itch.io

Really good game, probably the best I've seen so far, particularly in terms of gameplay & usage of the theme. Using a fixed-width loop as movement has a very unique flavor to it that I haven't seen anywhere else in the jam (or even conceptualized before, really). The difficulty is on-point and the level designs are nicely varied. Took me 32:44.

The movement really is awesome, both the fixed-circle as I mentioned but also the fixed turning direction. It really means you have to learn how to properly orient the circle to go in a specific direction, and it's easy to get tripped up while working through the levels. It just feels good to get better at it.

I do have a couple of gripes.

- The waiting time is too high for me. Part of this is that the death animation is simply too long, but then add on top of that 4 seconds of waiting for most of the levels -- most of them I want to go straight up, and it takes about 4 seconds for the loop to spin around from pointing to the left to pointing straight up. For some levels, like level 6, I spent significantly more time waiting between lives than I did actually playing (I would usually die in ~2 seconds, compared to ~6 seconds of waiting).

- The camera movement screws me up, because it changes where your mouse is pointing. Now, to be fair, that could simply be considered part of the challenge, and if it's a legit part of what you want in the challenge, fair enough. I feel like the camera is too unpredictable, however, especially with how key collection works--it seems like it likes to focus on a key once you collect it? I thought levels 8, 9, and 10 should have no camera movement whatsoever, as they're small enough to fit on screen. (On level 5 this seems especially bad, but on the other hand it kind of encourages you to be more clever about when you start pressing the mouse, so maybe it is a good thing?)

- I think that the orbit animation should not be a circle spawning in and getting larger. This really makes it feel like you should be able to "catch" the thing as your orbit is spawning in, which is not the case. I knew intellectually that I was not able to catch it but I still just kept trying to do it anyways, particularly on level 10. This is of course partially probably just muscle memory from other games with orbit-y things, and so changing the animation might not make a difference, but I would at least give it a try, I think.

- I actually didn't realize the game had music until I started writing this comment... I think this is because the sound effects seemed plenty loud so I didn't bother to turn up the volume. I do think that, once I turn up the volume so that the music is audible, the sound effects are too loud, especially the "disconnect from orbit" sound.

Still, all told, this has to be the best game I've played so far, as it really is quite novel (at least to me) while having enough there to make for a satisfying set of levels. Fantastic job!

Really neat. I did find it a little frustrating that there was no way to remove something after placing it (I would even be happy to have it require additional money to do a remove), as I significantly slowed down my points as soon as I placed one spinner (bad choice on my part, to be sure).

It absolutely blew my mind when I saw I could move the machine itself side to side.

Pretty fun! There's something about a limited sequencer that is particularly fun to noodle around on. With no limitations it can be hard to decide where to start, but given a forced 8-step looping sequence it's a lot easier to just relax and do whatever.

I didn't really play around with the effects until the end but they're also super fun.

I didn't realize that the trash can guy did not, in fact, have the final sound I was missing and was instead just a gate to the end of the game, so I ended up having to clear everything before getting the last sound, which was kind of too bad (I was hoping to add each of the sounds one at a time until I found all of them). I guess the game could maybe benefit from a built-in way to go back to a loop you had after clearing it, but that might be taking it too seriously :P

I actually think this is awesome, as I personally always use the loop and never use the dash. So seeing the opposite also works makes me happy.

Thanks for playing!

Neat puzzle game. I do think the harder puzzles (9 & 10) have a bit of a "where do I even begin" vibe when you first open them, but you definitely start to feel the structure at least to some degree as you play them. That is, you start to discover more well-defined requirements than "somehow get all the stuff," e.g. on level 10 I eventually figured out I needed a route that let me go through at least some blue pipes, and that I therefore needed up to 2 blue lightnings.

I did have fun with the puzzles though. Solving them was quite satisfying.

