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A jam submission

Pico TowersView game page

The blocks are all jumbled up! Order them by color in this Towers of Hanoi adjacenet puzzle game.
Submitted by Achie (@Achie7240) — 1 day, 20 hours before the deadline
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Pico Towers's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Graphics#503.8263.826
Authenticity (or, Creativity in use of resolution)#534.0654.065
Gameplay#543.4573.457
Overall#653.6143.614
Audio#953.1093.109

Ranked from 46 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Themes
Peaceful really helped me hone in on the relaxing puzzle game genre, and that focused my initial planning.

Tools
PICO-8 is the game engine behind, which has a few constraints already other than the 64x64 we have for the jam. That fact really helps you focus on your main idea and not get sidetracked with scope creep.

Lessons
The transition system I created for this and Daily Doku seems really easily adaptable for future uses!

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Comments

Viewing comments 29 to 10 of 29 · Next page · Last page
Submitted

Great job. A very beautiful and simple game. It's very fun and interesting to play.

Submitted(+1)

Nice and simple. I find it rather relaxing to play. It seems that sometimes the cursor moves a bit non-intuitively when going up and down, but other than that it is a nice little sorting game. 

I just noticed that you created *two* games for this jam. This is an amazing achievement, congrats! :)

Developer

Thank you! Up-down is indeed a bit janky, will look into how I can make it better next time!

And thanks, they are really simple games though, so my job wasn’t that hard!

Submitted(+1)

There are so many things I could say, but I’ll leave it with this: Pico Towers is one of three games I keep coming back to when I need a palette cleanser between voting. It scratches so many itches!

Developer

that is high praise, thank you so much! Super glad to hear that! What are the other two?

Submitted

Towers is right up there with OOPS Airlines for addiction, and I’m still exploring Mum is missing. I’m annoyed everyone except me has 100%-ed it!

Submitted(+1)

Fun and satisfying, and it runs nice and smooth with simple controls.  Very easy to pick up and play and I like that you provided so many difficulty levels to keep things interesting.  Great job! 

Developer

Thank you so much! Glad you enjoyed

Submitted

Neat sorter game!

I can see there being a mode where you can only put pieces of 1 color on pieces of the same color.

Submitted(+1)

2 games for the jam! impressive, a true pico8 master

Developer

Thank you! Both being small games really helped with it!

Submitted(+2)

X and C are too close together! I accidentally restarted too many times!

Loved this though!

Developer

Thank you for trying it out, will ad some kind of guard to reset

Submitted(+1)

Pretty fun and peaceful game :)

Developer

Thanks, glad you enjoyed

Submitted

Cool game, but I would like to have some difficulties in the gameplay, because now game allows you to move anything, anytime, anywhere. Just a simple limit to move counts would fit great in there. But overall I liked it and completed hardest level.

Submitted(+1)

This is a calm and peaceful game, with a simple optimization problem before you- sort these blocks using the limited space given to you. It doesn't try to be some grand adventure, it knows what it is, and it does what it does quite well. I feel like the gameplay is perhaps a little too free- you can stack any blocks on any other blocks, the only limit is four per tower.

(I suppose what I'm saying is that the typical form of this puzzle is the Towers of Hanoi, in which the blocks aren't colored but they are sized, and you can only place a block onto a tower if the tower is empty (base case) or the block(s) already there are larger than the block you are trying to place, (and your task is to move a stack of X blocks from tower 1 to tower 3, with the help of tower 2), or a, like, potion-mixing puzzle where you move groups of blocks from beaker to beaker, and you cannot separate a group once they have been mixed, and you still can't overfill any beakers so the puzzle is pretty strongly one-way and so a reset button is important to offer.)

But, for the puzzle that it is, it works well.

