itch.io

A decent start, and the mechanics seem to work well as-is, though I think it could use some polishing work. Obviously sounds were left out for the jam, but I think the main flaw with this game at the moment is the general speed of play. It’s… pretty slow right now. It takes a while to click into the menu to place each command, the robot moves slowly, it takes a couple seconds to restart when you die… maybe small issues individually, but they add up. Improving the speed of the game could go a long way toward making more difficult puzzles less tedious to complete.

Overall, the gameplay works pretty well here, though I’ve played similar games before. A lot of the time it felt like I just happened upon a solution out of sheer luck, and many of those solutions didn’t feel very “elegant” or logical to me (in fact, I suspect even some of the later levels have multiple possible solutions). What you have feels decently polished, though!

I think this might be my favorite game I’ve played this jam, honestly. Extremely polished, creative puzzle mechanics, and a solid difficulty progression. The bonus puzzle was a nice twist on the concept, and I liked the little passcode puzzle leading up to it, too (very clever solution…!). Really well done.

For a few (small) criticisms:

• Sometimes there felt like there were slightly too many tutorial levels in each section, and only one or two real “puzzles”. Now, these tutorial levels were still generally good, and mostly not tedious, but I think sometimes it felt they weren’t teaching anything so important that it needed its own separate level. That may be somewhat up to opinion, though.
• Very occasionally, when a bunch of puzzle elements were placed very close together, things could get a little visually cluttered and take me slightly longer to mentally parse.
• I think the speed up button could speed things up even more. If I’m pressing it, odds are I’m at least 90% confident I have a correct solution, so it can be a bit annoying to have to wait a while holding it before moving on to the next level. This was most noticeable on the bonus level, for obvious reasons.
• I like that the game is split up into several discrete sections… but honestly? While playing, I almost completely forgot about that, because the game does not tell you when you’ve finished one section and moved onto the next. They just bleed into each other. I might add some kind of splash screen to let you know you’ve finished the current set of levels, before sending you back to the menu.
• There’s no progression tracker in the game right now, so if you exit to the menu at any point (as I did, closer to the end, once I realized I’d probably already gone through several sets of levels and wanted to see how far in I was), you have to just kind of guess what level you were on before you exited. You can also skip to any level at any time right now, which is perhaps not ideal. Given this game has a single, clear, linear progression, the levels should probably unlock as you go.
• Returning to the menu should return you to the level select screen, not the title screen, I think. This was only really an issue when I was working on figuring out the passcode, because that required I hop repeatedly between levels. The decently long fade transition to enter the level select screen didn’t help, there.

Those are minor issues, though. Overall, I really enjoyed my time with this. With the level of polish this already has, I think it’d actually be a pretty viable commercial release, given a bunch more levels and a few more mechanics. You’ve got something really promising here!

Really interesting concept, though I found this a lot harder than regular Tetris - and I’m already bad at regular Tetris! I agree with many of the other commenters here in that it’s just not clear what constitutes a “loop”. I had been under the impression at first that it would be essentially an outlined square, which I spent several attempts finding little success at forming. When I finally did build a loop, I hadn’t even consciously registered I was doing so, and didn’t manage to see what it looked like before it disappeared. That happened several more times for the rest of that attempt; I have no idea what any of the loops looked like, because I made them all by complete accident. Some kind of diagram, or anything really, at the start of the game that explains what the game considers a “loop” would help a lot.

Otherwise, this is really well-made! The Tetris theme remix in the background was interesting and certainly more climactic than I’d usually expect from a puzzler. I like the dual use of the theme: you don’t just form loops, the board itself is also a loop! (Though, it felt maybe a bit too small to me. Both in a gameplay sense, but also as in, geometrically I think I’d expect it not to loop as quickly. Maybe. I’m not the best at judging those things, though.)

I think I figured it out? Maybe? After a certain point there were too many things going on in the background music for my ears to pick up on individual parts (assuming that does matter), and sometimes the pillars would say I was “correct” when it didn’t feel I was, but I got a decent amount in.

I unfortunately had to stop before reaching the end (the last level I reached was the one in your fourth screenshot, which I just couldn’t get to work). The puzzles were confusing me as-is, with solutions working that I didn’t expect to, but the breaking point for me was the timing. Even if I was 100% sure what rhythm I needed to perform, it often took me over a minute to actually successfully do so. Because the player’s motion is locked to the sixteenth note grid (and thus they don’t move until the next sixteenth note), I found I typically had to press the movement key before the sixteenth note I wanted to move on, which made my inputs feel very disconnected from the audio. What seemed like some kind of lag on the more complex levels later on exacerbated that.

