itch.io

Just a bit of curiosity - what this is programmed in? Seems like a fun bit of challenge to figure out how to push that core mechanics to be able to go far and beyond!

Interesting game, played through what is there so far. The sand physics is fun, the components to build from feel fitting together well to create interesting and functional contraptions. What I imagine would be challenging is to make the game mechanics (sand physics) fast enough for a solid, smoothly going game, it struggles a fair bit already for the later goals (was playing on Chromium).

Wow, going far there! :) ... Yes, those glitches I also noticed, some cleanup is missing after the waves (a cannon shot is left hanging to go off at the beginning of the next wave). The attack indicators were supposed to appear biggest & strongest dragons first, which isn't quite so (but OK gameplay-wise, a bit random what reveals first).

Wow, that's indeed a very nice run! Probably the first ever to go over 100 months! My best was 96 months, but that's still with v1.0, so no attack indicators. With the new version, was too busy trying to break it so far rather than pushing it. Looks like going into uncharted territories here :)

Wow, that's a nice run, using what the game gives you to prolong the life of your settlement! Well played!

Noticing some game glitches as well now seeing someone else play - most notably the order those attack indicators would pop up is borked, though gameplay-wise not in a too bad way. Well, 1.1 is released, now it is a feature!

That's a nice score indeed! :)

Wow, that indeed works! Thank you :)

I changed the web embed's settings so now that fullscreen button remains visible (and removed itch's fullscreen), also on Flight of a Dragon (which is having the same issue with fullscreen).

Yes, the signals are for tough dragons :)

The Fullscreen button I removed as on Itch it didn't really work - it could occupy the whole screen, but the game remaining 640x480, which was kind of pointless (or did you see it working in some environment?). Some time in the future I will try to work on a better Uzebox web emulator, EEPROM state saves would also be really nice.

Nice! :)

Yup, did it this way by design, the large dragons starting to appear from the 2nd year could appear like some final boss for intermediate players, then once you get the feel of the game's mechanics beyond Match-3, eventually you make it to the 4th year... It is possible to go further, pushing it (and now experimenting with the v1.1 add-ons while developing it) I have some worry that someone absolutely understanding the mechanics to its depth and playing it near perfection might possibly be able to "beat" it, in the sense that there is a point where the game runs out of being able to give you stronger waves. No worries, that's quite a way from the 4th year :)

Otherwise tried to design the difficulty curve and mechanics so it hopefully should give an interesting game for all skills, and at any stage of the game. Hopefully more or less works :)

I see and I like them - it feels akin to how ports were done in the 80s, sometimes having to vary the game a little to fit on the target. It sure feels faithful to the original as far as I had seen its gameplay :)

Wow, thank you for trying it out! :)

I am working on a version 1.1 upgrade now. Managed to squeeze out 3KBytes ROM space with an improved tileset compiler, which allows me to add those few gameplay features I wanted the first place, but ran out of space to have them.

Nothing too crazy, but will add a little extra to make it play better!

Wow! Only watched videos of the original a while back, was surprised to stumble upon this, it seems to recreate the game spectacularly well! The animations and the music are very pleasant, just like the original game, while the level design feels like a well thought out port for the Pico-8's display.

Huh, that indeed makes sense now reading it, how this one could emerge from Spider! :)

Looks like a very enjoyable puzzle game, played it to Level 50, when I thought to put it aside.

Now the level selection screen crashes it. Checking it fresh, seems like trying to navigate to the 3rd page (levels 51 - 75) results in a crash. Maybe ran out of levels, and was never quite finished?

Huh, that sounds like not a huge percentage :)

With "what percentage" I meant that starting games with completely random layout, over a long time, assuming an ideal player, what percentage would be solved. So far for you it looks like this would be ~0.25% (1 solved out of 400 games assuming 1 game played / day).

Played Spider Solitaire with 4 suits? This game seems quite similar to that (10 piles, 2 decks, same card placement rules), in a different arrangement, with more cards revealed, however since all are laid down at the start, there are no opportunities to build before taking on more cards 10 at a time.

Got a decent run today, but... There weren't many options left there!

I maybe found a bug, not sure about it though as I only got surprised by the effect. I think I had an ace of hearts under a king of hearts onto which I stacked up hearts. When dragging in the '2', it was gone, leaving the other ace of hearts I was planning to put atop there for me, killing the run.

Simple little game, but works very well for what it is! (Would say, even better than quite some around here for its functionality)

The undo feature is a bit odd to have in a game meant to have chance elements, but it is interesting, and remarkable that it works, as far as I could see, dealing correctly even with more complicated cases. Using it turns the game into something different, of course easier, but only with good memory remembering the cards.

