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Unflooder's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Visuals | #158 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
| Authenticity (use of resolution restriction) | #171 | 4.100 | 4.100 |
| Overall | #239 | 2.775 | 2.775 |
| Gameplay | #259 | 2.200 | 2.200 |
| Audio | #301 | 1.400 | 1.400 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you work in a team?
Na
Was the resolution a challenge?
Yes, it was hard to compress enough information into the player's design so that it was obvious what they where doing, another challenge was displaying the player's energy/health without blocking the surrounding dangers
What did you learn?
I learned how to make a falling sand simulation (without sand), a realistic 2D hose simulator and an image based level editor and somehow combined them into a game.
I think in hindsight its a cool but also terrible combination since I ended up having to generate procedural textures on the fly, but then in order for the player or the hose which are physics objects to interact with the simulation properly I had to also generate collision boxes based on the textures but they have to share pixels because there can be over 4000 pixels loaded at once, those sorts of things, so I'm quite sure I'll be using a lot of this game's juice in the future
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Comments
This seems really impressive from a technical standpoint. However, I wasn't able to figure out how to play it properly. I looked for a listing of controls on the game's page but couldn't find it.
It seemed like the first level had quite a lot going on. Maybe you could simplify the gameplay so we can accomplish an easy objective before exploring the impressive technical accomplishments?
Thanks for the feedback, I've updated the description so the objective is more clear and added a list of controls, I also added a nicer starting level for later
Cool idea! I enjoyed moving around and sucking things up, but I think the dynamic camera that follows the player around makes it hard to enjoy the sights! Still, a technical marvel!
Pretty interesting! I love the classic web powder game and this brought back some pleasant memories, I always wanted to explore the stages I made with a little character :)
Nice work, I’ve never tried making a simulation like this, I can’t even begin to think about how hard it is. I’m guessing this could quickly become super slow if you had more things to draw on the screen, with a higher res for example?
Yeah, the falling sand part of the game took 10 days to implement because I didn’t expect it to be so complex (mostly hard to find bugs), so I would say they are quite large time sinks, but it is really fun to add new pixels with weird properties and watching them react with each other
As for performance oh definitely, as I started adding larger levels the slowdown started becoming huge because every pixel on the screen (except air) would look around and move, luckily each level was split into 4 * 4 pixel blocks since the levels are loaded from images. This meant I could stop each sprite/block from updating if they were too far from the player and slightly further out after that they would stop rendering which made it very easy to implement compared to other things, you can actually see this on large levels because water for example might suddenly stop when you would expect it to continue down since the blocks they want to move into are dormant until you are in range.
High quality falling sand engines like in Noita, use tricks likes multithreading in larger 32 * 32 regions which are properly chunk loaded, and use virtual rectangles to mark parts of the game that have some activity in them, so it only needs to update those, this lets it run really well at a high resolution.
Sorry about the essay, there’s just a lot of cool technical witchery to talk about 👌
thanks for the very detailed explanation, I appreciate it!