I do think this is a really interesting mechanic, and if the game taught it a little more clearly I think this could be quite a strong puzzler. The graphics are nice and give off a relaxing vibe, the rhythms are fun and bouncy (it’s always nice to see a music-based game with at least slightly non-trivial rhythms)… it’s well-made. It was just the execution part on my end that prevented me from fully enjoying it, unfortunately. I’d definitely be interested in playing a touched-up version of this in the future, though, as I haven’t see anything quite like it before.

(Should note: I also experienced the softlock at the start of the game someone else mentioned earlier. It’s precise, but as far as I could tell not frame-perfect, so I think it’s pretty feasible for people to run into it before they’ve figured out the mechanic. This is why it’s often a good idea, when designing puzzles involving a timing that’s supposed to be impossible, to make said timing very obviously impossible; this one turned out to actually just barely be possible, so since I kept just not making it, I kept trying it instead of looking for a more logical solution. Of course the softlock revealed to me that was the wrong move, but…)

The tricky part of this game’s movement is that when launching, the launch velocity is just added to your velocity from the orbit. This can, admittedly, be a little unintuitive at first, but I suppose it’s more realistic (kind of? This game isn’t super realistic in general, though). Because of that, the marker is not entirely accurate, because it does not take the orbit into account. For best results, you need to launch off the tangent of the orbit (the line perpendicular to your current position on the circle) - that’ll also give you the most speed!

Regardless, I’m happy to hear you had a good time with the game :)

This was really well-designed! I liked how the levels iterated on themselves as they progressed. Often I’d have to rethink my initial solution so it would put me in a workable state for the second part. I wasn’t able to complete the whole game - not the best at Sokoban-likes - but I enjoyed what I played quite a bit. Nice work on this :)

You actually can adjust the power (it’s based off how long you hold before releasing) - but the whole thing goes by rather quickly, so I can understand missing it. The reason I made it so short in the first place was that I was worried a longer charge time would make the vast majority of the game where you do want max power launches more frustrating, but we can see if we can think of a better solution.

Whoa, this looks really cool. I don’t think I’ve seen anything with this exact style before, but I really like it. There’s an interesting contrast between the drab, brown sky and the psychedelic ground textures.

The main mechanic here is neat too. Simple in concept, but uses the theme in a unique way. I’m afraid to say I was not able to complete level 2, though. I got kind of close, but no dice. Every time I tried to jump upon landing to maintain speed, I managed to lose all my momentum instead, so assuming I was supposed to be using that mechanic that’s probably why I wasn’t able to make it very far. It likely works differently here, but I was never able to bunnyhop in any other games either… no explanations ever made sense to me, I always lose all my speed immediately. Unfortunately my lack of skill at FPS movement seems to carry forward into this game. Still enjoyed what I played, though! Nice work :)

Neat mechanic, here. I like the sketchy art style, too. However, I think it’s held back somewhat by a lack of feedback. It took me a little bit to figure out even the timing for the first level, because sometimes clicking didn’t feel like it actually did anything. Some kind of sound effect, or better, a visual, for when you interact with objects could go a long way, I think.

Other than that, perhaps the difficulty progression could be touched up a bit; I had quite a bit of trouble with the first couple levels, but then eg. “Mechanic” I somehow managed on my first try. Good work overall on this, though!

This was excellent! I wish it was a little longer, though - it felt like it wanted to be longer than it was, and it ended right as the level design started to get a bit more interesting.

The one thing that did annoy me a bit was the camera. It had a habit of zooming in super close to the player, such that I couldn’t see anything at all. Luckily it didn’t harm my experience too much.

Really unique concept, and seems executed pretty well! I did find it a bit difficult to keep track of everything - the font was not the easiest on my eyes, and the interface felt a little finicky to me. Articles and messages were coming in quickly, and it seemed half my contacts disliked me almost immediately, oops! I don’t think I quite figured out the proper strategy, but maybe I should’ve given it another attempt. The art/music do a good job communicating a specific vibe, and if not for the constant deluge of articles I could almost call it relaxing…! Good work on this.

Enjoyed my time with this, though I think I lack the wherewithal to finish it… level 2 is just so long, and I keep choking near the end! This is a really creative mechanic, though, and the artstyle is fantastic. I think it could just do with a few more introductory levels to ease the player into the game, rather than dropping them straight from an already somewhat tricky first level into a 1+ minute endurance level, haha. Really great work with this, though. I’d love to see a larger/expanded version of it.

Should mention, I had a strange bug my first playthrough where hitting walls didn’t kill me, so I did kind of play through level 3, but I wouldn’t count it. Not sure what was going on there. The Xs would appear, but I wouldn’t die… hmm.

