricks about how they work, especially with how they interact with walls. Because if you can't intuitively reason about them like you can with Ice then you resort to brute forcing like you mentioned.

I think I few things could help with the apparently complexity of the turning blocks, a step debugger, and a "ghost" projection that plays out once cycle ahead would help a lot I think, but in general they need to get tuned down.

It's also hard to visually distinguish between the clockwise and anti-clockwise rotating blocks, I think their color schemes should be inverted so it's easier to tell at a glance which is which.

Hey SecretPocketCat, thanks for the review! The angle of the camera was definitely something I went back and forth on. I too struggle with messing up Left / Right and with the player character facing Left->Right across the screen for most puzzle’s there’s an implicit 90 degree rotation you have to do in your head. I ended up leaving it because a) in most games the character goes from Left to Right, it’s an intuitive goal for players and b) the finish tile was more easily visible in most levels from a side on angle. I think I’ll make this a configurable option post Jam as once you have all 4 commands the starting orientation of the player doesn’t matter mechanically. Perhaps being able to issue commands with WASD/Arrow keys might also help.

As for the brute forcing, I definitely feel the same way for some of the later levels. I wanted even the complex levels to have at least one simple, but inefficient solution, and hoped the alacrity goal would drive people towards finding the faster solution after discovering the simple one. There is one level “Spinors” which is intentionally so complex with all the spinning pieces that brute forcing its 2 command solution was kinda intentional, I didn’t consider that it might have a demotivating effect on people given it’s right at the start of the rotating pieces puzzle section.

I think as you pointed out, a step debugger is really needed once the  rotating pieces are introduced as the player moves so fast it’s hard to grok how the rotation and action plan are interacting. That and drag and drop I think are the biggest missing QoL features.

I love this! Very clever use of phase as a puzzle mechanic. Quite a few head scratchers in there.

Hey Joda, thanks for the early review. Now that the final build is submitted there are way more puzzles and even more challenges for each level.

Hey moshyfawn, thanks for the feedback! Would you mind elaborating more about the reset button? Are you referring to the button next to the start button? It should be enabled (and colored red) whenever the player is executing the command cycle. If not, would you mind sharing your browser version with me so I can try and reproduce the issue?

> In terms of experience, there are cases where you can complete the game in less than the maximum number of commands, which is currently never acknoledged by the game; a little feedback on this could make the game even better.

I totally agree and this is the first thing I'm implementing tomorrow morning. The maximum number of commands is always one less than the number of commands required to walk straight to the finish but most the puzzles (other than the beginning ones) are definitely possible to finish in fewer commands. I plan on adding two "challenges" to each level, 1) The minimum numbers of commands, 2) The minimum number of steps. This should help communicate more clearly to the player that smaller solutions are both possible and desirable.

> There aren’t too many levels, and they aren’t too difficult either, but in the possible future an option to speed through the steps might come in handy if you get stuck and have to try several times.

Please come back at the end of the Bevy Game Jam (Monday) and check it out again, there will be lots more levels.  I  have loads sketched out on paper.

> A restart button and the end and audio on/off would also be nice.
I plan on adding a Puzzle Selection screen. With the audio toggle, do you mean just music, or the sound effects as well?