itch.io

Easily a favorite from the jam. I've played the Witness so much, and played so many fan games, I really should have seen the twists coming but didn't. At first I wasn't sure, but as I went on it became more clear how 'scale' played into the game. For a puzzle game created in such a short time frame I got an incredible amount of playtime out of it, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Like any puzzle game made in such a short time frame though, there were minor annoyances and bugs. I found that the save and load system introduced a lot of bugs. Loading a save caused certain blocks to no longer be able to be dragged, and stairs to not open. Restarting the game and loading a save fixed this. My biggest complaint is that there really should have been an auto save before reaching the top of the tower. After that point, the majority of moves that I was able to make resulted in me becoming soft locked. I replayed from my last save and made a save up there, the kept reloading it to experiment. Making a game this ambitious in such a short time frame is sure to lead to some quirks like that, but the game you've made here is incredible. Great job!

Good game! Like others have said I found it was easy to softlock myself by pushing crates a little too hard and having them slide off into a wall. Good use of the theme, I especially like how becoming heavy to break floors is sometimes desirable, e.g. when it lets you pass into another area, and sometimes adds extra difficulty when you are trying to platform on them. Nice work!

Thank you! To be honest, I really didn't understand what was going on anymore when I submitted the game : P I have fixes ready to go when the rating period ends, thanks for playing!

LOL instructions were definitely unclear, and bugs have made the market quite wacky. My favorite bugs are competitors selling products for negative dollars (an appealing deal) and the lot listing a collection of 0 items, for which your competitor bids a single dollar and wins. Hope the bugs at least gave you a laugh, thanks for playing : )

The learning curve was steep, I was confused by the drainage pipe obstacles until the later part of the game, but once I understood everything the level design came together, and seemingly got better as I progressed. The way you are punished with long falls reminds me of Jump King, an unconventional platformer that I'm a huge fan of. After a particularly brutal fall through three layers of drainage pipes I had to call it quits before I broke my laptop, but I may come back, these sorts of games tend to do that to me :P Nice work!

I also noticed this strategy. The opponent AI is so bad that often just letting them try and run their business will cause them to lose money faster than your rent will deplete yours lol. The AI needed a lot of work and I ran out of time.

You're completely right, my attempt to fix the issue failed again : P now that ratings for ludum dare are over I can make another update. The idea is that you were supposed to be required to use the mechanic to complete (ROT13) gur ebbz jvgu bayl oyhr naq terra. Thank you for playing and for the feedback!

Good point, totally reasonable to assume that. Unfortunately PuzzleScript doesn't let you customize that part of the menu. Thanks!

That’s intentional! The game never has any need for undo or restart since all moves are reversible. The only exception is in the very top room, you can press r to exit.

Thanks, didn't realize that was a feature! Just added

Last level was brutally difficult, but so rewarding to complete. These mechanics are so good, and could carry many, many more levels imo. Awesome work!

Gah! Sorry for that, I think I know what happened, but I thought I had fixed it. I’ll add a note: if the game ever freezes for you in the eternal suffering room, you can press R to exit the room and maintain your save. Also, if you try reentering the room after that, it shouldn’t freeze again. I’ll look into a better fix. Thanks for the report! Hope you’re still able to enjoy the game!

Thank you for sticking with it! An earlier puzzle was meant to illustrate that key insight:





That blues can "conduct" greens, but it was beatable without using that mechanic, I've since patched it. Thanks!

Thank you for your feedback! I wasn’t able to do quite as much with the procedural generation as I wanted to, I guess I overestimated puzzlescript’s abilities, and also was running out of time for Ludum Dare. I would have ideally liked the top to have multiple rooms you have to complete under time pressure, leading to a secret ending, but I just couldn’t get that working. In the end, I thought it was fitting to loop a single basic room, and call it “eternal suffering” lol.

You are correct that undo/restart is never necessary! That was one of the first principles I wanted to explore with the design; in a variant of Sokoban in which every move is reversible, how can I still make interesting puzzles? The lack of undo/restart also made it possible to have the structure the game does where you can freely walk between multiple puzzle paths while knowing none of them can be stuck. It also is what made the method of procedural generation used here possible. The game simply places sigils in a valid position, then randomly moves the player character around to scramble them, with the knowledge that any move made can be undone.

Thanks again for playing!

thank you!

I appreciate your excitement! Over the last year the game has been in and out of development due to personal reasons, and I haven't been posting much about it. Development has recently been back in full swing, and you can expect some new announcements very soon :)

SPOILERS




















Competor posted a blind playthrough. It is in Japanese, but the English auto-translate feature is pretty effective for understanding what is said :)

Exactly!

HINT BELOW:





















There is something intangible that needs to pass through one wormhole to the other.

It was! That was one of my favorite puzzle games of the last year, but I felt cheated that there were no actual wormholes in the game so I made this lol.

Thank you!

Thank you! Simplicity and consistency in the mechanics was definitely a goal. Thanks for playing.

Liked it! A good narrative wrapper to put around a logic puzzle of this kind. I've seen these tricks used before, but it's always remarkable to me that you can find one specific 4 digit number from what seems to be so little information. Also, I expected "check solution" to show me the solution, clever idea having it require me to enter the password!

Thank you, I forgot to hide the game from search results. Consider yourself an early tester :)

Thank you! I also have to ask: how did you manage to find the game? Lol, it’s been hidden both from being sent as a notification to my followers as well as being hidden on my page.