Interesting take on the theme! A bit short with only two levels, but I liked what I played. I missed one of the secrets on the second level, unfortunately, since I accidentally completed the final objective before it - perhaps it could be better telegraphed what is a secret versus a main quest. Sometimes I think the progression was also a bit opaque… I only got past the shovel objective because there were few enough objects in the map trial and error was a valid strategy. The solution of “hit the guard with a shovel” didn’t even occur to me. I thought I’d be digging something up…!

Love the concept of secret exits. I always found the idea of those neat. Unfortunately, though, I found this game too frustrating to make very much progress in it. The handling is unusually heavy, and the instant death + long restart times + often poor contrast of enemies against the background made it feel like a bit of a chore to get to the part of the game I was interested in, which was finding the secret exits. I think I figured out what I needed to do in level 2 (have the enemy at the top follow me…?), but I’m sorry to say I just wasn’t able to execute it well enough to complete the level, and I had to stop playing. That enemy loved to immediately run off screen if I went even slightly too fast, which was difficult to avoid doing given the quick-moving instant-death enemies on the platforms below. I think this could be quite a neat game with a bit more balancing, but as of now I think it’s held back a bit by its difficulty.

I like the mechanics in this, but I feel right now it’s all a bit too much up to luck. On level 2 and 3 especially, it often seemed the game would just… decide I would lose, by giving me unworkable pieces, or starting the marbles in inconvenient spots. Each level took me several attempts, and when I finally did complete them, I actually never used looping! Eventually, the game would just hand me the pieces I needed, and the level would be over just like that. Maybe I wasn’t playing it properly, but I don’t know… it’s very hard to plan out a complex route involving looping when the piece selection is completely random, and often feels like it just refuses to give me the pieces I need. I think this has some potential, but could use some more playtesting.

I liked the large map to explore! I do think that the “time loop” aspect in this maybe felt a little weak, though - the game just completely restarts when the timer runs out, so it’s less a “time loop” and more just… a regular timer, I guess. I did get to know the map better over my several attempts, though. The timer is actually quite tight, which I found a bit frustrating; there really isn’t much room for error at all. There also seemed to be a whole corner of the map (the bottom right) that I didn’t need to go to at all…? Maybe there are multiple routes I didn’t notice during my playthrough.

I also think the controls could use a little touching up, perhaps. I didn’t love not being able to cancel the hover ability, since the few seconds it took to end after being used quite matter with a timer as strict as this game has. The keybinds also felt a bit off to me, though that’s somewhat up to preference. Space to jump, up arrow to high jump, and Z to hover feel like they all come from completely different control schemes. Space and Z in particular really shouldn’t both be used in the same game, in my opinion. Perhaps others feel differently, but the reason I kept hitting hover accidentally and wasting time was because these keybinds threw me for a bit of a loop (pun intended…!).

I really like the concept of this game, but it does not work on my machine for whatever reason.

I did at first have an issue with DPI - I had to set Windows to 100% scale, or the mouse position was calculated incorrectly for the Start button specifically, and I could not start the game. That’s probably on Godot’s end, unfortunately, so maybe there’s not much you can do about that.

The real issue I had, though, was that on level 2 all the beats appeared to draw on top of each other, and thus I could only interact with the first one, making the level impossible. I tried different browsers, without any luck. At one point the second level miraculously worked properly… but then the third level had the same issue, and I was forced to reload again.

I haven’t rated for now, as I have only played the first two levels of the game and so feel it would be unfair. If you happen to know how I might be able to resolve this bug, though, I’d be happy to give the game another try! It does look quite interesting.

Cute art style! The gameplay is simple but works well. The one critique I have is that the player’s hitbox was a little large, and the sudden cut to black on death is a bit jarring - so, I was often caught off-guard with the game suddenly ending, just like that, even when it didn’t really feel like I hit anything. Good work overall, though :)

Sorry about that! I’m aware of that bug, and am working on preparing a patch for it (among other things) for after the jam period ends.

In case you’re curious, the bug appears to be related to how baby Stardrops will return to their original bubble if you die before first bringing them to a checkpoint. If they reach their original location before the screen transition, a new bubble will be created - then, during the screen wipe, additional bubbles are created for any babies that didn’t reach their spawn points in time. The bug seems to happen when you die while on top of one of those original spawn locations; something in that process goes wrong, and the game creates extraneous bubbles. It happens most commonly in area 2 (the tropical/beach-themed one) because the bouncy ball planets have a habit of killing your momentum and stalling you in place. This can crash the game if you get more babies than the normal maximum of 15, but your message suggests you just so happened to avoid that, which is good!

