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A jam submission

ZenFView game page

Zen puzzle game to relax.
Submitted by gordonshamway23, WTBasil — 8 days, 9 hours before the deadline
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ZenF's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Originality#74.3334.333
Overall#213.5003.500
Technical#223.1673.167
Polish#253.1673.167
Graphics#333.0003.000
Audio#411.8331.833

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

  • Excellent puzzle game! I enjoyed this one a lot. I think adding more/louder sound effects and music could be an improvement.
  • Promising game, it really made me think! It needs audio and better controls (maybe some UI indicators of the mode you’re in).
  • Nice puzzle! With a little more work it can become a great game :) Some notes: - I like that you've added a how to play scene ingame, but I think the font is too small, especially on a GBA Micro. - The purple tiles are also difficult to see against the gray background. - The controls are a bit weird: it would have been a bit better to hold A/B to add/remove tiles instead of pressing buttons to switch modes. - Is there any audio, apart from what plays when you beat a stage? It sounds too low. - Maybe the game would have been more fun with an arcade mode with stages to beat and such :)
  • This puzzle game is easy to learn and engaging to play, I can see myself spending a lot of idle hours passing the time with a game like this. Unfortunately I have encountered a "Ran out of video RAM crash", recreatable through the following methods: Complete the the game once then go to the 4th page of the "how to play" screen. Or complete the game 4 times and return to the main menu. Crash aside this is still a very enjoyable entry.
  • Unique and engrossing puzzle concept! A bit eye-straining, sound effects seemed very quiet. I could imagine a simpler control scheme where you just hold A or B instead of using them as toggles. But aside from those nitpicks I really enjoyed the game, it's really brilliantly designed - nice work!

Jam ROM submission

Ok - understood! I attached the GBA ROM file as "MYGAMENAME_jam.gba".

Type of submission

Game

Open Source Repository URL
https://github.com/gordonshamway23/ZenF

Tags

Puzzle

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Comments

Submitted

This is actually a really cool calming puzzle game that I totally could have seen my younger self playing on the bus to school. And nice work making it in rust :D

I enjoyed it, nice work :)

Developer(+1)

Thanks for your kind words. Very glad you like the game.

Rust ftw :)

Submitted (5 edits)

Hi! Been having a good time playing your game in idle moments :) It's interesting how sometimes it's tricky to see which "tower" should be occupying a given space, but as I complete more of the board it gets easier to solve the remaining "question spots".

I did run into a couple (ultimately minor) issues playing the game on hardware (GBA SP AGS-101 + Everdrive GBA X5; I have not tried on emulator):

  • With Everdrive's "Quick Boot" option enabled (which skips the system BIOS before launching a game), the game crashes immediately: "IRQ and main thread are attempting to access the same Lock!" (That mode could definitely be better about initializing more hardware state though...) (Edit: Several other games also fail to work with Quick Boot fwiw)
  • The sounds are so quiet as to basically be inaudible, even with the volume maxed out (which is a shame, because I do enjoy the clicky sounds)
  • After winning a board, if I reopen the "How to Play" screen and scroll through the pages, the game runs out of tile space in VRAM. (Edit: This crash also happens when winning a game if you've already won a couple games in a row without turning off the console. I suppose the victory image tiles are getting leaked 😅)

Other than that, I haven't encountered any problems! Overall an enjoyable experience. 

I wonder if some kind of difficulty setting might be possible in the future—i.e. adjusting the frequency of easy tiles that reach across the whole board, etc. The fact that they're auto-generated in the first place is very cool though!

Developer

First of all, thank you very much for your extensive testing and feedback. I'm glad you like my little game.

Regarding your issues:

- I have no idea what the effect of a quick boot is, but I guess the Rust agb framework is not working without fully booting.
- Sound are defenitly very quiet, I put it on todo list for post jam work.
- I had a out of vram crash only once and I tested a lot and wasn't able to reproduce it anymore. It is definitly not easy to leak memory using Rust, as the lanquage is designed that way, but not impossible, so I suspect the agb framework has eventually a problem freeing tiles correctly. But I might be wrong. It is my first gba game and the first time I used the agb framework. I will investigate it post jam.

As I did only test in mgba emulator, was the text in the "How to play" menu hard to read or to small?

Your idea to create different difficulties by making towers not cross the whole board is great, I will think about it and put in on todo list.

Have a nice day and thanks again for your nice comment.

Submitted

The text in this game is really hard to read.