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Monkey's Puzzle Ride's itch.io pageHow does your game fit the theme?
It is a puzzle game where you guide Monkey on his bicycle through the various levels.
Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 4 days?
No
Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 4 days?
No
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Comments
I loved the game. My only problem with it is that is too slow, if you could speed up the game would be better
Thanks for playing and for your feedback! I'm hoping to update it to improve the speed a bit when I get some time to work on it again
I liked the game, I completed it using the green arrows mostly and a few times used the clock. What I did was run the game before giving any comands to see what happened when I didnt put any comand then I used the green arrows to take the monkey to roads that didn't have any cars or that I realized that when the monkey got there the cars wouldnt be there.
I got a bit stuck in one of the levels behind that truck, so I put some clocks to make the monkey stop and then go after the truck moved again, don't remember now but I think I put like three clocks in a row and maybe one of the arrows to make it work.
I'm glad you enjoyed it, thanks for sharing your experience with it!
My first puzzle game! Love the vibes and polish!
Thanks for playing!
The isometric visuals stand out, but the puzzle components could use a little work. It feels like there were too many ways to tell monke to do the same thing - very often, the turn signs were useless since you could accomplish the same thing with the directional arrows which were significantly easier to use, since you didnt have to know which way he was going. I restricted myself to turn only, and found it more engaging. Also, there was no way to know and figure out how cars would behave, so a lot of the puzzles became guess and check rather than think and figure it out - a good example is the truck in level 2 - i rear-ended it like twice because i had no idea it would stop moving. Also, on my screen the UI was miniscule, nearly impossible to make anything out. Other than those minor issues, the game is amazing, and is a very cool concept that i havent seen anywhere else in this jam, great job!
Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it!
It's a good point that the turn signs and arrows are most interchangeable. I added the turn signs later in the development when I wanted to design levels where the player could cross the same place again but with a different result. That did mean they weren't really needed at all in the earlier levels though. It's interesting to hear that you found it more engaging with just those though, I might consider removing the arrows in that case!
The trial and error style wasn't quite what I was aiming for, so it would be good to address that too. I was thinking of having a button to demo the vehicle movement for a level, to see how it would play out without the risk of crashing into anything. I didn't manage to get round to that unfortunately, but it's something I could add if I update the game after the jam!
Thanks for letting me know about the UI scale issue too, I only ran it with a 1920x1080 viewport so didn't find that myself. I must have not set the scaling settings properly, so will look into that!
Really fun game!
Thank you for playing, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
This is such a fun puzzle game! Great job getting everything working in time and with multiple levels! This must have taken a lot of time to do
Thank you, I'm glad you found it fun! It was definitely a challenge to fit it all in before the deadline!
the isometric visuals and puzzle style definitely stand out but i felt there was a lot holding it back from actually feeling fun for me. i like puzzles and i like the idea of this but the execution on it felt a bit clunky and a little unintuitive. granted, i skipped past most of the instructions at the start but that much text on screen all at once isn't the most appealing to read and i like when mechanics feel right enough that they're easy to pick up on without having to read a bunch of text.
making it faster would've helped a lot, waiting felt tedious and it'd let someone like me trial and error the mechanics much faster too. even if you were a genius you'd have to play the level at least once to preview the other vehicles coming in so, a skip or speed up button? i didn't understand the difference between using the turn signs and just using the green arrows to making connor turn but i did only play two levels. that one truck in the second level i played just stopping by itself was really confusing lol it felt like it wasn't supposed to be doing that, so some sort of visual indication of that being intentional (is it dropping off something? why did it stop?) would help with stuff like that.
also felt like you could lean into the cycling theming more with the objects you could place, design them all after road signage or something and it'd feel a lot more special, like a stop or give way sign instead of a stopwatch, and from there you could get even more creative with mechanics inspire by other signs. sometimes the ui felt a bit awkward, i'd personally make the on screen ui bigger and make the play button even bigger than the others, to give it a sense of hierarchy. also would've been funny to see connor's model kinda fall to the floor or something lol, a bit more visual oomph to losing.
i understand the time constraints of the jam though, what you managed to create feels like a lot! i'm just very particular but the idea for this jam is pretty cool. could come back to this if it feels faster so i could see more of the levels.
Thanks for playing, and for your feedback! I appreciate you taking the time to give such a detailed review.
I originally wanted to make the tutorial more interactive, introducing the different instructions across a number of levels and with an animation of each one in action. In the end there wasn't time for that but I wanted to at least have something in place, I agree though that it could definitely be improved over the current wall of text! I think that would help clear up confusion over the different instructions that you encountered as well.
