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Neat.

Although it seems you're showing off a clever idea that's not very functional as a game.

Understanding the rules of the game comes with a pretty high barrier to entry: you need to be familiar with a whole different game, playing it in reverse is just harder, and it's very difficult to tell what makes a good board state from a bad one.

The UI doesnt help much in understanding the game (it's only natural for such a complicated premise developed over this short a time frame).

I'd suggest you could ease the players into this game much better by first simplifying the initial state: instead of diving straight into a finished game first introduce a game that's a few moves in (this would give a simple solvable problem where the player can learn the rules), then another that's a few more and so on.

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Thanks for the long write-up! And the follow!

Although it seems youā€™re showing off a clever idea thatā€™s not very functional as a game.

Though itā€™s never been more true than with this one, a lot of my games fall into that category.

That (and all of the points in the rest of your comment) is actually one of the reasons Iā€™m participating in TriJams. (Along with learning Godot instead of updating my own increasingly horrible made-during-gamejams C++/SDL2 ā€˜engineā€™.) I spend so much time in just implementing the bare ideas, and never have any time for polish.

instead of diving straight into a finished game first introduce a game thatā€™s a few moves in

Thatā€™s a really nice idea if I would continue with this. Butā€¦

playing it in reverse is just harder, and itā€™s very difficult to tell what makes a good board state from a bad one.

ā€¦ I donā€™t think I want to, for those reasons. I enjoyed making it (showing off to myself?), and Iā€™m (as always) very curious what other comments I might get, but thatā€™s about it for this one for me.

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Thatā€™s a really nice idea if I would continue with this. But I donā€™t think I want to (...)

Yeah, I figured that was likely the case. I just mentioned it because I think it's useful to think about regardless, to improve our understanding of game design.

Let me know if you'd like to team up with me for a future trijam. You can look for me on the trijam discord.

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I think itā€™s useful to think about regardless, to improve our understanding of game design.

I didnā€™t mean to imply otherwise :-)

Let me know if youā€™d like to team up with me for a future trijam.

Next month Iā€™ll have to focus on the Secret Santa Jam ( https://itch.io/jam/secret-santa-2021 ), but Iā€™ll keep it in mind!