Timing is a nice take on the theme, it's fairly unique and it's pretty fun. The game peters out towards the tail end, where I imagine I could do some perfect setup with a bunch of shuffling, but the fact I have to refresh the page to actually play shuffling makes it fairly clunky and not worth the effort

More fun than I was expecting. Making the game deterministic is a really good idea.

The UI around saving/loading setups confused me, and it stops being useful since you can't save layouts before reshuffling.

Game was pretty fun, though a bit slow at the beginnings and the ends. The skill tree is a nice way to mix things up, though it can be easy to softlock yourself if you don't get gem storm early enough.

Gem storms are one of the more interesting mechanics I've seen, given that they encourage experimentation in a good way as opposed to experimenting without benefits or with losses. There's no one good way to set them up which makes it feel better. The shuffle mechanic is also neat, but it's more discouraging to experimentation because it can ruin your previous setups and introduce new setups that just don't really work (which is a bit of a problem since they take like 1 to 2 minutes to load at endgame when you most need it).

Balancing is a bit off, the start is kind of slow and uninteresting before specializations. Waiting for the last specializations is also kind of slow but at least you have good graphics to entertain you for a few minutes before you just leave it to run in the background.

Theme- I was going to give a 2/5 originally since it didn't felt like time mattered a lot, but I bumped it up a bit after gem storms which make fair use of the mechanic.

Other stuff: shards and magnet effects don't reset on runs which can have some interesting side effects. It also introduces a bit of randomness which is hard to control unfortunately.

Overall amazing game made within the time period, given that it felt so unfinished and obviously a prototype rushed in a day or two just 2 days before the jam end. I'm glad I revisited the concept.

The game starts off slow, but once you start going into the Specials tree, it really starts showing its stuff.

The map refresh ability plays well into all that, as you try to optimize your layout and combos. I found the best strategy in the game to be to get a chest gemstorm, and then a bunch of chained splitters to grab all of that. Much easier said than done! The gemstorm is a very clever mechanic that encourages experimentation and there are lots of ways to set up a good one.

The combo I just mentioned is very hard to get and takes many shuffles (which gets nasty later on and will hang for a long time), but ultimately it's not needed for a player to progress. It's great to have that extra room for experimentation if a player really wants to tinker and maximizing their output.

This game was fun and I liked theorycrafting a bit around the Specials tree. Unfortunately it did get to a point where the game just couldn't shuffle any more and had to call it quits. A lot of further potential if you keep leaning into clever special interactions and making players decide what combos they want to create!

It would be good if the connections between the items on the "Specials" map lighted up when you unlocked a new special, that would emphasize the tree's structure.

Also, the "progress bar" background of the purchase buttons on the Gem screen is very subtle, it could be shown with a bit more contrast or a slightly brighter colour.

Not sure what changed since i played a day ago or so, but the game DESTROYS my gpu. (980 ti)

if i press shuffle at late game, the game frezes, and then if I have to reload the page, the goal for prestige points reset. also its annoying that i cant get all point to complete the prestige tree, like the points to get grow exponentional, but progress is linear