The speed has come up a few times and is something I'd like to address once the jam is over!
My idea for the second puzzle was as an introduction to the "wait" command, the truck was intended to stop by itself and the player was meant to work around it with those. I used a sprite of a garbage truck as I thought that would give some indication as to why it was stopping, an animation of people getting out could have been a nice touch though!
The UI buttons could certainly have been a bit bigger, I was trying to balance the size to have readability while also not hiding too much of the game screen itself. Maybe I'll try to adjust the layout, adding the UI to a panel so it isn't covering the map itself. I thought the positioning of the buttons would be enough to give a feeling of the intended flow to the player, but adjusting the relative sizes is something I'll consider too!
A falling over animation for the cyclist would have been good, but I'd already spent a fair amount of time making the sprite and the cycling/idle animations. As a solo dev, I had to balance it with the actual implementation of the mechanics and level creation, so adding more animations to the cyclist wasn't as high on the priority list as making sure there was something to play, but it's definitely something I'll consider adding if I update this more in the future!
Thanks again for all your feedback!
As many before, I found this game to be a lot of fun. It stands out with the gameplay mechanics.
It was a bit funny seeing the cars drive above the building assets, but this kind of polish can be worked on after the jam~
Thank you for playing, and thanks for the feedback!
I tried to avoid that by moving buildings further away from the roads, haha, but that wasn't possible in every map. This was my first time working with an isometric tilemap, so I wasn't exactly sure how to get the layering to work properly between the tilemap and other objects. It's something I want to look into more and try to fix though!
Reminds me of Mini Motorways nice job :D
Thanks for playing! I really like Mini Motorways, so I'm glad to hear that it gave you a similar vibe!
I LOVE this type of games and really liked the whole idea! Would love a speed control if you ever decide to polish this into a more finished product. Great job!!!
Thank you so much, I'm glad that you liked it! I think I'll aim to update it with the speed up option once the jam is over.
I really like the theme of this game, it reminds me of those mobile puzzle games to play! Also, I think you guys did great on focusing the theme for this year Monkey Jam! :D
Thanks for playing!
The artstyle is super cute, the music is charming, and the puzzles are challenging but fair. Everything is just top-tier!
Well done all around! 5/5 across the board!! 🫱🏽🫲🏽❤️🔥
Wow! Thank you for your kind words, I really appreciate it, and thanks for playing until the end! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
This was awesome! Nicely done, I agree with all the other comments though, adding a speed control would have made redoing maps (due to not knowing the vehicle paths until a few run throughs).
I might also suggest (if you plan to extend this further) scoring based on number of runs completed, and number of instructions used :).
Thank you for playing, and thanks for the feedback!
The speed control was something I wanted to add originally, but it caused some slight difference in the way the vehicles moved. At the time the source of the issue wasn't immediately obvious, so I decided to remove the feature instead to keep the consistency. From the feedback, I think it would have been better to keep it instead since the issues it introduced were only in a couple specific cases and the chances are people wouldn't have encountered them anway.
Thanks for the suggestion too, a high score (or low score?) for number of instructions for each level would've been good!
Will echo that a little speed up button might be nice, but overall this was a really cool little game, I could already see ways you could take this concept further with different commands and hazards etc. Nice one!
Thanks for playing, and I appreciate the feedback! The speed-up button was something I originally included but there was an issue with the implementation which meant the level behaved slightly differently at some points at different speeds. I took it out because I didn't want people to get frustrated that speeding it up led to something that should have worked to suddenly not work.. but it seems like the speed itself has been a bigger issue, so perhaps I should have left it in!
Yeah a little fast forward feature and a volume slider would make this great!
Thanks for your feedback!
Really fun, I agree with the Mario that I wish it had a speed increase for each time I have to restart. After getting to the forth level and having to redo it again and again I just couldnt keep playing do to the time constraints. But other that that really unique and fun, I love puzzle Games
Thanks for playing and for the feedback!
I did originally include a speed up button that increase the game's timescale, but after using it on a couple of the levels there seemed to be some situations where it would cause a solution that worked at the normal speed to fail. At the time, I looked through the code and couldn't find anything obvious that was timescale dependant and opted to remove it to stop the different behaviour. In hindsight, it may have been better just to keep the option since it was only in one or two places and the speed when retrying seems to have been a bigger frustration!
It’s really fun, my main nitpick is that I wish it was faster, it’s really slow and easy to lose interest
Glad you found it fun and thanks for the feedback! When I was playtesting I already knew the level solutions so I think the speed issue slipped past me, increasing the overall speed is definitely something I'll look at if I update this.