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Lead Line's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #8 | 4.250 | 4.250 |
| Graphics | #20 | 3.917 | 3.917 |
| Fun | #54 | 3.083 | 3.083 |
| Audio | #58 | 3.083 | 3.083 |
| Overall | #59 | 3.071 | 3.071 |
| Controls | #65 | 2.917 | 2.917 |
| Accessibilty | #105 | 2.167 | 2.167 |
| Theme | #130 | 2.083 | 2.083 |
Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
4.4.dev5
Wildcards Used
You could argue, technically, 'ui is real'. But actually no, N/A
Game Description
Alarmingly incomplete puzzle game about having a squirmy grabby arm and using it
How does your game tie into the theme?
You can only move by grabbing the world with your 'arm', which you could interpret as being 'frozen' in a way. But since that was kind of vague and didn't end up mattering, it's also 'frozen' in that the glowy stuff(tm) cannot move. Except for the one glowing node that can. Which ironically has a glyph resembling an ice flake, because I was originally going to make it so that motionless glowing nodes had the ice flake like glyph. But then it turned out that most of them were motionless, so I decided to invert it and make it so the one node that -could- move got the snowflake. I'm bad at design idk.
Source(s)
N/A
Discord Username(s)
iris_xii
Participation Level (GWJ Only)
1
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Comments
Very interesting mechanic - Did you have to use inverse kinematics? I think this has to be the most uniquely themed jam submission.
Quite interesting mechanics! it was pretty hard to figure out what was going on, but after figuring it out - it became a rather interesting experience!
You've certainly got a vibe going here. Unfortunately the abstractness is working against the game - I've finished it and I still don't really know what any of the rules are. I've got some guesses at best, and that seems like a pretty big problem for a puzzle game.
The movement is certainly unique enough to make for an interesting mechanic. I think it'd feel a bit smoother if having the mouse cursor outside the radius didn't stop it from working outright, but instead acted as if it were on the nearest point inside the radius? Maybe a bit of easing near the edge?
Still, it feels like there's good potential here that just needed a polish pass or two to really shine. Pretty good for something you consider incomplete :]
First of all, thank you for the thoughtful review! I think you're right on the money about everything that you've mentioned - I was going for a deliberately abstract and obtuse vibe, but I took it a few steps too far. I'm not surprised the rules aren't clear, considering I have to stop and think through them and I made the thing, not very intuitive at all. A result of both poor time management not letting me spend time on making it understandable (something as easy as 'press R to reset' was added on the eleventh hour) and also the fact that the mechanics were meant to be simpler than they ended up, but I painted myself into a corner code-wise (it's nasty) and by the point I realized 'this is unsustainable' it was too late to rip it out, I had to 'massage' the mechanics to fit what the code -could- do without breaking rather than the other way around. Oops!
The 'moving the mouse outside the circle' is more of a surprise, I did have like, 1 person play the game before the deadline and they did struggle with wanting to click outside the circle and having it stop abruptly, I dismissed it as just 'oh just getting used to it'. Probably more of a unnecessary hindrance than I thought! I was definitely too quick to dismiss that issue then
I'm glad the arm was interesting though, it was originally meant to be the main mechanic back when I was still figuring out what on earth I was even going to make. I also knew I wanted a puzzle-y game though, so that didn't really happen. Still kept it though, not like I was going to get a time refund.
Thank you for playing and sharing your thoughts!
i love my arm and your game!!!!!!!!
I love your game! The mechanic is nice, it feels good to move around so you could easily create levels with a lot of lines so we can keep moving around the screen solving the puzzles.
I do get stuck on a level (I forgot to take a screenshot) but it was a level where you needed to grab and move that ice flake, I didn't know how to connect it exactly to solve the puzzle, but the thing is that, if I'm not wrong there are some ice flakes which you cannot move, so it is confusing and not clear what I can move or not.
But I really enjoyed the experience, there's definitely potential in the arm mechanic
This is really neat. The IK stuff for the arm is really neat. I have no idea how I'd put that together myself. The aesthetic was really cool. The puzzles were simple and the movement was fun. I soft lock myself when moving one of the moveable nodes and couldn't figure out how to recover. There could be something here with some more time spent thinking about the puzzles and mechanics.
I really love your jam submission text. Gave me a good chuckle :)
Would love to see where you take this.
I feel like this game could do with a manual or something. The minimalist tooltips gave off a really cool vibe along with the rest of the game's environment, but they also made it hard for me to figure out what was actually going on. I only understood the mechanics well enough to get to this level.
Then again, maybe it wouldn't have mattered because I'm the only one that bothers to read the instructions anyway.
Yeah, I agree big time, with you and everyone else that's said this - I wanted to be a little obtuse on purpose, but I overshot it and made it incomprehensible instead. You got pretty far though, there's only one more level
Gameplay mechanics are a bit hard to understand, but I love the visual aesthetic. Has a nice, abstract vibe, like I've entered a strange, dreamlike dimension.