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A jam submission

Cubenomics - A Cube and Ball Puzzle GameView game page

Line rider meets puzzle. Draw lines to guide the ball around a cube using gravity and puzzle mechanics.
Submitted by Narwaffles (@narwa_rp) — 2 days, 10 hours before the deadline
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Cubenomics - A Cube and Ball Puzzle Game's itch.io page

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Super cool idea for a puzzle game! The menus look real top notch too. 

This feels like it was made for a tablet so some of my issues with the interface might have to do with that. It would be nice if deleting drawn sections could be done with the right mouse instead of having to toggle between the two mods. I ran into a bug where individual dots spawned from clicking the mouse button down could not be deleted. I might have missed the reset button but one of those would be nice if it doesn't exist.

I also ran into some frustration with the physics. It felt like a lot of my time was spent tweaking a solution to work with with physics after I had figured out the answer. Giving the ball a little extra force as it comes out might go a long way in helping with that.

Turning the cube with the arrow keys also felt a little awkward. It would be nice if the cube could just be rotated with the mouse.

 Looking forward to seeing how this turns out!

Developer

Thanks for the feedback. The menus were made using a purchased unity asset called Shift. I started it off with a mobile version in mind but thats been scrapped for now. The dot issue you mentioned has been fixed and a reset button has also been added into the game. I used your feedback for fixing some of the physics of the game and now the ball gets a little kick after rotating around a face, hopefully less time is needed now to draw out the solution once it has been found. The cube can be rotated using the mouse if you do a swipe action with the mouse on the bottom third of the screen while holding left click, and the game now also let you rotate the cube with the right click free rotate function once you let it go instead reverting to its original face. 

Submitted(+1)

I beat the intro sector. This game is surprisingly fun and very well done. I really like the puzzles and objects in the puzzles and finding the solutions for each stage is fun. The only thing that is negative is it is a bit confusing in the beginning with camera controls and the dark faces of the cube. Great work though, I think you have a good thing here and you could expand on it by adding skins or something. Do you intend on releasing it soon? What are you planning on adding next to this game? 

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback. I'm glad you enjoyed it, I added in a tutorial which is still a wip but should help out with the confusion at the start. I might add in skins in the future but my focus is on the core gameplay and bug fixes for now. I plan to release it some point this year, I originally planned for a late september release but now I'm not so sure if I can't complete it by then. For now I plan to add in more levels and two more mechanics, and my goal is to have a total of 100 levels. 20 for each sector.

Submitted

Sounds great! I'll play your new build soon :)

(+1)

Played through most of the game. Skipped some levels here and there.

This is an interesting game, it combines puzzle solving with dexterity, which I suffered a bit since I cannot draw a straight line with the mouse to save my life. 

I like how the main menu background changes depending on which world you choose. 

The levels are very interesting and I and the mechanics were introduced properly. Levels could use a "retry" button. Spamming the undo key until everything is empty works but it is cumbersome.

I had issues with controls like the other posters already mentioned. I will add that having to always click the cube to start drawing is annoying when trying to start a line from the border of a side so it matches a line from the other side. 

I know the game is in early development, but the physics in general feel broken, specially with the top face and rotation. Many times I watched the ball having certain motion and switch directions entirely once it switches to a different face. Take for example temp name 7 of desert sector. If you don't add any lines, the ball goes straight down, touches a booster, goes to the top and in a straight line reaches the opposite face where there is another booster. You would expect the ball to return in the exact same direction, forming an infinite loop. Instead it makes a sharp turn and goes to a completely different face. Other instances were the ball slowly moving to a side from the top, the camera switched and it started to go in the opposite direction.

Sometimes drawing a line changes how the simulation plays out in places that don't seem to make sense. Like having the ball land perfectly on a slope and after adding an unconnected line somewhere the ball now bounces.

When pressing multiple times a spin key, the cube will start spinning in the opposite direction, I believe because it tries to latch to the right face index. This is annoying when spamming a key to quickly visualize the entire cube.

Clicking the restart button while the cube is spinning in the test sector breaks stuff.

It was fun, but a bit frustrating at times. It is a real good start and I hope you will be able to develope this game further.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback. I'm hoping to remove as much of the dexterity part of the game as possible but due to the nature of physics puzzlers I doubt it's impossible to remove entirely. I've added in a wipe cube button which should act as a "retry" button by clearing the cube of all lines. I have managed to fix up most of the physics and the game should now act in a more determinate way, I never really paid much attention to this part of the game so I appreciate the feedback as I didn't notice it until you and a few others pointed it out. The ball now does go back and forth on the level you mentioned although it doesn't do so infinitely so it still needs a bit of work but now goes back and forth exactly 6 times before breaking out of the loop every time. The issue of strange ball movement in both instances you mentioned were caused by the cube pushing on the ball during rotation, silly physics mistake that I never considered, and should now be mostly fixed. The cube rotation with the spin key changing directions is caused by the game trying to move the cube in the shortest direction to the destination. I'll look into fixing this. 