Abusing it I found a case which isn't really handled, resulting in a deadlocked game (always a bit curious what would happen in various spider solitaire implementations in this case), see as in the image. What happened here is that by assembling stacks, the board ended up having only nine cards left at this stage with a pile empty. Quite rare case, but possible :)

The game looks nice, however I feel the mechanics aren't that great.

In many Klondike variants having more passes through the stock is penalized or not permitted, none of that is present here (part of that mechanics is that once playing a card from the stock, the previous card if any would become available again).

From other Klondike implementations, was anticipating double clicking on dragging cards onto the foundations to work, which doesn't, made me thinking the game was incomplete at first, until eventually checking the description here. Was experimenting with the gameplay without foundations though (it is very rarely solvable that way as apparent, even with turning one card at once from stock).

Interesting, gave it a try, got a few better rounds out of it, though nowhere near being able to complete it.

Roughly what percentage should be solvable? (With no reliance on chance, that is, with the unknown cards) I feel there are many unsolvable, at least the initial position of kings (beyond which it is difficult to reconstruct the stack further as the king needs to go into an empty stack) seem to matter.

Neat little game, works surprisingly well for its size, with quite a bit of variety! The desert stage with the rocks on the road was nasty!

Does well as an example too, checking its code, nicely done!

Nice game, played to Level 23 in one go for now, has some unique mechanics I haven't seen before, with the later levels really starting to utilize on it. Could use some more recognition :)

The UI feels mostly all right, though I miss being able to rotate elements placed with right-click only, removing elements could also be easier (would have expected dragging them off the grid to work). Swapping elements by dragging one atop another could also be nice (could be nice to quickly fix mixed order of fills). The base idea on how to interact with the game is solid, though!

The idea is genuinely interesting and fun :) - but there is a bad balancing issue.

Until about 7 minutes the rate of packages is low, a few tries and it is easy to collect all (obtaining the maximum amount of income to buy things).

Then it starts pouring in. At that point there doesn't seem to be any way to really last much longer (my max was 7:28). Even tried holding and sweeping with belts a bit to keep tossing packages forward before placing them.

The problem isn't the eventual failure, rather that once figuring things out, there seems to be no way for the player to improve, find new strategies to last longer.

Wow, getting this play as well as it does on the small space Pico-8 offers is quite remarkable!

It is glitchy, yes (and I can't muster the patience to complete the flying level), misses some elements even in the levels implemented, yes, but what was managed here is still nothing short of awesome!

Fun concept, could get 22 boxes delivered :)

Could use more attention to refine, turn it into a proper game!

The tune played by the music box is in fact the same as that in a certain scene in Neverhood :)

Very nice and unique game idea with quite creative puzzles!

Could use some sound and possibly music to set the atmosphere, and maybe a bit of polish with the controls (deleting rails is a bit difficult to figure out), other than these, it seems to work pretty well, and is quite fun to play. Should see more recognition, being such a unique idea!

Really fun concept, even the minesweeper side is quite much enhanced by the very uneven mine distribution, bringing up situations rarely seen in normal minesweeper games, requiring different ways of thinking.

The Sudoku aspect works well, solving it often creating interesting new puzzles where the count of mines can break a chance situation on the minesweeper board.

Difficulty is more about mine density, so the 9x9 Sudoku combined with the 27x27 minesweeper is the most challenging, while the largest 36x36 minesweeper remains easier.

Definitely not for someone being annoyed by unfairly losing as that's very common here, inevitably running into chance situations on the minesweeper board (though many such situations can in fact be resolved by elaborate thought, a very nice angle of the game, the classic 50%/50% situations remain).

Would be nice if the generation logic could implement measures to reduce the occurrence of such - still, even as it is, it is fun to play!

I like this! Took a bit of trial and error to figure out how the items work - but they work well for enhancing minesweeper. Giving new options to break situations involving chance, or sometimes themselves shaking a bit up the board for a change!

Nice idea, could be developed further! My main issue trying it out was the generation of zeroes - they with the low density used make it a less rewarding experience (usually ending up having to hit a lot of tiles in the end to find the remaining one zero).

Fantastic! Wonderfully crafted story all around, kept me captivated until playing it all the way through (to the 3/3 ending, might check the others out later).

In the mechanics the only item I felt a bit annoying was the chase sequence leading into the family tree hall, to figure out what exactly I need to do there while repeatedly dying. Still, a relatively minor hiccup.

Wish there were more such stories around, the lore unfolding was a haunting, amazing experience, how everything tied together. Scary, but in a good, exceptionally well-written way!

The endgame feels a bit disappointing unless I ended up missing something crucial.

It is quite a grind (well, it is an "idle" game, but after the very nice pace up till going for the University, hoped the pacing would stay) to go up to researching all techs with Electricity at the very end. That I couldn't figure out, it does work, I got electricity generation going all right, but the few production buildings using it, I couldn't even spot the benefit of supplying them with electricity.