This was fun. I'm pretty bad at dictation, especially rhythms, so this was a neat exercise. (I did have to play most of the clips more than once, however. :P)

Genuinely quite fun. It took me a while to figure out there were tooltips for the upgrades, so I never figured out what the Haggler upgrade I bought did (I never saw another one after buying one). I assume it must have been the one that added the Zs. :P

I think most of what I had to say has already been said, but I'll mention two things that IDK if other comments have said yet:

1) For the pearl UI, it would be really nice to see what it does when you unlock it, instead of having to navigate into another UI to even know what it does (and also unequip it there). Maybe when you obtain one it could also have an option, like "Equip now?" or "Keep current pearl."

2) It felt kind of bad to not have any marker for completing, e.g. the snail. It seems like each map marker should be checked off even if it doesn't award a pearl, as otherwise it's hard to know if I actually made progress or not.

I do have to applaud the variety of enemy mechanics I saw. Especially the Arba was fun.

I really like the theming with the level evolving over time and seeing it change. That's very cool. There's a lot of games I've seen that involve somehow repeating the same level, and having it actually evolve on a geologic-ish time scale is one of the most effective ones I've seen, as it both means the level does actually change, but also makes a lot of sense aesthetically & narratively.

I think it is a very bad idea to send the player back to the beginning with a time limit. We are already replaying a similar level many times simply due to the nature of the level design--being forced to re-replay those similar levels again and again to win is very tedious. (Although, I'm not against tedium per se. But I don't know if that's what you were going for).

The music is also awesome. 

Wow, the desert level was brutal. One particular note from me: that one screen with the three leaves, it was rather unclear (at least initially) that the expected timing (for when I should touch them) was something like middle, right, left--I would have expected them to all go at a similar rate, or to all be done at the same time, but instead it was a bit of a mixture of both.

The floatiness of the controls made some of the platforming very difficult. But, I have to imagine that's intentional, with the water drop theme. And I can definitely appreciate wrangling some floaty controls. It was definitely satisfying to win. :)

I did appreciate that the water droplet saying the fire level would be easy was on point. It was easy. So, it was nice to see the gameplay & the story line up in that way.

I thought the spider web object was very clever.

All in all, a pretty tough platformer but on-point. I think the hand-drawn style is pretty neat.

I think this game would really benefit from being able to restart on the screen that you lost on. It's not all that exciting to play through a bunch of levels you've already beaten, especially as the early levels are pretty simple & similar to each other.

I think there's enough meat in terms of the actual execution that re-trying a level would not get too boring too quickly. (That is, I could easily see myself failing a more-difficult level multiple times in a row, even if I was able to quickly restart it).

Besides that, I quite like this. It's like an action puzzle game that resembles a programming puzzle game, something I haven't quite seen before. And, always fun to see games written in Rust. :)

Pretty fun, especially for two hours! I didn't realize I could turn left and right at first.

Interesting. I could swear I had done all the actions from the tutorial. Perhaps I didn't end up collecting money or something? I think it's possible I completely failed to serve the first customer as I had somehow ended up with only 1 customer served that run.

This game, for the first few times I played it--very very stressful. I cannot keep anybody's orders straight for the life of me. This is unquestionably a skill issue, but it does mean my ability in this game probably caps out pretty quickly, if I try to purely memorize the customers' orders.

But then I realized something. I don't have to memorize them. I can just put the ticket for each customer right in front of them to keep track! And this helped tremendously. Although, I also switched to the post-jam version at the same time as I tried this strategy, but in any case it more than doubled my score instantly. (My high score is now $162.85).

Once playing with a real strategy, I think this game really starts to come together. I found that customers would often inexplicably leave even as I was about to give them their food, but that I often was able to re-use their meal for a future customer. It seems like if I could somehow prepare a bunch of coffee, soda, fruit, and soup ahead of time, I would be able to do better, as those steps take by far the longest. I suppose high level play must involve always scheduling something to be cooking on the soup machine, because if there's any downtime you've probably already lost a customer.

