fun game! I think its very funny how the line piece is still good, but here you usually want to place it sideways instead of vertical haha

my highscore is 775K/301 lines (on marathon/1/1) without thinking too much about the combos. (but its very fun to pull them off!) I’d be interested to try a version of this with 5 colors

I love the lives system, and the way that every player plays the same finite set of levels, rather than framing it as an infinite procedural generator – makes it much more compelling to me. I died on level 18 but I might try again later…

the spike at the start of level 15 is nasty! can you push it to the right a few pixels please? ;)

that “feature list” is really funny to me, because they seem small but they are genuine features; I wish I’d been able to fit them into my entry!

finally, here’s a puzzle(?) for you:

very cute game. pretty tricky by the end; nice difficulty!

cool game! compelling mechanics, easy-to-understand world. I stopped at 25 points (after dying with 1 point on my first run!)

nice relaxing game, and hahaha that intro was great. I stopped on level 21.

I played an early version of this, and I have to say that the scanning mechanic + the lore of why I’m doing it adds a LOT to the game, I’m impressed. I also really like the choice to put in an ending

all research complete B)

(oh btw, is there any particular reason for the odd pixel-scaling? the p8 manual recommends setting the itch viewport to 750px x 680px for nice and even pixels)

fun! I made it to the depths :) Hard to control, but in a good way. having infinite lives was very nice, thank you for that

finding the star felt fair to me – the game gives you enough clues to follow! here’s some hints, ordered vague to specific: (rot13.com)

• vg’f abg oruvaq n snxr jnyy
• gur pyhrf ner ivfvoyr bapr gur fgne fcnjaf
• sbyybj gur enlf bs yvtug gb gurve bevtva cbvag

I agree, making it work in 2D was fascinating. and, I ended up with the same layout!

hard but very worth it! my favorite levels were 6, 8, and 5. I like how the levels were large and hard to parse, but fell apart under examination – lots of small lemmas to grab onto and realize “oh this part has to be first. but how??”

clear, tricky and fun – what an elegant game!

finished! finally seeing what I was missing to get the sixth dollar was a thrill. and holy moly the ENDING

this is great! the mechanics are clear and simple yet the puzzles are so tough. I’ll have to come back and finish later (I have 5 dollars and am very very stuck)

fun! the limited movement was a bit frustrating (not being able to jump over a box) but I liked the puzzles you made with it. nice puzzles, and the game was short and sweet

my playthrough: https://gist.github.com/pancelor/ed1551f7afce462349673b2c671a0118

unfortunately, I had a lot of fun. I believe this is Bad Game Design

I had an excellent time playing – tense and surprising and charming and funny. my results: https://gist.github.com/pancelor/ed1551f7afce462349673b2c671a0118

I believe I am supposed to write “I am a cheater” here, but I didn’t finish reading so I am not sure. might as well be on the safe side of the kitten law: I am a cheater

boat crash 1.puz:

it reminds me of spider solitaire, combined with an odd and exciting version of free cell where the free cells are the cards themselves… seems difficult so far! I’ve managed to win once out of ~fifteen games, but I can’t really tell you what went right that run. I’ve played a ton of free cell but I was never any good at spider solitaire.

I find it a bit strange that if I put a 3 sideways onto a 4, I’m not allowed to pick up the sideways 3 and re-place it rightsideup on the 4 (and this can be useful sometimes to give myself a free cell)

I’m also surprised that cards auto-score as soon as they possibly can – sometimes it would be helpful if they stayed in place until there were no lower cards of any suit. But I haven’t played much of this game yet and so I hesitate to suggest changing it, maybe it adds an interesting wrinkle where I should try to build multi-color stacks instead of single-color stacks, to prevent this

great game! looking forward to playing a lot more of this

same; I can consistently break the game by clicking outside of the iframe while the cards are being dealt at the start. (at anytime actually, but it noticeably pauses the card-deal animation) The game permanently freezes and I need to refresh the page

I thought of a idea for the doors – I can see why you wouldn’t want them to glow all the time, but maybe they could glow while the player is using the blue secret-finding ability? I think I would have liked that. (and adding a working door to the bottom house near the shark would have also helped me to know that doors existed in the first place)

re: the rainforest waterjump: one option might be to trap the player in the water with an equally tall wall on the right, to tell them that there’s a way to get out if they can just figure it out. or maybe make the water deeper, so that they’re sure to accidentally highjump after they dive down for the spirit orbs…? or change the physics to make the waterjump height difference more exaggerated. I’m not sure how well those changes would work, and I’m not even sure that a change here would be a good thing, but they’re options that come to my mind if you decided you wanted players to not get stuck there.