Sorry for the inconvenience, but I’m glad you enjoyed your time with the game :)

This has a really neat art style of the kind I don’t see often in jams, which I really like. Felt very nicely polished. I only played through the first two tracks, since the second one took quite a long time (maybe two loops would’ve been more fitting for that one, given how long it was…), but I had fun with what I played! I foolishly didn’t read through the itch page before playing, so at first I was avoiding the track (thinking it would hurt me or something), which made me a lot slower than I could’ve been. But, I figured it out eventually, thankfully!

Love the art style on this! The enemy designs were fun, and the hand-drawn style in general worked quite well. The gameplay was pretty good, though sometimes it felt a bit up to chance (as in, one half of the loop would have basically no obstacles, then the other would have what amounted to a close-to-impassable wall of danger). I was only able to get 20 points, unfortunately, but I had fun with what I played overall :)

Glad you enjoyed it - that’s pretty far in you got! Some of the beach ball sections are a bit tricky, yeah. There wasn’t much time for playtesting, admittedly…

This was really cool! I liked how it shifted from a “standard” room-by-room puzzle to a more exploratory approach by the end. Parts of rooms that felt random at first were revealed to be critically important later. I liked the final puzzle of looping around the level to retrieve the one straggler block and access the ending sequence. I was very worried I would accidentally softlock myself (or at least lock further progression behind a lot of Z presses, if the mistake was a while back), given how many extra holes there are that aren’t meant to have blocks put in them, but either the game just telegraphed the correct blocks well enough that never happened, or I just got lucky. Either way, I had a great time with this - really impressive design work!

This was a good time! I liked how I slowly got to know the map better as the game progressed. Hearts that seemed impossible to collect before suddenly were, often from a direction I didn’t expect. The game ended at about the right time, I think, before the mechanic got stale. Nice work on this.

Whew, this one is fast-paced! Maybe too fast-paced, actually - I moved so quickly the tiles appeared to be moving backward, and couldn’t even read what I assume were distance markers of some kind. Most of the time that wasn’t a problem, though once the floor-mounted enemies started showing it up it made it tricky to actually hit them (I’d fly right past them…!).

In other ways, though, I think the pace could stand to be increased. Enemies didn’t show up that often, and those that did were quickly dispatched by just shooting backward consistently. Maybe there could also be some kind of “ammo” system, to discourage that strategy. I think the floor-mounted enemies could also be introduced a little earlier, since as-is there were a few minutes of very similar gameplay (which I found pretty easy) before things started to change and become more challenging.

Here was my final score, not sure if it’s good or bad:

This was great! Just about the right length, I think, and the platformer handling felt nice and tight. I don’t know if it was just me, but I felt maybe the difficulty progression was a bit off; I found the last few levels a little easier than the few preceding them. The disparity wasn’t too large, though. Nice work!

Interesting mechanic, here. I got a little past the “good luck” message, then fell, and didn’t really feel like getting all the way back up again… the “foddian” concept, to be honest, is not my favorite conceit, because often I feel it doesn’t add much to the game beyond making failure especially devastating.

I enjoyed what I played before I fell, though. I might give the player a bit more air control, if that’s not too far away from the intent of the game - platformers without it I find can often feel a little awkward to play, since because it’s customary to provide higher air control, I tend to sometimes jump before reaching max speed, which doesn’t work well with controls like in this game. That might be somewhat up to preference, though. Good work overall!

I love all the different mechanics! The game was constantly introducing new things, and combining them with previous mechanics in interesting ways. I do somewhat agree with the other comment about the puzzles, though - sometimes the solution that ended up working for me didn’t feel all too “intended” or “correct”. The magnet I mostly just used in a straight path to effectively freeze a boomerang in place, as the curving behavior was too flexible to be able to satisfyingly plan a solution around. I’m not sure if that was the intended way to use the magnet, but it made the last few levels a lot easier.

I might also like to see more sound effects; a lot of the game felt a bit awkwardly silent. One for when boomerangs bounce would be a good start, I think.

Simple, but pretty fun! I enjoyed the extra mechanics added later on, but I think maybe they could’ve been introduced after the first level - playing multiple of essentially the same level in a row felt a little redundant. Nice work overall.

This was really fun! Very polished, and does the retro aesthetic properly. I liked the variation in both aesthetics and mechanics as I progressed up the tower (though, I think the bounce pad section maybe went on a little long - I might have preferred a few more block puzzle rooms instead of ~10 bounce pad ones). Maybe that sense of progression could be improved by giving the new areas new music tracks, as well, though of course given it’s a jam game it’s understandable there’s only one.