But the jank and frustration with the infernal customers seems to be the point. The fact that they throw their tickets randomly, making it possible to lose track of their orders before you even see them; that they seem to be absurdly impatient at times; that they won't let you just gently set down a tray, then the food on the tray, and will actively interrupt your attempts to do so--these things are all hilarious.

The sandbox nature of the game is also really effective. As I said, the only hope I had to even do decently at the game was to make use of the tools it gives me and actually place the tickets down in a meaningful place. I think you could develop additional strategies, such as organizing some food/utensils ahead of time so that they were easily accessible. (I found that most of the time when I tried to organize food ahead of time, I would end up with a stack of objects where trying to pick anything up sent everything else flying and it may have cost more time than it saved).

I think the music in the post jam version really does a lot. It is cheerful enough to make it feel, like, not my fault that I am so bad. :)

I do think that the way the food slides along the tray is a bit weird. It seems like the tray will try to snap it back to where it should be, but that it still lags behind? This definitely makes it feel more precarious than it perhaps should be... like, it seems like the game wants me to not just drop my food, because it does snap it to the tray, but then the snap is done in this weird way.

One possible (?) bug I found in the non-post-jam version (no idea about post-jam): on the first run, literally every customer ordered "soda burger." I thought this was actually intentional--that it would be like this in every run, that no customer would ever order anything else. Seemed like a pretty funny joke--you make an entire functional restaurant for the jam but then make the customers only ever order 1 of the 18 possible two-item combos. Having seen customers order other things, it seems this was likely a bug. Or just a very unlikely coincidence.

In terms of orders, there is an interesting luck-based element. In particular, any order with 2 of the items requiring the soup machine will necessarily take substantially longer than any order with only 1 soup machine item, and the orders with only burger/salad are very very fast comparatively. Based on looking at the code, it appears each of the 6 items is just chosen purely randomly, so for the most part the soup machine items should be pretty common due to being 4/6 of the items. But in theory, a very lucky run could get many burger/burger combinations and possibly have an outright unbeatable score without the same luck.

As such, I think a possible additional strategic element would be to service any of the faster orders first. This means at the very least you are getting the orders you can finish done very quickly. Although, I guess I am curious if you have found it possible to serve every customer on time in your runs.

The 3D assets look good, and the in-game buttons are a fun way to interact. I'm pretty sure this game would go very hard in VR--it feels a lot like a VR game with its focus on grabbing physics-based objects and with the in-game huge buttons you have to push.

Overall, definitely a hectic game, but quite funny & enjoyable, especially the post-jam version.

Very neat game. The thing I liked about it most was the variety--both in the number of fish, but also in level design, including the different ways oxygen was sourced, and the different settings themselves.

Level 2 feels legitimately scary, partially because of the music but also because there is only one tiny oxygen source for exploring the whole area. It feels intense because every scan is somewhat slow and so you have to take it quite slow, often getting more oxygen after scanning a single fish. (Which does make it tedious, but I imagine that's the point?)

Level 3, on the other hand, feels more upbeat and joyous like its music suggests, as oxygen is plentiful and it is easier to navigate. There's also more clustered fish / kelp which makes scanning more fun as you can get multiple done with one scan.

I did find a number of points of confusion while playing.

• It took me a while to figure out how to actually end level 1. Going to the location marker itself did nothing, while I couldn't seem to find my way into the tube. Eventually I managed to get myself off the ground far enough that I could actually get into the tube, but it wasn't obvious that that was where I was supposed to go. I think putting the location marker at the end of the tube rather than at the front would go a long way for clarity.
• In level 2 I would sometimes see some kind of damage markers (?) appear, but I have no idea why. They always appeared when I was generally full on oxygen. My best guess is that it's cause I ran into the lionfish? But I'm not sure.
• I couldn't find "Fish name" in level 3. I had read the itch.io description multiple times before I finally realized that by "Rock Coral" doesn't appear correctly in the progress menu" you really mean "Rock Coral appears as "Fish name" in the progress menu." I think saying that in the bug description would be very helpful. Part of the problem is that one of the rock corals in the level simply refused to scan at all, so I might have thought they were unscannable.
• It's not clear what the "MAIN MISSION" button on the pause menu is supposed to do.

