itch.io

@kaliuresis I finally got around to trying version 2.0. Here's a recording of my playthrough:

The key points are:

- Put the levels in a logical order so the mechanics are introduced slowly to the player.

- Make sure when you're testing the player on a new mechanic that the level actually requires the player to understand the mechanic in order to beat the level.

- Introduce new mechanics and concepts as slow as absolutely possible. This game uses very complex spatial reasoning that will overwhelm most people if too many things are introduced at once.

- Add a zoom feature. This way the player can see the entire room at once and zoom out even further to better understand what sorts of patterns the links are creating.

The reverse-metroidvania idea is really neat. It creates a rising difficulty as you have fewer options to deal with the coming challenges and it creates a meta-puzzle where you have to decide which powerups to give up first to cripple you the least in future areas. It also serves replayability as the game is qualitatively different when you play the areas in a different order.

My main criticism is with the platforming mechanics. They felt very clunky, especially with the overzealous wall-cling that was constantly activating when I didn't want it to.

This was a neat idea that adds a fun new way to look at Poker. It was very tense when I went all-in on a hand and had to hope I didn't miss something and create a straight for an opponent without realizing it.

In my first attempt I went all-in on a flush looking to tie with another player, but I forgot about how the held card breaks the tie. So your hand-evaluation system seems to handle the edge-cases, but it did mean I let Jimmy get killed one time.

If you added the ability for opponents to fold, it would create a fun extra layer since you would have to make your opponents' hands look really good while still making Jimmy's hand win.

Nice work!

1. The left-side Golem Guy (and the entire level, in fact) is really just there to demonstrate the mechanics of air tunnels. Specifically that you will shoot right through a perpendicular air tunnel unless you have a backstop of some sort. It is important that the player learn this in an easy level so they can be sure they understand the mechanic before moving onto more complicated levels that use that mechanic again. We've been working on a post-jam version and in that version you actually do need both Golem Guys.
2. I am kicking myself for not realizing that sooner. That level went through several revisions and somehow neither of us figured out that was possible. The intended solution to the puzzle is to ferry Person Guy to both boxes so he can push them.
3. I believe what you're referring to is purely a visual bug. I've fixed it in the post-jam version.

Thanks for the feedback!

What a cool mechanic! Ever since I first learned how to play Minecraft, I've been strangely fascinated by the concept of discovering new crafting recipes by experimentation rather than by wiki page. The warmer-colder crafting hint system is really cool way to guide the player continuously toward the result rather than have it be complete guesswork. Once I figured out what was going on, I stopped referencing the guide you added at the bottom so I could discover for myself the recipes I hadn't memorized yet. I'm kind of wishing you hadn't put that there. I assume other people were getting confused?

I do have several complaints though:

• Recipes should not care where you place them on the grid. If I craft a health potion on the left side of the grid, it should work the same as if I put it in the middle. If this is an issue for the way the crafting hints system works, maybe you could make the hints only teach you how to make the centered potion, but still allow you to craft the potion in any orientation if you have the recipe memorized.
• When I saw the resistances/weaknesses graphic, I thought the up arrow meant "damage to this monster of this type will be increased". But it actually means that it has a resistance to that type. (Plus, it made sense to me than an electric fan should have a weakness to electricity, not a resistance.) Maybe use a shield icon to represent resistance instead of an up arrow.
• Instead of "39% fire rod", have the wording be "39% of a fire rod". I thought that message meant that it will function as a fire rod but only deal 39% of its normal damage or something.
• The enemy item slots are confusing. I have the resources to craft a large healing potion and a small healing potion, so I craft them both and send them as loot. But then the small potion replaces the large and overwrites it despite there being another open slot. Does each slot only carry certain types of items?
• Sending weapons as loot doesn't really make sense. The weapon won't be useful until the current enemy is defeated and you have no idea what weaknesses or resistances the next enemy will have. So having an enemy slot just for weapons seems especially pointless.
• My materials box kept getting filled with junk I didn't need when all I wanted was green blocks to craft health potions. Then when I did get a green block the box was so stuffed that I would get buggy behavior. I would grab two blocks at a time and that would cause one of the two blocks to be destroyed when I placed them. (On my winning run I got way more green than I needed. Maybe you could flatten the randomness a bit so you're guaranteed to get each block at least once every n dispenses.)
• The purple blocks were dirt useless since I never figured out what the glass potion does. On my winning run, I only ever kept one purple block in my materials box just so I could craft a lightning rod if I needed.

