itch.io

Thanks for trying the game and spending time to write feedback!

Coming up with the concept, I realised that there's is a pretty high risk that it may end up being frustrating to a lot of people and yeah, frequently losing control is not that fun. The main idea behind this was fighting for control. It was intended that the adversary does not want the player to finish the level so you have to fight against that. Sometimes the enemy might help you since the buttons it choses are random but that in a way makes the later levels more challenging as having twice as many colours per panel makes it half as likely the AI would pick the correct one for a given panel.

But I do agree with you that the player should have more options to work around that. The way the game works now is that when you lose control, there is an AI system that randomly picks a panel it wants and then uses pathfinding to actually run from panel to panel and press a random button when it reaches the destination (you can see that in action on the end screen if you beat the last level). It's meant to give the impression that more time has passed when the player loses control, as if they lost consciousness, since the AI movement is really fast and the countdown goes quicker when you're not in control. What I wanted to do initially is design the levels around that by having mazes that the AI would get slowed by or traps that the player can lock themselves in for a few seconds. This was going to allow the player to trap themselves before losing control to minimise how much damage the AI can do. So it would become a game where you race to activate as many panels as you can but as soon as the screen begins to fade, you'd have to race to put yourself in a position that slows down the adversary. Unfortunately, I did not have the time to add all of that because it would require more mechanics, spending a lot more time on level design, and it would be another balancing challenge in itself. I just about finished this version with one hour to spare so the game ended up like it is now, where you can't prepare much for the switch but you have to recover from it in time. I feel like the game would be far less frustrating if I had the time to add all this since it was in my initial idea but it's something I might just add after the jam if I end up continuing with this...

And you mentioned with the CYBMRC level (which is the last level), the game restarting with one second left. That is definitely not intentional and the game is intended to always move you to another level if the progress text is shown. There is a delay before the level transition to play the progress text animation on screen and I assume the failure text just has a much shorter delay and ends up restarting the level before the code that progresses the level has a chance to run. I don't think I finished any level that close to the time limit in testing so I must've missed the bug, sorry. If you're interested, I have put up a full walkthrough video on the main game page which shows you how it is supposed to end.