As a nitpick, I feel like making me breath manually while above the water in Level 3 didn't make sense. 

I think the core concept of forcing multitasking is always a fun one. I definitely did not get particularly good at the multitasking by the end of the game, and so it's always interesting just how hard it can be. I found I often mixed up left and right click... I would be trying to release the scanner but accidentally stop breathing, or be trying to stop breathing but accidentally release the scanner, etc etc. So it's interesting because I would argue the scanner button specifically does more as an additional point of confusion than as a particularly compelling player input on its own, which is kinda neat.

Overall, even if there are some rough edges, this is a very impressive entry for the jam. The sheer variety of content is enough to make it fun--simply exploring these different environments with different vibes is engaging. Great job!

As usual the polish is off the charts. The background music is an absolute banger. The game looks great too, everything seems great from the color scheme to the pixel art to the shader effects.

This game is quite fun too! I've played it three times while trying to put together my thoughts for this and it's always a good time. This is despite there being somewhat little variety in what you can actually do--by the end of the game, it seems like you might as well always have all the upgrades, and in the early game you can only afford a few certain ones anyway (unless you save your money). So I think the path I take through the game never feels too different, but it's fun nonetheless.

My one complaint with the game is that throwing the ball simply does not work. This is because, at least on the browser page, if I ever release my mouse outside of the window, the game doesn't notice. So then when I drag my mouse back into the window, I'm still holding the ball, and my mouse is not pressed, so to even release it I have to press the button a second time. This feels very bad. It means if I do want to try to throw the ball, I have to, like, stop my mouse slightly before leaving the window, and this often either kills all the ball's momentum so it doesn't kill anything, or I overshoot the window anyway and so just don't manage to throw it.

I'm not sure why exactly this is happening? I have seen issues like this with signals in Godot before, and especially with like mouse_entered/mouse_exited signals, but I can't think of a mouse click signal that might behave the same way. I did try testing both polling Input.get_mouse_button_pressed() and checking for InputEventMouseButton in _input, and both of those methods seem to detect mouse unpress events correctly, even on an itch.io page. So I don't know what could be causing the issue.

I will say, the one other thing is I really would appreciate a fullscreen button. This probably (?) would have at least helped with the mouse issues, and it would also make the game less tiny on my screen. I can zoom in on the itch page in Chrome, but this seems kinda silly. (I think you can just add a fullscreen button to the itch page and it will probably work?)

Still, the game is very playable by just holding the ball constantly and swinging it around. It's actually pretty cool that the game has this physics-based approach to the gameplay--you can just do whatever you want, as long as it manages to smush the guys somehow.

I think the fact that your upgrades are listed in GiB is very funny. The idea of installing over 200 GiB worth of a single antivirus program is hilarious. (Although, I guess the fact that it managed to recover around a terabyte of space on our hard drive makes it a good trade).

So at least personally I do think it is pretty okay to have highly random or frustrating game components,  and I think they are effective in this case! Making a filibuster be annoying because, well, filibustering is annoying, makes a lot of sense to me.

The main thing that I personally am looking for in games is a certain sort of clarity, I suppose--what are the game elements trying to do or say? In this case, the message is, at least to me, unclear--it seems like the Mutualist party is just doomed to fail, which is a fine message, but the game mechanics don't make that message particularly clear (or any other message).

Still, I think an important thing to note is part of the lack of clarity may be due to bugs! I'm pretty sure I never saw a single vote change in any filibuster I did, despite playing through the game twice. Of course, I was not always paying attention to the screen, so I could have missed it. But I'm pretty sure at least in my first playthrough I did watch quite closely and nothing ever happened.