Submitted(+1)

Hey Narwaffles, I played you game in two sittings on Wednesday, and Thursday.

I like puzzle games, but I am not a big fun of physics puzzle games, so I found that about 15 puzzles in one sitting was enough for me.

I like the mechanics, and the idea behind the game. Gradual introduction of new mechanics is good.

Some people already left some good feedback, so I am going to try not to repeat that.

Often times I found myself struggling with drawing the lines I imagined in my head to work, rather than coming up with solutions. I would like to see some line editing tool in future, things like the basic move translation tool so I can just move already placed lines instead of deleting, and redrawing them.

If I accidentally placed a small dot, then deleting them did not work. I know there is an undo button, but something like a box selection tool, and then pressing delete would be better.

I did not like how not making any adjustments to lines, and running the simulation multiple times would give different results. What I mean by that is sometimes the ball would act differently even if I made no changes. I don't know if it's just the way physics work in the engine, or maybe you don't reset balls' velocity or something, so I do not know if it something that can be fixed, or not.

I enjoyed coming up with weird solutions to your puzzles, often times skipping many things. I think "breaking the beta" is the fun way to play.

There were few times when the ball would hit the end hole green area, and it would count towards the end of the puzzle, but the ball would not go in the hole. There was also another time when the ball kept bouncing inside the green area without getting in the hole, but it would not count towards the solution.

Sometimes it felt more like a drawing challenge, than a puzzle, but I think if you add more tools for line editing mentioned above it is going to get better.

About the new test mechanic:

The cube face rotation is creative, but it is already hard to match line height on different faces even without them rotating. I think maybe rotating the whole cube instead of just the individual side would be better.

I did not do the "lights out". I know how it works, but I dislike it, and I don't think it would be a good addition to the game.

Developer

Thanks for the feedback. I managed to fix a few of the critiques you left and I appreciate them as they were very helpful. The dot issue is now fixed by auto deleting the line if there isn't at least two points in the line. The exit and line tools are something I am still working on, but the non-deterministic issue has been mostly fixed. Unless there is some unknown but most the issues that caused the ball to act differently on different runs of the game has been fixed, I never noticed this until you gave your response so I really appreciate you pointing this out. (Sorry for not responding until the next DD I kinda forgot I haven't replied to some comments as I don't visit itch too often) I took your suggestion about the face rotation and changed it to rotate the whole cube. Turns out this was a much more challenging and interesting mechanic and I now prefer this over the face rotation, and uses the whole cube instead of just ignoring the bottom face like every other level does. There aren't very many levels with this mechanic in the game yet but I have put in two in the DD45 demo in the test sector.

Submitted(+1)

I honestly really struggled with the controls, especially as the number of faces and the complexity of the puzzles grew. some stuff I found myself wishing for was:

- using the scroll wheel to adjust the field of view

- as others mentioned, snapping to the face that's currently being viewed when changing the camera angle

- a "lock" button that doesn't change the camera angle once you let go of the cube

- generally faster/snappier animations on face change

- some way of showing the whole cube at a glance, like pic related

I liked the concept and, from what I've seen, the puzzles put its potential to good use; in particular you've done a good job of introducing and easing the player into new game elements and tougher puzzles. For this reason I feel like that it's worth focusing development efforts on stuff that complements the puzzles before adding more levels.  Good controls are especially important, because the period of time the user takes to input the solution he thought about is essentially downtime between the two fun parts of a puzzle game, thinking and winning, so you want to minimize that.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback. I actually start the design of the levels by drawing a flattened cube on a piece of paper so I'm shocked myself that I didn't think of adding that in. I'll be keeping what you said to heart and continue development in a different direction for a good while, since I've been way too focused on the levels themselves and clearly neglected the other parts of the game. Hopefully I'll have a much more enjoyable game by the next DD.

Submitted(+1)

Heads up, I streamed your game. You can find a recording of the stream here:

Developer

Thanks I'll check it out

Fun game. I wish moving the cube with right click would leave the cube to the face it's facing instead of having to use the arrows. Somehow I managed to make a red dot that I couldn't erase unless I used the rewind button. I had drawn that red line over another red line multiple times (if you need context to reproduce)

Developer (1 edit)

Thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely add in that, some other anon on agdg told be to do that too. The reason why you couldn't erase the red dot is because there was no collider in there yet since the line is too short. Didn't think it would be an issue so thanks for letting me know.

Submitted

This is a pretty cool puzzler. I think it's a little slow to start, and it feels clunky to draw, especially since you can't start drawing off the cube, but I could see this being very fun.

Developer

Thanks for the feedback, I'm getting a lot of responses saying UX is lacking so it's definitely gonna be something for me to work on. 

Submitted

Nice the idea is good and the game worked and your UI is making me jealous with how clean it is. Have you capped the max frame rate? my gpu was working harder than i think it should have been.

Developer

Yeah the framerate isn't capped by default, there is an option in the game to cap it and I'll switch to be on by default instead. The UI is mostly asset store bought.  The one I used is called shift UI