But even with all of those issues, I had a lot of fun with this! There were a lot of tense moments where I tried to craft something really fast in order to save my player. I just think that if the game was tutorialized a bit better and had fewer confusing UI design choices it might be easier to get into. Great work!

Lots of puzzling fun! I've seen a couple of board games with this premise of shifting rows and columns, but it's cool to see a puzzle game that uses it. I love the storybook artstyle. Great work!

Those were some very fun and clever puzzles! I liked all the different ways you had to use gravity with opposite-polarity blocks to transport your characters where you need to go. It created a fun feeling of instability and tension as you prepare to leap off towards the key. Level 12 was my favorite. It required good understanding of how to use the four players to work as platforms for each other. 

Here were my main gripes:

• All the levels after level 12 (except maybe the final level) are super easy. With levels 14 and 15, I just kept flipping gravity until the key fell where it needed to go.
• The push physics feel very clunky. You can't just tap the right arrow to inch the block a bit at a time since the block won't move at all until you've built a bit of speed. Then once it starts to move, it accelerates very quickly, requiring fast reaction time to cut off your movement before you push the block too hard and overshoot wherever you're trying to push it to.
• Level 7 was extremely tedious. Slowly stacking all those blocks without missing one took me many tries due to the wonky push physics constantly causing me to overshoot the pile (which I can't see because it's off the screen). Then when I finally stacked them all, I ended up doing this:

It happened to me twice, actually. There is no reason that level couldn't have had just three blocks.

But those issues aside, this was a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle game. Great work!

The second puzzle does not work for me. I have tried Chrome, Firefox, and the downloaded version. I see the gif on the itch.io page showing how to beat the level but when I make the same moves, I collide with the knife as it is moving to the next space.

It seems to be working for other people, though. If you can find a way for me to play the game properly, I will come back and re-review it.

The game seemed lacking in nuance at first. But once you start getting puzzles with solid blocks, more pieces than you need, and tiles that don't quite fit together how you'd like, you start getting some head-scratchers, especially with the last level. Nice work!

Fun little physics game. I enjoyed the ability to drag the stage downward and fling the player. For the last level, I was basically just trying to drag the exit to the player since I couldn't think of any other way to get the player there. I just wish the physics were more consistent so I don't constantly clip through walls.

If you turn your monitor upside-down, this becomes a regular platformer. The levels are fun and challenging though, especially the final level.

This game is very trial-and-error heavy since you have to remember the exact path the player took on the previous run. And that's on top of having to remember where you placed all your platforms. The main feature I would add is a line-trace that shows what your trajectory was on your previous jump. It got to the point where I was taking screenshots of the game just to remember everything.

The level that introduces jump pads was especially guesswork-heavy. There is really no way to judge where to place the platform since being even slightly off will cause you to not hit the jump pad dead on. I just had to try different heights until it worked.

But that aside, there were some fun levels in here. The last level required very clever problem-solving to get around all the obstacles. Nice work!

An interesting concept for a sandbox game. There isn't really enough here to sustain interest, but I wonder how you could expand on this to create a fun simulation game.

Here's my level. The AI kept getting getting lost and couldn't find the exit.

The upgrade mechanic is definitely what makes this game work. It was fun figuring out how to get towers to get the precise right number of kills to upgrade them without wasting any kills. Nice work!

Really cool puzzle mechanics that, in turn, created really cool puzzles. The last two puzzles had me scratching my head before I figured them out. Lots of great revelation moments.

My only (minor) complaint with the mechanics is that I never figured out how the game determines which block to swap to if you have two or more blocks in your radius. (This was a problem we had to figure out for our game, which has a similar mechanic.)

I had a fun time with this game. I just wish there were more puzzles. Great work!

This is like one of those kickstarter disasters where they get $300K in funding and they can't implement even the most basic of features.

At first, I wasn't sure whether the constant changing of the game mechanics was a good idea. After all, a good puzzle game is all about learning the mechanics and having later puzzles build on skills learned earlier. But I think you struck a good balance of changing the mechanics in interesting ways while not changing them too much that it feels like a different game on each level. Changing the fast forward button to affect mice instead of the players is technically a completely different mechanic, but it's similar enough that you can transfer your existing understanding. So it still works. And it all makes sense within the game's thematic context.

I had a really hard time on last level. I was able to get past the first three mice, but then I kept dying to the fourth one. I thought maybe I was missing something, but turned out I just had to be a little more precise with my timing.

Overall, this game was funny, clever, and challenging. Great work!

I am mildly upset that this isn't a licensed game about the 1960's rock band. But I played L.A. Woman in the background while writing this comment, and that'll have to do.