I think that having typing as an input system for a rhythm game is super fun, and it works decently well here.

It was, however, unclear to me if I was supposed to be pressing the note only for a tiny blip of a section or if I was supposed to hold them down. Holding them down sounded way better so I assumed that's what the game wanted, but it doesn't seem to say anywhere.

It was also always impossible to know what the next node would be on the first page (although, given there's only one song, it should be possible to memorize them, I suppose). This is kind of neat as it does match how sheet music actually works, but it also doesn't necessarily make sense as, although our in-universe character would have practiced the music and so would have either memorized the first notes or written them down or used some other technique to know them, we as the player do not actually have access to the ability to know them ahead of time. So it is actually somewhat out of character to not give us direct access to the note data without us needing to memorize it, if that makes any sense.

I also feel like I may have experienced some keyboard ghosting issues or something? Or I might be thinking of the times when I had to switch between shifted notes and non-shifted notes. It's not really possible to play "legato" when going from one to the other, because shift determines which note it is, so you have to be holding it exactly for the notes that need it.

The one other small complaint I have about the interface is that there really isn't any visual feedback--I can't tell if I hit the notes on time or not. I suppose this is, as always with rhythm games, at least in part a skill issue--if I trusted in my ears, I would simply be able to tell audibly whether I played the notes correctly!

One thing I really liked was the way the conductor would look at us to signal that the play/don't play signal was about to change. That was really cool.

I did manage to do pretty well on my second attempt and I think I had fun! It is quite satisfying to execute the notes correctly, partially I think because of the keyboard interface. Playing chords is especially fun.

Good job!

Super fun, tightly executed. I love the art style of this game, it has a certain impeccable vibe. 

It did take me like 6 or 7 wins of the first level (actually apparently the second level) to realize that the right pointing arrow was a button I could push, and not something else. I do think the text-less interface is a strong point of the game, so I'm not sure exactly how this could be made clearer... maybe with a new first level where we just drop the pin, with the continue button and no reset button available?

I thought it was funny that this didn't count as victory.

It did seem like in the dice level the die fell slightly to the right of where it was visually while the hand was pinched.

One thing I like about this game is it got me trying to find a straightedge to line things up. I always love it when games motivate me to pick up physical objects and interact in interesting ways like that.

Edit: Somehow editing this like 5 times made itch stop showing this paragraph as a caption. Hooray!

So, I'm really not sure how to actually win this game (but maybe that's the point?)

It seems like it is absolutely impossible to get any of the Mutualist bills passed. Every time I filibustered, not a single vote changed. I suppose this means that you could simply filibuster the first bill every day and at least then none of the Federalist bills would be passed, but it doesn't seem very possible to get any of the Mutualist ones passed.

The one Mutualist bill that I thought I did get passed, something about making stealing car parts legal again (which I thought was compatible with our "subsidized auto repair" being good) ended up also being a Federalist bill. (Although maybe it had said "illegal"? I can't remember now).

I tried a second playthrough where I filibustered every bill, and even that didn't let me save enough reputation to win--one of the days I had to miss one of the tasks in order to get to the vote on time, and so I ended up with 0 reputation.

So I'm not sure what the message is here. I think maybe the difficulty in winning is supposed to mean something... like, for example, if filibustering everything was the only way to get re-elected, the game would be saying something like "voters only care about filibustering, not about actually pushing for change" or something. But even that strategy doesn't win, so the lesson seems to be... the Mutualist party always loses...? I'm not sure.

Two other notes:

1. I found the font somewhat hard to read. I could never tell that 2s were 2s or 5s were 5s.

2. Having to hold the filibuster button is something I both really like and find annoying. It is annoying because holding down a button for a very long time is just physically annoying to do (and there are also accessibility problems with that). But, on the other hand, it definitely encapsulates the idea that standing there filibustering is annoying and exhausting. So it is definitely on point.