If setting the end goal of researching all upgrades (which I presume would get Progress up to 100%), that seems technically impossible to achieve. A single library would hold 620K research of each fully upgraded. The biggest target seems to be the coffee field's last growth speed upgrade at some 39 billion Luxury research points. To hold that, nearly 63000 fully upgraded libraries would be necessary, that is, approximately an 500x500 grid filled up entirely with libraries (2x2 tiles each) only. The game field seems to be only ~150x150. With good city management the maximum storable research feels like would be somewhere around 50 million.

Really nice game, if it ran out of steam by this point, a bit sad. Hope it could be finished, even if maybe only tidying up the endgame to have a more satisfying ending (with an option to keep playing, but clear that the progression ended, with only those upgrade options left which are realistic to reach with the game's finished state).

Though I hit a snag now, not realizing the University needs Luxury research, and a lot of it.

Guess we are dying of chocolate poisoning now... For science! :D

Unless I missed something essential, this feels a fair bit out of place compared to how well I found the game's mechanic working otherwise. Chocolate seems to be the only item generating Luxury research with everything sub 200K already researched, and only the Manager consumes it (so not much useful for the population). This was one of the very few elements of the game I tried and seemed like just not being worth it - so ended up without pretty much any Luxury research until this point, when I am doing this just to meet that target.

Wow, such an incredibly well designed city builder! I am surprised it is able to work so well like it does in a web browser.

I got to bronze age with a population of nearly 3000, where the technological limitations started to creep up (Chromium), might be nice to release a native version if at all possible. The sort of simulation the game does just needs the computational resources.

The progression and mechanics feel incredibly good and intuitive, easy learning curve, the pixel graphics is pleasant to look at, though maybe could be refined here or there (notably the buildings for chocolate feel very out of place in the era they pop up, a few buildings like the horse mill could use some animation). But it works, and it is nice to see all those tiny people going about doing their stuff.

So far I also rarely got into a situation requiring much waiting, if approaching the game right, there is enough stuff to do to have the necessary research happen while doing it, if it isn't so, the city probably needs structural improvements (like, have enough clay tablets for the campus to work? have wheelbarrows accessible for production buildings and markets?)

The game has no sound, which may seem a bit strange at first, but then it ended up feeling nice that I can just listen to whatever I like while playing it.

This game has some very interesting unique mechanic from which quite a challenging gameplay emerges, with the AI being decent enough (Hard & Aggressive settings) to be able to appreciate it.

I see a few here mentioning difficulty understanding it: You are the blue player (on the top), you can click on a cell you control, which rotates it 60 degrees clockwise, and that's your turn. You capture all cells connected.

If this was played among human players (wish it had local multiplayer option!), would suggest Obliteration as target (or like Go, both players passing, or a resign), as the mechanic sometimes implies strategies involving changing large areas back and forth.

Unfortunately the game seems quite fragile on my Firefox browser, crashing it often, seems to work all right in Chrome.

Fun little game. Got 479 at first try, of course depends a bit on luck. Might be a nice one to teach some math to young kids as well, especially in the numeric range where it is most needed to develop a routine skill for basic arithmetic.

Neat idea! A bit short (could do it in some 15 minutes), but fun. The last level was quite an interesting surprise.

What I missed was a reset option, often I would see, dammit, I had mistaken, or accidentally tapped in an extra move - was annoying to tap the remaining moves through to restart the level.

And of course maybe a bit more of it!

Found a strat to keep the field playable for much longer, but really wish the game had a means to save. Even drawn out very long, could be an enjoyable time-waster if it was possible to do a run over the course of several days in small stretches.

Fun game, but if doing well, seems like the endgame gets too boring to be able to complete a run.

Eventually it becomes impossible to match (a couple of level 6 towers sitting around along with various lower level ones, gold possibly ran out after desperately keeping on hitting remove basic elements if that was chosen), and then it would be pretty much just trying to arrange them as best as possible to see how long it can last.

However there are too many swap, and enemies neither get a lot stronger between waves. Looking at the high scores... Who has the patience to sit around fiddling two items for so long?

If there is a way to discard items / towers, couldn't find it.

Wacky :) Sometimes indeed keycombos will end up doing unintended stuff, still very much worth it! Short (if you can figure this sort of stuff out), but fun!

Interesting concept!

Though runs too slow here (Firefox)... Got bored at a score of 683 on wave 77, with a setup where it seemed like I could go a looong way further (a few restore old defences, draw 2, upgrade & repair, stack top to console, with a well populated playfield connecting everything). I like the idea, just really needs some optimization in my opinion.

Huh, some nice idea and mechanics in here!

Sounds broken... Most likely, sir. I'll bet it was something nice though!