Fun WarioWare-esqe game. I never realized how versatile doors were until I beat a guy to death with my bare handles. I wasn't able to figure out the zimmer-frame granny race though. No matter how I tried, I just flopped around the left half of the screen. But overall, this was a funny game with a good number of minigames. Nice work!

I keep getting teased by puzzle games here. I play the first few levels and right when I'm getting invested in the mechanics and curious to see what else the game has in store, the game ends!

But I did enjoy what was there. The second and fourth levels had me stumped for a bit before I discovered how I could use the starting blocks to redirect the players.

A few notes:

- Put a grid pattern on the floor so it's easier to tell where exactly to place the spawn point relative to other game objects.

- It felt a bit arbitrary that I couldn't move the players around to certain parts of the level. I understand why from a puzzle design perspective, but it would be nice to have some permanent indicator.

- There was some buggy behavior when I placed the start block on top of a pushable block.

- The rotation direction of the blocks was hard to tell at a glance. I saw the dashed lines up top, but I think it would be better to have an arrow representing current direction and another for turn direction. Maybe something like this?

But overall, cool mechanics. I just wish there were more levels!

High Score: 93810

The constant switching of positions is not only an awesome mechanic, but a great way to create pacing. As you get closer to the enemies, their attacks get harder to dodge. It builds anticipation before you can get to the bottom row and unleash damage as fast as possible before you switch back! And there's also the fun scenario of being sandwiched between two enemies, so you have to dodge while also trying to get shots in on the guy on top.

My one complaint is that I wish the difficulty increased faster. It took quite a while before I started taking more damage than I was gaining in health.

This was a lot of fun and I think this has a lot of post-jam potential with new enemy types added. Great work!

This is definitely my favorite of the "platformer, but you rotate the stage" subgenre I've seen in this jam so far. There are some great levels that force you to think about how to reposition the ghosts while also making sure you don't rotate the stage in a way that sends you into some spikes. Levels 9 and 10 really force you to understand the game's mechanics. Those levels had me on my toes as I freeze the level just before smacking into a ghost whose movement I didn't consider properly.

A couple of notes:

- I think the stage rotating animation should have been a little bit faster.

- If you die while in freeze mode (which can happen if you rotate the stage while right next to a ghost), the game softlocks.

But other than that, this was a lot of fun with very simple mechanics! Great work!

A very satisfying game to play. My main criticism is that I never felt very in-control. I could place blocks, but I never found that any particular arrangement of blocks was significantly more likely to cause the random chaos to bounce the balls where I needed them to bounce. Basically, I was just aiming to hit a cluster of ball-multipliers and pray for the rest.

As for presentation, everything felt punchy and impactful. And I liked the coffee-monochrome look. Very polished-looking.

The graphics are very interesting to me. It looks like super-pixelated 3D with layered perlin noise terrain. The jumping physics felt very smooth. Nice work!

My strategy was to create a ring of sorcerers around the player and bodyblock him with goblins while he got shot from every angle. Though my run ended when the player got stuck on a pillar.

The picture-taking is a nice mechanic that made for some fun platforming puzzles. The last two puzzles took me a while to get, but it was super cool when it clicked.

The tutorial screen was completely unintelligible. It's a good thing you put the controls in the game description or else I wouldn't have figured anything out. The movement in camera mode feels very sluggish. It was annoying when I had to redo that section because I missed my jump.

Great work!

Fun puzzle game with a cool mechanic. But figuring out how the game actually worked was a real hurdle for me.

Having only colors to represent game objects (except for fire) makes it very difficult at first to tell what is what. I just had to guess the difference between green, light green, and purple.

It took me a long time (until the level with the 5x5 board and corruption in the middle) to notice that the numbers in the top left had to do with why my movement mechanics kept changing from level to level. Some tips to help that out without adding a tutorial would be to make the text pulse whenever you make a move/light a fire and make it turn red when it's exhausted for the turn. And having a move sound effect that drops in pitch with each subsequent move (and an error sound when you fail to move) would help even further.

It completely eluded me that "rounds until rain" was just another way of saying, "turns remaining". I thought it was a game mechanic where all my fires would be put out every n turns, so I could light fires right before a rain without worrying about them spreading. Having text on the "you lose" screen that explains why you lost could help with that.

I wish there were some tougher puzzles later in the game that required more turns and fighting out more than two sources of corruption at once. The game felt pretty easy.

But overall, I think this mechanic was used well in the puzzles it was in. Nice work!

Very original game concept! I think the levels were too long though. Each level could probably be cut in half and it would feel better.