I do think this game is effective at communicating political concepts through gameplay! It does feel like I, as the senator, am forced to filibuster every bill to have even a chance at re-election, and it feels funny that the voters also seem to care whether I am able to boot up my computer every day, but that they don't care at all about all the dang Federalists who are actually voting for all the unpopular bills. So I definitely feel like the game is really saying something to me, but I just can't quite tell exactly what,  due to the way it ends up playing out at the end.

Hmm. Having participated in 34 jams, I think if a jam wanted the theme to be a central point, they would say so. I didn't even realize this jam had a theme until someone else pointed it out to me--it simply was not at all obvious on the jam page. (You might say--how could I miss it? And the answer is I didn't notice the tiny text "THEME" at the top, I was distracted by the huge theme image which I thought was just a funny graphic with no particular significance).

Like, take the Godot Wild Jam for example--they simply say the theme is required. So if a jam wants the theme to be required, they would say so! It takes only four words: "The theme is required." I even checked this on the jam page specifically before committing to working on my project for the jam. And even then, if the theme was required for this jam, I would probably have done one of the following two things:

1. Simply not submitted, which seems like a loss for everyone. There was no way I was going to make anything besides this specific project during that weekend. Even if my game is silly, I think I still contribute to the jam in ways such as leaving comments on people's games. I also think that the very act of making something within the same timeframe as other people is a pretty worthwhile effort on its own.

2. Submitted anyway, and made up a tenuous connection to the theme. I think this is the better option. But then the question becomes why we're doing this song and dance where I make up a connection at all. Who is my nonsense theme connection for anyway?

And so, as a result of both of these options seeming kind of unnecessarily obtuse, I tend to just not actually worry too much about following the theme. What is actually the point of caring about this, you know? What does it do for anyone?

And my attitude is partially because when I do put in real effort to use the theme, people often still comment that they don't see the relationship my game has to the theme--because it's very easy to be inspired by a theme to create something that has no direct connection! That's what brainstorming is all about! In these cases I can always explain exactly how the theme lead to my idea, but apparently that's not sufficient...?

I've also seem jam hosts get confused by some jammers focusing way more on forcing a connection to an optional theme than on making something they actually wanted to make. I kinda think there must be some like, widespread belief that the theme is suuuuuuper important to jams, that overrides people's ability to ignore even an explicitly stated to be optional theme, and I think that's just overall kind of harmful to game jams. I would much rather see stuff that people really wanted to make, in any game jam I participate in, than stuff that definitely relates to the theme, and it's even worse to see people so focused on following the theme that they don't even take the time to realize that it's optional. And so I tend to try to push the opposite view--rather than being too concerned about an optional theme, as some jammers can be, I want to intentionally be cavalier about less-optional themes, to help maybe push the general culture of jams less towards being so focused on themes, at least a little bit.

Now obviously game jam rules are important. I don't think it makes any sense to submit a photorealistic 3D game to a pixel art jam. But specifically themes are already so vague and abstract, and can be so tenuously related to games, that I don't think enforcing a theme even really makes sense in the first place. This, combined with what I see as a culture around game jam themes that is more harmful to creativity than helpful, and I find that overall I will always just make whatever I want to for a game jam, regardless of how it relates to the theme. If I can submit a game that seems to explicitly disregard a rule relating to a theme, I honestly kind of consider that a good thing. I want to see what happens, you know? Jams are always free to disqualify my entries! But they never have.

And, I think that's because fundamentally: if you made a good faith effort at a project for a game jam, of course that jam doesn't want to disqualify it! They want people to make cool stuff for their jam, and rules are squishy. And so making cool stuff is really all I ever set out to do.

Man I did not realize how bad I am at my times tables these days (and some other basic arithmetic...)