Thank you! It can definitely be tough, and dying with 1 health left to go is pretty brutal! Sorry for that, lol. Thanks for playing :)

Thank you! I'm not sure that I will update this game beyond where I left it for this game jam. It is likely that I revisit this idea in the future however. There are some items I included to be sort of dead-ends but also funny secrets/additional information as to what transformations are being applied. To reward the player for finding those items, rather than adding more puzzles which may end up being redundant versions of pre-existing puzzles just with a different item in the output, I think it would be better to give the player a full journal showing all of their discovered items and recipes, both as a way to track how to make certain items so that the player doesn't have to rely on memory, but to also provide a sort of reward for finding every little detail. Thanks again for playing the game!

I found myself feeling the same way during development. If I were to make something like this outside of a jam, one of the most important features would be some sort of chart the player can access at any time showing all discovered items, and all discovered methods of creating them. For a game any larger than the scope of this jam, I think that might be necessary to avoid forcing players to rely on note taking/an unfair amount of memorization. I also agree that with some testing, I could probably create a set of recipes that make it easier for players to predict, and plan their solution, but sometimes the unexpected interactions are what make the game fun. It would be a difficult balancing act. Thank you for the feedback!

Wow! This is a more detailed list than I made during development, props for organizing this and explaining the recipes so thoroughly! There's only one thing I could correct, SPOILERS:


















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In the "progress" section, rock, paper, scissors, and chicken are backwards. In those levels, the green box has a left facing arrow. Left facing arrows simply mean the reaction applies in reverse, similar to the backwards crafting table. So the actual interaction taking place is this:

Egg upgrades into chicken

RPS upgrade into whatever beats them:
Rock upgrades into paper
Paper upgrades into scissors
Scissors upgrades into rock.

The confusing aspect is that these interactions only ever take place backwards.

Also: Breadboard ->invert-> Chalkboard is kind of a reach, I just really wanted a way to make the puzzle fit the theme using the objects at the players disposal. My best justification is that chalk and chalkboards are inedible and very unappetizing compared to a breadboard.

Thanks again for playing and going through the effort of documenting these interactions!

If you aren't sure what to do next, place the torch into the slot marked torch, then press the arrows to continue to the next level.

I made the cardboard enemy/player art today!

Here's the enemy: He's basically just the frowning devil emoji. My only goal was to make something that read as an enemy (hence the horns) and had a face that was different from the players. Also, the fact that he's frowning plays into how the player's facial expressions work:

I ripped the health system from Michael Brough's 868-Hack, in which the player has three health states: Full (smiling) half (meh face) and low health (frowning).

Lastly, and it's not very impressive, I made the box:

I don't know why it's so huge on the post but here you go I guess! The plan for the targets is that they'll be some sort of fake stickers I'll make on my computer and past onto the tiles in the room. It will be something thematically consistent, like the kind of marking you would see on a cardboard box in the style of "Handle with care/WARNING Fragile" etc.
That's all for now. Next: I need to get these things moving around in the game.

And here is the cardboard room working in game!

Even after a lot of painstaking photoshopping to make everything line up, somehow there's a weird visible seam/misalignment with the top wall. I'm pretty sick of that photoshop file for now so I'm leaving it as is. Even with the ugly programmer art on top, travelling through the doors conveys depth, and really makes it appear like the objects are in the space and travelling through the door. I'm still debating exactly how much animation I plan to do for this project. The character really needs to move smoothly for visual clarity, but I don't know that I'll do anything too fancy with the room transitions. We'll see though. Next step is replacing that programmer art before creating smooth animations.

I'm creating a Brough-like procedurally generated dungeon-crawler based around Sokoban inspired box-pushing, with all art assets being made from cardboard! 

Before creating any of the art assets, I created the game layer using programmer art.

I did this because I wanted to be sure of exactly what art assets I would need to create, and also to make sure my game idea could work before making a big mess of cardboard in my room.
The gameplay is simple; The game creates randomly generated 5x5 rooms with 3 boxes, and 3 goals. The player gets points, and refills their health when they place all three boxes on their goals. The map also has enemies in it, who try to chase down and deal damage to the player when next to them. The player can defeat enemies by standing next to them and pressing toward them, or by pushing a box on top of them.

There are some other surprises I won't spoil, but I'm essentially done with the gameplay, so it's time to start cutting up boxes!

Here's the 10x10 inch model of the dungeon in the game. The plan is to use photoshop to create the various different door locations out of this master image. Doors can never be in the corners, so by rotating and flipping these two doors I can create all the variations needed.

On a side note, have you ever seen those videos where people build massive cardboard recreations of video games and then put a hamster in it?

Should be fixed now! Sorry, I've been... forgetting things lately.

I love this! The idea of using shape connections to illustrate stacks makes this probably the most visually intuitive version of Solitaire I've seen.

They are hidden on your creator page, but when I click on your profile from your comment I see them. Same for me however, so I don't think you did anything wrong! 

Thank you! In terms of third/fourth connections to knots: they are not possible. Knots have one input and one output, attempting to connect more will not work. Knots do have directionality, they have an input, and an output. The knot is shaped like a C and you can see the output coming out of the hole of the c, the input can go in any of the other three sides. I'm glad you liked SUBLEQ! I made this as a little prototype for a similar Zachtronics-style puzzle game, so I may continue this concept as part of a larger game. Thanks for playing : )

Thank you! I just fixed it. I'm able to see 3 of your games for the confounding calendar on your account as well, is that intentional?

Thank you, definitely a long time! But my plan is to release several more games in the meantime, then work on the game again once I've gotten some space from it, and when people are looking for a Halloween themed game again. Thanks again for your feedback!

Thank you!