Actually pretty fun once you get the hang of it! Though interacting with stuff felt quite unresponsive at times, and it took me a while to be able to translate the requested ingredients into the ones on the belt. The cheese looks a bit like slices of pineapple, and the tomato and pepperoni are very visually similar. All of this made for an experience that was quite a bit less fun until I picked up the details.
also i agree with the person who said putting broccoli on pizza is heresy
I found the controls to be unintuitive, and the things on the screen difficult to react to, so it oftentimes felt like I didn't have meaningful control over the gameplay. A bit more time to react to things (via a more zoomed-out screen, or slower-moving entities), along with some kind of thing to help gain better intuition for movement, would likely make this much more enjoyable for me.
The need to rotate the mouse relative to the ball and the precision needed to actually make a shot unfortunately made it quite hard for me to get into this game. I second the comment that it would be better if there was an indicator showing where the ball would go.
Interesting narrative, though it's the type of narrative that kind of depends on the gameplay not being very fun. Certainly nice to see an idea of this sort being explored in the jam, though.
Thanks! Music and programming were two inspirations for this game, so it's cool that the vibe carried through. Given that the gameplay itself only needed one button, I didn't want to require the use of more buttons purely for menuing. so I just did what felt like the most natural thing for the interface there.
I wasn't specifically intending a BIOS vibe with the graphics, but I'm happy to see you liked it! The artstyle was mostly just chosen to be readable and easy to implement. The relatively retro-looking font was just the monospace font (so that it would be easy to reason about what text would and wouldn't fit on a single line) with the most readable brackets that I had easy access to.
Thanks for the feedback! The ability to directly retry a level is an interesting idea -- though as a survive-as-long-as-possible game with randomly generated levels, it wouldn't fit very neatly into the design unless there was a lives system or similar. Perhaps it could fit in some kind of separate practice mode, though that would probably be out of scope for the immediate post-voting patch. (Or maybe a separate, more distinctly puzzle-ish game altogether with curated levels and special mechanics.)
Still, the core issue that there's way too much downtime between failure and getting back to interesting gameplay has been pointed out by several people already, so that's a big takeaway for me.
The fundamental idea I started off with was spatial looping of some kind, which then gained inspiration from repeats in sheet music, loops in programming, and this game I remembered playing a long time ago to turn into its final form. Glad to see people liking the concept! Also happy to be repping Rust in this jam. :)
I was a bit concerned about even the slowest speed being too fast for people, but at the same time I didn't want to suffer through an even slower speed when playtesting. Based on what I see in the comments, perhaps I should have lowered the speed further. I'll be doing that in the post-voting update, I guess.
...Actually, having a pause at the start of each level could help too -- a larger pause for the slower speeds and no pause for the fastest.
The slower speeds weren't made for more experienced players, anyway -- the idea was to let you pick a speed that felt fun for you. Thanks for the data point and suggestion!
Rust + Macroquad is, ironically, the game development tool that I'm the least rusty with at the moment. I've been programming primarily in Rust for quite a while now. It's a pleasant language to use, especially with its convenient sum types, expression-oriented nature, and if-let/let-else for control flow!
Another person pointing out the long downtime between attempts! Seems like I should have considered that more -- I didn't realize when playing the game myself because the difference between screens 1 and 2-6 feels a lot smaller when you're plowing through on the highest speed.
It didn't even occur to me that some people would try to manually click an option instead of using the brush! I guess "[Input] to select an option" doesn't actually clarify which option would be selected. Hopefully "[Input] to select the highlighted option" would clear that up.
...Are people actually reading the in-game tutorial? If not, then I might want to add a short paragraph to the description summarizing the controls. And maybe some extra text in-game after the voting period is over.
Interesting, thanks for the feedback! I originally had ideas for dying as soon as it became impossible to clear a screen, but the logic for dying at screen end seemed easier for both coding and player understanding. The no-obstacle first screen was... well, it would still be nice to have it on a first-time playthrough for a given speed, but I suppose there could have been ways to skip directly to the more interesting stages after dying.
Post-voting, I'm planning to upload changes to address issues like these, just so the game can stand at its full potential. That's two things to start off that list!
Regardless of how good the concept itself was, I was aiming to present it in the strongest possible light I could. Glad to know I did well in that regard! Wasn't expecting compliments on the proportions of the overly long game window :P
Nice little game. I would have heavily preferred directly dragging the controls into the boxes instead of the current two-step process where we have to click the control to get a draggable copy.
A great experience, and creative use of liquids to add interesting time-pressure behaviour to corpses! Though a reset button could be nice, especially for people who want to minimize their use of cats. Or at least a way to skip the long game over screen, even though it can be entertaining to rack up a bunch of negative lives in that time.
A wonderful experience, though I didn't really feel that looping was an integral part of the game. Accessibility-wise (both in terms of keyboard hardware and just in general), maybe an option for controls to be toggle-based instead of hold-based could help. Managed to finish every level except the final one, due to my keyboard not supporting the big hold at the end.
It was surprisingly fun to dodge the sharks with their fast speeds and chaotic -- but predictable -- trajectories. Unfortunately I really didn't get much of a sense of "Loop" from this game -- the only distinguishing gameplay mechanic (screen warp) can basically be completely ignored for the most part.
The sound effects were nice, but the repetitive music loop dragged down the audio experience. (So one of the most prominent instances of something fitting the theme in this game was in a way that made the experience worse :( )
Cute touches with the fish's animation whenever you press a direction on the keyboard!
Speaking of keyboard, it took a bit to figure out how to get past the title screen. Something like "WASD/arrow keys to move, space/enter to select/pause" on the game page could be helpful.
Nice start! It feels a bit bad taking seemingly unavoidable "damage" from moving onto a red/blue orb for the first time -- I would prefer if they only had negative effects after you've already had a chance to cleanse them once. I made it to level 8 before I stopped being able to mash away the blue orbs fast enough.