I think my favorite moments in this game were when it got really intense and I had to clutch an answer in a small number of seconds. This did make it somewhat frustrating to replay the rest of the game to get back to that point. This is for two reasons: 1), the rest of the game is not too hard, so it is less engaging, and 2) all the players come back to life, making it take much longer between when you get to actually do something. I was always hoping some players would die early--not so that I could win, but so that I could stay more focused on the game, sorta.

Still, I did actually lose relatively often during the "long time period" part of the game, so I think it was an important part of the difficulty. It forces you to hold on through a somewhat grueling section and then gets really tense, and this does hammer home the tension for sure. You really don't want to lose your progress once you get into the endgame.

The use of arithmetic as the actual challenge is very effective, I think. Arithmetic is something I do sorta know, but not perfectly, and it is also a skill I do use in my day-to-day life, so it is sort of the perfect thing to ask me to do under time pressure as a game. I suppose "timed arithmetic challenge" is a somewhat common kind of math game, but as I said, this one really does hammer home the tension, which I think makes it decently unique. It makes it really very satisfying when you just intuit the correct answer under the time pressure and live, and then it makes you feel like an absolute fool when you think you knew it and instead see your guy explode. I love it.

A rhythm game centered entirely on holding keys is, I think, new to me and definitely fits the theme very well! The fundamental ding-ding-ding-PRESS pattern is also quite fun!

I definitely think that it feels a bit idle during the times when you hold the key for a long period of time. Usually in a rhythm game, you aren't necessarily doing something all the time, but you are usually doing stuff at least at a pretty decent pace.

It's actually pretty hard (at least for me--and this could be skill issue) to feel the rhythm in this game, and I think that's partially due to these long sections, but also partially due to one other factor: the ding-ding-ding before each action we do is very prominent, and it's somewhat difficult to feel the rhythm of the rest of the track with respect to the actions we're taking due to how prominent they are.

So one thing you could try is to turn off the ding sounds, and see how it feels to try to feel the rhythm based on the musical elements that are in the track. I guess you still probably want some sort of audio cue, but I do think that would help make the times in the track where there are no dings for seconds on end feel more integrated with the parts where we do the taps.

The other thing to try would be to make the game more active. If we had to do things more often, I think the game would be a lot more engaging and, at least for me, more fun. I think that there really is something cool about having to time when you release a key, as it's not something I think about a lot when playing games but it is something I think about all the time when designing them. Focusing in on that aspect of the keypress is interesting to me! And I think having it happen more often would make it more fun.

And to be sure I am not a speed maximalist when it comes to rhythm games. I am definitely more interested in unique rhythms (e.g. triplets / other polyrhythms, weird time signatures, etc) than pure speed, and I think those kinds of things would work here too! If I'm not wrong, there was already at least some variety with where the beats landed that we had to do, and I think those mixups were fun! And I think even more like that would be great too.

As one final note: very good job making a complete, polished product. Despite my gripes with the gameplay, everything works, all the art is there and looks awesome, and the music sounds great. 

So I think the most confusing thing about this game is that it's not obvious what the different block types do. When I first started the game, I saw I had "magnet" blocks, and I assumed they should pull towards either each other or other blocks (just based on my intuition about what "magnet" might mean). But instead when I dropped them it seemed like everything flew off the platform, which felt so intuitive that I thought it was a bug.

It wasn't until much later that I learned magnets are attracted to the metal blocks and repel magnetic blocks. And now finally the behavior made sense!

I think it would probably be a good idea to make each block look visually distinct based on what type it had. This would serve two purposes: First, it would help with the issue I mentioned, as if I saw that the magnet blocks appeared to specifically be repelling other magnet blocks, I may have had a better intuition for what was happening. Second: As the game gets more complex, it becomes difficult to keep track of which blocks are which for everything you've already dropped. Making block types have unique sprites would help with that.

