Very interesting mechanic - Did you have to use inverse kinematics? I think this has to be the most uniquely themed jam submission.
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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
Comments
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 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.
73 days ago(+1)
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
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