Every person has a different way of thinking and playing so the only way to prevent players from getting lost would be to add no challenge and no exploration at all.

yeah! I completely agree. that’s why I’m hesitant to suggest any big changes… the times I got stuck were part of the whole experience, and I really enjoyed the whole experience! thanks for the game :)

really compelling! my best time is now 8904

hi, I beat the game! 23:52 to beat the game, and 24:52 to get 100%. I’m blown away by how huge it is; I can hardly imagine how much time and effort went into this…

if there’s room in the credits, I’d like a #ff6c24 to #00b543 gradient; something vaguely like this: (all lowercase)

I had a great time with the game! the pacing was slow and meditative – it took me an hour or so to get into that vibe, but after that I really enjoyed it. I think that first long section where you run through a long long field with no enemies was probably the turning point where I started to really get it.

I liked the level design a lot – there were generally secrets where I expected secrets (even just small coins), and the visible coins in the early game guided me into a lot of moments where I thought “wait, can I get there right now? I don’t think I can… aha! I can!”

the level design felt… playful? teasing? mischevious? like, before the first bat boss there’s a long tunnel with no obstacles that you run down. if you jump as you go you can see there’s an upper tunnel too. and if you missed that, there are bats up there that you’ll notice when they shoot. so, now I know there’s an upper tunnel but I’m already committed to the bottom tunnel b/c it’s long; I eventually get to the end and find this teaser:

so the level design is telling me “ha! just kidding, the upper tunnel was nothing, just 40 coins, not really worth it :)” but I am Suspicious so I go up there and aha, there’s more! well, just some boring tunnels that don’t go anywhere. hmm, drat. but I finish going all the way to the 40 coins and… there’s even more! a little maze at the end, to get a valuable trinket

that whole sequence felt like a game of cat-and-mouse with the creator. the very long tunnel to go back and forth added a lot of time to each trip, which gave time to think and predict the level design. it was pretty essential that the tunnel was completely empty to not distract me with game mechanics (jumping, enemies), and the game moved out of the computer and into my head, which was very neat. I think there’s stuff like this throughout, but this is the most concentrated example I can remember right now.

there was an almost-similar moment here: this room seems hidden, and I passed by it (I was on the left). then later I came to it from the right, and saw that it must exist. then I went all the way back to the left and went in, and that revealed that there was another hidden passage, accessible from the right! so I went all the way back around to the right side, crawled in… and there was nothing there. I was expecting a circuit key or something

I didn’t realize doors (where you can press up to travel to a back layer of some sort) were a thing until after getting my first cube. I consistently had trouble seeing them throughout my playthrough – I didn’t find the save before the first shark boss, and many of the last collectibles I found (e.g. one in the green sunken ghost ship area) were hard because I just didn’t see the door, which was a bit annoying

I think I would have figured this out a lot sooner if the house near the shark boss had a door – the upper house had a door, but I didn’t try it because I had already tried entering the door-looking spot on the lower house (next to the well), and nothing happened.

I got stuck at the water jump after the first cube; that was the one time I had to ask for help. I ended up going back into the dog zone to get circuit keys to unlock the door to the map, because I didn’t know it was a map yet and thought it might be required. I wondered for a while if there was some way to use the new portal – it was the only “activated” portal on the map, so I thought maybe I could use it somehow. maybe I was tired and would have figured it out eventually, but I got stuck there.

I also got stuck before the first bat boss; I didn’t know that mushrooms were interactable yet. I spent a while wandering around, expecting to find a claw upgrade that would let me break the bricks in the boss room.

I tend to get lost in metroidvanias, and neither experience was too bad since I got to go exploring and collecting, but I thought you might be interested to know where I got stuck.

I was disappointed by the sunset gates – I beat the boss and then came back to the game the next day, expecting extra-hard post-game challenges, but it was just easy circuit keys. but, I did have a great time getting the last claw upgrade, which was required for the last 3 keys (in the snow area). (the last claw upgrade looking easy to get to but then being a whole gauntlet was a very good joke!)

the final boss was hard and cool and the postboss ascent was really amazing – you really got my heart pounding! I did NOT want to fight the final boss again, and there’s that one really hard jump where you have to get up onto a center platform by bouncing on the friends. I ended up timing out right at the last hard platforming part, on the last jump to the right on the 1x1 blocks. I wish I’d cleared it first try and never realized the stakes weren’t as high as I thought… but then I ended up needing to fight the final boss again anyway!! because I reset manually when my second climb started too slow! haha whoops. it was a fantastic final boss

I loved the reward for getting 99 circuit keys; I can’t imagine anything else that would have been as satisfying. it reminds me of that long run through the grassy field I mentioned earlier.