I fell out of the level many times in the outer rooms of level 7. I assume it's because the stage moves faster and the physics engine can't keep up. Fun little physics puzzle game!

Aha! That is definitely the sort of thing I would have fixed during the jam if I'd noticed it. In the post-jam version, I'll extend the flag island by an extra tile to the right.

I normally dislike these sorts of grid-based strategy games especially when high amounts of RNG is involved, but this really drew me in! I think it's the min-maxer in me fist-pumping whenever I trade a d4 in for a double-damage d12 and run for the hills to protect it. The strategy elements seem simple at first, but the ability to protect large-dice units with other units while also considering how the dice might move around the board in the coming turns gives a lot to think about. Great work!

I wonder how this would play as a pvp board game. I might try that some time.

Come on, man! The moment I start to understand the mechanics and get excited for solving puzzles with them, the game ends! I think this is a really cool way to reverse the Cut the Rope mechanic while still leaving plenty of design space for puzzles. I just wish I had gotten to play those puzzles.

Adding sound effects and animations would go a long way to making this feel better to play. The dash just teleports you forward and the attack has no feedback except making the enemy disappear.

I'm not really sure what you mean by, "annoying trap". Could you please elaborate?

Thanks for playing!

Super satisfying and punchy! I love how the game encourages you to get close and circle your enemies by limiting your attack range, making the ducks attack one at a time, and forcing you to recollect deployed ducks.

The game feel is great. All the sound effects and animations make unleashing your swarm on three machine gunners feel like the perfect finale!

The music is great and really sells the revenge theme.

It was definitely too easy though. I think it's because of the hunters dropping bird cages. That mechanic makes it impossible to balance the difficulty since increasing up the number of enemies also increases your ability to build your swarm. In fact, the first level that really challenged me was the level with the one cage in the middle of four hunters. And the only difficult part was getting the first kill. Once I got that, I had enough ducks to swarm the rest with ease.

But that aside, this was a lot of fun. Great work!

Super satisfying and punchy! I love how the game encourages you to get close and circle your enemies by limiting your attack range, making the ducks attack one at a time, and forcing you to recollect deployed ducks.

The game feel is great. All the sound effects and animations make unleashing your swarm on three machine gunners feel like the perfect finale!

The music is great and really sells the revenge theme.

It was definitely too easy though. I think it's because of the hunters dropping bird cages. That mechanic makes it impossible to balance the difficulty since increasing up the number of enemies also increases your ability to build your swarm. In fact, the first level that really challenged me was the level with the one cage in the middle of four hunters. And the only difficult part was getting the first kill. Once I got that, I had enough ducks to swarm the rest with ease.

But that aside, this was a lot of fun. Great work!

I don't see any way to play or download the game.

Super tight action that requires quick thinking and clever routing. And super well-polished to boot! Great job!

This is the third "Flappy Bird, but..." game that I've seen from briefly scrolling through the random game screen, but this game took it in a clever direction. It's really more about the user trust mechanic, and Flappy Bird works well as a simple game to apply it to.

Minor interface-design thing: I read "Drag the opaque bird to control it." And so I did that. But then all of the other text (that I hadn't read yet) disappeared instantly.

Is there a reason the player needs to be holding left click the entire time? There really isn't a point in the game where you would want to not be dragging the bird. Constantly holding left click was starting to tire out my index finger.

It's too bad the game doesn't scale difficulty as you get further into the game. It works perfectly that when a Flappy Bird style game gets harder, the human player messes up more. But since you can't mess up, you end up losing confidence while the ghost bird is going through the pipe. I got to 90 before I figured the game wasn't going to get any harder and stopped.

When thinking of ways to expand the game, I came up with this game idea: You play a whitehat hacker who just hacked into someone's phone, but the vulnerability only let you control their touch screen. So you have to respond to their inputs to keep up the facade (and prevent them from getting their screen fixed), but it turns out they're doing evil things on their phone. So you have to decide whether to risk losing trust to prevent them from doing something bad in a Papers Please/Not For Broadcast type of moral choice game.

Anyway, this was a fun little game with a cool mechanic. Nice work!

Cute idea! I have to wonder which world is real. The square in the bottom world is the one that has collision, but it gets its collision from the top world. Feels like there is an opportunity for puzzles where you move blocks around in the top world to change where the reflection appears.

It's neat how each of the four animals has slightly different platforming physics and how that can be used to gate progress. I like the concept of carefully planning how to position the animals so they can help each other out, though I wish it had been used more to create more challenging levels. So I feel there was more potential in the level design and supporting mechanics, but I had fun overall. Nice work!