Okay, but there is one bug! If you use the up/down keys to move up/down a row and your cursor is empty, that works, but the height of the cursor isn't correctly adjusted! So if the tower you moved to doesn't have the same number of blocks as the tower you moved from, you can't actually access that tower. This shouldn't be hard to fix,  since left and right correctly assign the cursor's height, and even in-game I fix this by also tapping left and then right whenever I tap up or down, so I'll do "up-left-right" or "down-left-right" and it has the same effect but also corrects the cursor's position.

Developer

Thank you so much for the feedback!

I do agree some kind of restriction would be nice, due to time constrainsts I went with this kinda easy and relaxing version, but based on feedback it looks like I’ll need to look into more challanging rules!

Submitted(+1)

Great game! it was a joy to play through the puzzles. My one note is that it's a little annoying having the pick up piece button right next to the reset puzzle button. I found myself about to finish a puzzle, only to reset it all because I wasn't watching where I put my fingers. Possible fixes could be double checking the player wants to restart, or having to hold down the button, like in Super Mario Maker. Super fun game, really enjoyed it!

Developer

That is a great idea, will add that after the jam ends!

Submitted(+1)

This was a fun little towers of hanoi game! The background music is really nice!

Developer

Glad you enjoyed it!

Submitted(+1)

Fun game.

Developer

Thanks!

Submitted(+1)

Looks so clean and every bit of movement feels smooth. Also when you get things right you feel BIG brained so that's also a plus. Great work with the implementation, definitely delivered.

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the kind words, means a lot!

Submitted(+1)

reaaaaally relaxing... I like games that make me feel smart

Developer(+1)

Glad you enjoyed it!

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Love me a sorting puzzle game, and this one hits the spot. I will echo the up/down movement issue that others have mentioned; in addition, I think a few of the colors are a little too similar, which did give me some grief. It did *seem* like they were a curated palette, but perhaps a bite more curation (or a high-contrast option) could be helpful. That said, the shadowed blocks are a really neat touch and add just enough spice to the classic formula to make it tasty. 

I think I might've liked a timer (maybe one that just shows the completion time, not one on-screen and visibly counting up) or maybe a move counter?

Overall, very nice!

Developer

Move counter is def. a plan in the future, I just ran out of time due to having other scheduled stuff during the jam’s time.

If you remember, could you highlight the problematic color pairs, so I could look into changing them up?

Submitted

I think these were the color pairs that gave me the most trouble. When sat next to each other they're enough to tell apart, but when they were separated by a block or two, a bit troublesome.

Submitted(+1)

Nice implementation of a proven classic, good presentation overall. Not too challenging even in "pico" difficulty, but that may be subjective. I noticed that when using up/down to change stacks, the hand usually points at another but the top piece, leaving you unable to pick it. Left/right works as intended.

Developer

up down was a stupid bug I introduced with the late addition of that feature :(

On difficulty, I kinda wanted to keep it simple and relatively easy so others playing won’t feel discouraged by how hard levels are, but I do agree something else might be needed for the higher ones!

Submitted(+1)

Solid implementation! Hand was a bit buggy with up/down movement

Developer

Thank you!

Submitted

Very solid and simple game! Good vibes with the music and pretty dancing graphics ^_^

I did have some trouble getting controls to work in the embeded game on Firefox, but that was the 2nd Pico game tonight with that issue, definitely not an issue of your game.

Developer(+1)

That is a really weird issue, what were about the controls wrong? Using a FF myself o.O

Thank you for the kind words!

Submitted(+1)

Cute and fun! The shadow blocks were a nice twist. I liked the bubble background too and felt like you did a good job keeping the screen lively.

On my first normal puzzle, I totally didn't see the one tower in a row by itself, then I encountered some weird bugs where if I moved the cursor down to it by pressing down, it wouldn't actually let me select a block, whereas if I wrapped right or left, it worked fine.

A pleasant game, but I think I want like one more mechanic like the shadow blocks to really stick with it.

Developer

Thank you so much!

up-down was a really late change, which I should have tested much more, missed a setting of a variable, which is causing the issue :(

Viewing comments 29 to 10 of 29 · Next page · Last page