(edit: I just read sylvie’s comment: I didn’t realize it did something! I just sat there for a while and then closed the game, satisfied)

Hi! I’m enjoying the game; currently just exited the creepy catacombs. I ran into a crash here on the map:

I was walking through that room and got hit by an angry dog, so I went into the pause menu to choose “retry”. I heard a strange noise, accidentally pressed the wrong key (I don’t know what), heard another strange noise, then pressed “retry” and the game crashed:

I think the strange noise was just the dog playing a high-pitched/sighing sound effect I didn’t recognize? but it was weird that it played a second time while I was in the menu the whole time.

text version of the error:

___________________________________________
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of  Step Event2
for object obj_alien_bones:

Unable to find any instance for object index '92' name 'alien_light'
at gml_Object_obj_alien_bones_Step_2
############################################################################################
gml_Object_obj_alien_bones_Step_2 (line -1)

excellent update – thank you again! this tool has been fantastic for learning how to wrangle the compressor for pico1k

this tool is amazing! I’ve learned a ton by referencing it.

The bits-per-char numbers are nice when looking at the code from a high level, but I often wish I could see the full cost of the chunk. like, it tells me a chunk of 65 characters costs 0.6 bits/char, but it doesn’t tell me the character count (65) and it also doesn’t multiply them together for me (65*0.6 = 39 bits). and while I’m wishing, I’d also like to be told which type of chunk it is – move-to-front char, offset+length copy, or uncompressed chunk. (if my understanding of PXA is correct – I skimmed the wiki article)

separate question: how did you learn how PXA works? any good resources (besides the wiki’s P8PNGFileFormat page) that you can share?

lovely game

you might enjoy this other entry – what a funny coincidence! https://itch.io/jam/mini-jam-111-colors/rate/1634499

I’ve played (and quit) many games with basically this concept for this jam, but this is the only one I’ve beaten and really enjoyed. the isometric view + animations were essential for helping me easily visualize what was going on, and the levels were nice and small to teach me specific things. I was also surprised that I liked the step counter by the end, but without it I would probably just roll around randomly until I happened to win, and then be annoyed that I beat it without learning anything. really nice work!

fun! and impressive for 6h. it got a bit easy in the end – maybe if the dice fell in domino-like pairs that you could rotate, maybe that would be more interesting? nice work!

fantastic game! I need to try this IRL. my best score so far: 1268

I thought this was a cute little game but then I realized there’s a level 2 and now I think it’s fantastic

short and sweet! nice sounds/art/polish; it’s a nice cohesive game

I keep hearing clanging noises that weren’t in the tutorial, but I keep holding the button and keep hearing stepping noises. I think they’re the slot machines and the dealer’s table? Why do I still hear stepping noises – am I bouncing off of them?

I beat all 6 levels! It was frustrating at times; here’s some specific wishes I had:

• I wish the dealer shuffle sound only played when I was close enough to win – at the start I kept hearing it and pressing space which would reroll the floor for some reason, and thought I was winning.
• I wish it showed me where I was (and maybe the entire history of my path?) when I got caught.
• It was a bit annoying with all the guards around. It seems like there’s probably something more interesting than guards that you could use to add difficulty – maybe maze-like levels? I dunno

I liked finding myself based on sound alone – it’s like I start with a quantum state of being everywhere at once, and then I use the sound clues to slowly collapse that down into a single position. I enjoyed the game! very different and fun. reminds me of Invisigun Reloaded and https://gruebite.itch.io/double-blind

I don’t know what’s going on because there’s no fullscreen button. I think you should be able to add that (even though the jam is over) under “Frame options” in the itch game edit page? dunno how well that would work but its something to try.

I got to 156 points / turn 17. I wish the roll animation was about 5x faster. I like how most of the roadblocks you run into are your own fault, so on your next run you learn to play carefully to not make any individual numbers too large, which would make things difficult for future-you. nice music + tutorial too. fun game!

I like the music, and the sfx are really great; gives the game a nice calming vibe. the puzzles are fun and interesting – my best scores in each mode are 7/10/24/23

It’s like… a mario party fish tank. odd but slightly mesmerizing, I like it

VERY loud after the tavern. I liked the story and characters, but I don’t know how to do anything after I get into the dungeon?

clever puzzles! impressive, considering how restrictive the mechanics seem

lovely :)

thank you! you raise some good points; I’ve made a few updates to the map that should help future players