The boss was a fun way to wrap it up; though, I think it might be better if there were stronger feedback when you got hit. Right now, it just fades to black without ceremony, which maybe feels a little awkward.

Nice work on this! Had a good time playing through it.

Love this mechanic! It did a good job of disorienting me. Sometimes the places I needed to loop through were a bit awkwardly shaped, which occasionally made it feel like I was going somewhere I wasn’t supposed to, but for the most part it was fine.

I unfortunately wasn’t able to complete the game. I got stuck in a hallway and couldn’t figure out how to loop out of it, and when I finally tried to brute-force my way out, I got stuck in a wall (image attached, if it helps), which seemed to be the end of my run. Other than that, though, I had a good time with this!

This is really cool! The last level was a bit tricky. The UI looked nice and was responsive.

I did find the later levels a little confusing; the “Manual Impulse” node especially didn’t really make sense to me. It did indeed create a 1-beat offset if I attached it before attaching the main beat signal, but that didn’t logically connect in my head. In general, while the heavy constraints of this system do make for some challenging puzzles, they also make the system as a whole a lot less flexible - so, I think I would get quickly frustrated trying to make a drum beat with this outside of the context of a puzzle. I suppose it depends what your goal is making the game, though. Good job overall!

Whew, this one is intense! The ones that really got me were the “press when the button is <color>” ones - they often seemed to take forever to switch to the right color, and often the color would switch out under me while I was in the process of pressing the mouse button. My best score was 818. I probably would’ve lasted longer, but I got a couple “click 8 times” buttons in a row, which wasn’t really possible without a click speed I cannot reach…

Man, this ended way too soon! I really like this mechanic, but we’d only just gotten everything introduced, and I was looking forward to some trickier puzzles making use of what we’d learned. I’d love to see an expanded post-jam version of this, if you’re up for it. This was really well-made. I liked how smooth it felt to play, as opposed to some Sokoban-likes which just snap you between squares. Nice work on this!

This is one of my favorites I’ve played so far! There were some clever puzzles in the back half. I think I preferred the second rewind mechanic to the first one - the latter was quite timing-sensitive and I found it a bit finicky/stressful to use. The second mechanic let me take my time, which I liked. Great work on this!

Neat little puzzler. I’m not sure if there was an end point or not, because I was playing for a good while and the puzzles just kept coming (not really getting any easier or harder, or even introducing new animals at a certain point…), but I enjoyed my time with the game overall. I had trouble remembering the sizes wanted by each animal, and it was a bit frustrating having to figure those sizes out initially - sometimes process of elimination was enough, but a few times it felt like my only option was trial and error.

Interesting mechanic! I like the constraint it places on mouse movement, and the game gets nicely frantic. It did often feel, once I got sufficiently long, that it became near-impossible to lose that length without hitting the edge - and, sometimes I got forced into that situation if more slimes happened to be spawning on the side the mace was not on. My best was 508, which is probably not a very high score, but I found it to be a pretty difficult game!

This was awesome! Incredibly polished for a four-day project. I don’t think I even properly saw a lot of the detail put into the environment, given how fast-paced the gameplay is! The only snag I ran into was my car sometimes drifting in the opposite direction to what I wanted. That might have been down to the order I hit the keys in, though. I suspect the game probably feels a bit better on gamepad, so maybe I’ll try it with that at some point.

I was able to complete the first two races, but struggled with the third. I kept running out of fuel on the last lap. I was trying my best to avoid fuel pickups on earlier laps to leave them open, but the hitboxes are generous and the track is often thin… so, unfortunately, if there were more races after that one, I didn’t get to see them.

Neat game! It does a good job at conveying a sense of speed. You can move really fast in some sections. The one suggestion I have would be to add some kind of failure state; maybe a hazard of some kind? I actually thought the bounce pads were hazards at first - something about their placement in level 1 suggested that to me somehow. Level 3’s placements more clearly telegraphed to me what they actually were. I think that, because you can’t lose the game right now, a lot of it just turns into holding space and switching directions every now and then. Having some hazards could force you to occasionally slow down a bit and consider your positioning, which I think could make the game a bit more engaging.

Enjoyed this a lot! Cute pixel art, and a simple set of mechanics that’s explored pretty well. I do have a few critiques, if they might help:

• I never remembered the order of when the different types of lasers activated, so I had to start each level with a bit of a trial-and-error routine.
• Some levels felt like they probably had multiple solutions, or that parts of them were just “free”. Sometimes I’d end up in a wide open corner where almost any inputs would let me live.