This is a cool little experience, even if it's lacking in straightforward gameplay. It's really satisfying to be able to set up a move and listen to it play out a few times. I really wish you could move tiles up and down on the grid, too. I eventually reached a point where I couldn't get any balls to score because all my pieces were at the wrong height and/or angle. Softlocks are hard to protect against in games like this.
Overall, well done for 48 hours. Congrats!
Thank you!
It is actually a design choice. A bit like tetris where doing a move even if it gives points might screw you later, this does the same. But I made it really forgiving and random so it might not work very well in the long run. Usually you want to get rid of both bamboos on a row at the same time to leave as little solo bamboos as possible because it's what can end a game. But since it's very random you can have done all the worst choices and still get a good move. But it's also a risk and reward system where leaving more lines with only one bamboo will make a full screen clear easier (When you get rid of all the lines at once).
Also, moving the cells up and down means that anything is possible. You pretty much cannot loose and only the time spent give you more score. At the moment with 5 rows and 5 possible position for each, the player has 3125 possible configurations. Making it possible to try each one of them for the player. Allowing vertical movement would drasticly multiplicate this number to something that the brain will not internalize and the player would only try to mess with whatever comes to him, making thing easier as a result but harder for the player to visualize.
One way that could work would be the possibility to cycle through the lines. Like all the lines goes down by one and the last one goes on top. But you would pretty much never loose then, or only with extremely bad luck and it wouldn't feel very fair too.
I may be wrong but thoses design choices are kind of deep already for such a little game. But yes the important part might be that what you felt as a softlock was for me the loose conditions, and it does bring the fact that it is not clear enough and might not be the best as it is left to the player to restart when he doesn't find any combination that works.
I'll continue to work on it after the jam so thank you for your feedback it helps a lot to see what people do and understand about the game!