Once I did start understanding what the different types do, I have to say, I think they're pretty cool! Having these various physics-based elements, combined with like, deckbuilding elements, is a pretty neat combo! I like, for example, the mushroom blocks, which seem decently strong. I also kinda like the interplay between metal and magnet, although I think that magnet blocks are kind of bad due to how they repel... if you get two magnets right after each other while stacking, the best strategy might be to just dump one to the side...?

It does seem like the blocks you earn on one run carry on to the next--which is a good thing, because otherwise I think level 2 might actually be impossible. With only ~6 blocks if your blocks didn't carry over, I'm really not sure how you would get as high as it wants you to.

So right now, with the blocks carrying over, the game is in a weird superposition of like, idle game, roguelike, deckbuilder where you have to repeatedly get through level 1 and then die on level 2 to get your deck good enough to beat level 2 (because you keep adding blocks every time you pass level 1). I'm not sure if this is what you were going  for but it is actually a kind of satisfying loop.

The art and music are also quite nice!

So I am generally a fan of programming games, having written a number of them before. I definitely appreciated the writing in this game, with the various acronyms and names and URLs, they all contribute solidly to the tone of the terminal filled with tools.

As far as the gameplay goes, though, I couldn't tell if I was making meaningful progress or mostly running into bugs. Some examples:

- Level 1, I can pick up the Normal-blue-Nothing, then pick up the blue-stone, and then picking up the pink-stone fails, and then I can just "next" to win the level, even though the task was apparently expecting the blue-stone to fail. Also, playing through it again to review what happened, it looks like if you keep dropping the stones you get additional dialog that I hadn't seen before.

- Level 2 I imagine was just cut due to time?

- Level 3, once Tibbles escapes, if I just try to do "hold Tibbles" it fails. It appears that if I hold something else indoor, then switch back to Nothing indoor, and then just do "hold Tibbles" again it works. I really don't have a sense of why this made holding Tibbles work--I didn't move the robot to the yard, Tibbles was still listed as (yard), but apparently I somehow managed to succeed...?

So the main feeling I get from the levels is that I mostly don't actually know what works or why. Which is fine, but it doesn't match the normal rigidity I would expect from a programming related game (as computers are nothing if not predictable... although robots are certainly not the same).

I get the feeling that the inconsistencies here are part of the story of the game, and the original intention was that we will eventually figure out what is wrong with the sensors or at least move in that direction? And if so, that definitely explains it! I think the game does a very decent job of building a sense of mystery, both with how the itch page itself is laid out and with how the initial messages we receive are mentioning things going awry but that they don't know why, etc, etc. In that case what the game really needs is just, I guess, more of the story, which is obviously difficult or impossible to due in the game jam timeframe.

So that was how the game played out for me. But I do want to emphasize that I really do like the vibes! The terminal is nicely done and the writing of all the in-game tool text / help menus / etc is very on-point. I thinkt he sound and music work effectively here too. Running commands to get stuff done can be surprisingly fun, especially if you can capture that feeling of banging your head against the wall until eventually things just work. Good job!

My understanding is that for most game jams (including this one?) the theme is a solution to writer's block--something to help you come up with an idea for a game if you don't have anything yet.

I already knew (vaguely) what I wanted to make for this event, so I didn't really see any value in following the theme. So, my game probably doesn't fit the theme at all!

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for playing!

This game was one of the only games I have ever made for a 24 hour game jam while seriously trying to make something decent, and I am quite happy with it with respect to that. I also haven't really considered coming back to it and changing it much for the same reason--although I wouldn't say I will definitely never come back to it, it's pretty low on my list of priorities.

I do appreciate the suggestions, though! I think they all are pretty sensible.

To be honest, I don't remember what the intention was with respect to white blocks. When I've revisited this game I definitely feel like the ability to overflow them makes it a little too easy, perhaps, but I am pretty sure it was on purpose.

But, I'm very glad to hear positive feedback on this project! Thank you for the comment!