Play experience
A Moving Experience's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun | #429 | 3.656 | 3.656 |
| Originality | #634 | 3.750 | 3.750 |
| Overall | #1136 | 3.375 | 3.375 |
| Presentation | #2653 | 2.719 | 2.719 |
Ranked from 32 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
Boxes of the same colour will move together when pushed, and the puzzles incorporate the joining of multiple puzzle rooms working together.
Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?
Yes
We created the vast majority of the art during the game jam
Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?
Yes
We created the vast majority of the music during the game jam
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Comments
Clever block pushing puzzle! Moving the blocks between rooms is very clever! My only criticism is that you can sometimes get stuck and undo doesn't seem to work between rooms, but that's a minor issue
Fun little puzzle game with nice twists, but I felt that the backtracking got too extensive at some points. I also got stuck in unsolvable configurations sometimes (even with the undo), so I didn't feel like finishing it in the end. Except for that, the rest of the game seems quite well polished :)
This game is awesome. I don't really know how to write this, but I'll try: It looks like the game had gotten everything it needed developed in time: It has great music, good sound, nice graphics, and it's polished as well and has rewind and a pause menu. No aspect was overlooked.
But the most important thing is gameplay, and it nails that as well. The puzzles keep surprising and actually had me thinking, I'd love to see a post jam release with more levels. Fantastic job.
I liked the direction of this game! A simple baseline mechanic turned into a connected location-wide puzzle is surprisingly tough to execute well. One of the issues of that is the amount of variables; and, in my opinion, such an issue undermines this game too, in two ways.
First, as a designer, you end up having too many things to keep in mind. Every puzzle connects to every other puzzle, and this eventually limits you. Worse yet, it can make the whole system fragile - while somewhat remedied by the undo button, if something breaks in room A based on the player's folly in room B, there is little salvation. I ended up softlocked like that in the twisted corridor on the top right of the map, but I am unsure if there are no other places like that.
Second, as a player, if a new challenge demands that you backtrack several rooms to flip the switch to open the path onward, you might feel smart about remembering where it is; but if you need to do that backtracking multiple times, and if the results are not always easily visible (one is unlikely to remember just how far right the blue box needs to go, for example), this would only increase. I do not see a remedy to this, not immediately, at least; but the small size of the game sure does help to alleviate it.
So, in a way, this game suffers from growing out of a system that gets harder and harder to handle the longer it goes. Perhaps, a way to lock the dead ends opening rocks in place could work. Perhaps, an ending could be placed just after you use the green rocks to open the door to the next puzzle. But the idea is ambitious, and it is clearly handled with utmost care; and that I certainly respect.
Ah, and as an end note: perhaps, adding basic symbols as well as colour would be useful. Recall Mark Brown's video on accessibility - and beyond just the colourblind, such a change would also be helpful to those who easily forget what block they need to push.
Thanks for the very comprehensive and detailed feedback, it's very valuable to me. I think you're right about a lot of points. Whether you could tell or not, I tried in many ways to prevent soft locking in my design, but it was hard with how the game inherently works, and the little time I had to do it in. I certainly agree with adding symbols for accessibility. Thanks for playing!
Very cool game. The puzzles were definitely hard and sometimes it took me a while to solve them. Great game!
For me, the visuals were not very clear as to what I was trying to do or where I was trying to go. The goal in the first room wasn't obvious until you moved a box, and it wasn't very clear for me that boxes in multiple rooms affect each other. Some better art assets would help this problem, but maybe having a little tutorial room(s) could help too?
Wow when the blocks pushed also in the other rooms it became really hard! Very cool! :D
The level design was excellent on this one!
The visuals could be improved but it was a fun and a challenging experience nonetheless
nice take on the theme!
Solid game overall! Being able to move boxes between screen was a great take on the theme and opened up a ton of puzzle possibilities. I got soft locked a few times, so some way of preventing that would be great, overall incredible though!
Who knew that a removal man knew the secrets of quantum entanglement.
This was a cool entry and with a bit of a graphical polish and more levels this could be a seller.
Haha! Thanks for playing!
Great job! This game is super fun and the concept is really clear and quick to grasp. The levels are designed pretty well, and I only had to hard reset once. I'd love to see a feature where you could rewind moves endlessly, and between rooms, to prevent softlocks. Overall, this is fantastic!
So, besides the obvious fatal flaw of how easy it is to get unintentionally stuck and have to restart the game from the beginning, this is actually my favorite game in the jam so far. In fact, it's incredible for me to see a Corrypt/Promesst/Game Title/Aunt's Flora's Mansion/Ludoname style large world sokoban game that Jon Blow loves in a jam.
If you played Aunt Flora's Mansion though, that game also has a problem where you can easily totally break your game and get stuck, but it has save blocks that are dictated by the player. It would have been nice to have that here -- or at least a press R to restart the room feature -- or more than 20 moves history at least, I don't know if there's some technological reason why you couldn't have more than 20 moves (and why it couldn't cross rooms), but I was almost incredibly angry during the final green block section when I thought I stucked myself when I hadn't.
What you did have was a "Press Z to unto" message, which, once you realized the purpose of it was essentially the same as the Morrowind "The thread of prophecy is severed" message (because you killed an essential NPC and the game is unwinnable), it became incredibly useful to tell you when you messed up. Or at least before the final green block section, where I got that message twice but still was able to complete the game.
Still, designing this kind of game where literally every block is linked and having the game still be playable (as in the player doesn't stuck themselves unknowingly mostly) is an incredible feat. I'm curious about how the Z to undo thing even works because I feel like this kind of problem would be Turing complete and actually as impossible to solve as the halting problem (I mean clearly it's not perfect, but it functions well enough to be incredibly helpful).
Anyway, like I said, despite the brutal unwinnable by design nature of the game, I absolutely love this.
That is so cool that you like my game so much! No I haven't played Aunt Flora's Mansion, but I'll check it out. Sokoban and Jonathan Blow were huge inspirations, glad someone picked up on that.
I didn't include the option to restart the room because I was focusing more on the whole thing being one big puzzle, but a save block is a genius idea, that would solve a lot of problems! The undo feature worked based on variables of past x and y coordinates for the boxes and player, and so I had to make a new variable for every move, hence the limit, and the variables were assigned to specific instances, so they wouldn't save between rooms. However, if I end up expanding on this game or making something similar to it, I'm sure I could find a way to fix this.
The "press Z to undo" works less on AI figuring out whether the puzzle is solvable, and more on how I designed the individual puzzles and knew how they worked. For example, in the first two rooms the only way to get stuck is by pushing the blocks all the way to the top or bottom of the room, and so in those two rooms I made the game check if the boxes were touching a wall above or below them.
Thanks a ton for your amazing feedback!
Ah, see I also had an undo feature in my game as well, but I just used an array of snapshots, where each snapshot stored all the relevant variables in the game, so it's only theoretically limited by the amount of memory Javascript can allocate, so for practical purposes it was infinite. I haven't used GameMaker in over 10 years and back then I barely knew how to use variables so I'm not sure how you'd do that in that engine though.
This game was a lot of fun! I adored the little opening visual, and the puzzles that followed did a great job at ramping up the difficulty, especially the final two branching path ones. I got to both dead ends, and while it took some considerable effort, I never once wanted to give up! The idea that blocks carried over between rooms was fantastic, and made for some phenomenal puzzles. The little screens between certain areas, giving you a goal or a bit of information was clever and helpful. Definitely one of the stand out puzzle games I've played this jam, I'd love to play more puzzles with this design. Great job!
Really cool concept would be interesting to see taken further! Awesome job getting this done in the jam! Best of luck with the ratings! :D
this was honestly a very cool idea. First I thought it was just the usual pox pushing puzzle game but the idea that the whole map is one gigantic puzzle is pretty awesome.
I somehow finished the game even tho I was thinking that I would softlock myself at any moment now but somehow it never happened.
The gameplay was really nice, reminded me of Baba is you, a game that I love, so you certainly get bonus points for that. The mechanic that all boxes are connected really showed through and I haven't seen a game quite the same concept before. It's a good twist on a normal game formula.
The visuals are a little harsh, I'd suggest using less saturated colours, and blending them together a little bit more.
Genius concept and execution! Would love to see this polished up
Really awesome game! I love the moment when you realize that the blocks are connected between rooms. I didn't think I was going to be able to make it to the end, but I did! I kept thinking that I had permanently messed something up, so it might be good to have undo support between rooms, or else explicitly tell the player that they can't get the game into an unwinnable state, if you can guarantee that.
Thanks! This is really helpful feedback, I think you're right, having undo between rooms would've solved a lot of things, I should've thought to do that.
Concept is nice. Having the blocks being connected even across different rooms is very impressive and definitely something I'd struggle to program so good job on that front.
My only gripe is that its very easy to get softlocked, as undoing after an error is not very responsive.