This is jam game perfection. It's the right scope, the right level of polish, easy to pick up, difficult to master, innovative, and tied to the jam theme. I really have nothing bad to say about this game. The only issue is that the play area was kind of small for managing all the pieces, but I think that was due to being in the browser. Now that I mention it, I think I forgot to check if there was a full screen option, so I may have just missed it. I had a blast and will definitely be coming back to finish up the rest of the levels once I get through rating a bunch more games.
Viewing post in SequencIO - Alpha jam comments
I went back and finished the game. The only thing I never understood was the point of the "buffer" gate. As far as I could tell, it seemed to have the same effective behavior as "push", but perhaps subject to real-time inputs? Which would ironically make it the only gate that DOESN'T buffer. In fact, in order to solve a bunch of the later puzzles, I ended up creating what I think of as a buffer out of a long chain of "reflect" gates just to act as a trash bin for discarding unwanted outputs. In the end, I completed the game without ever using "buffer".
That's an interesting way of completing the levels! I guess it's a side-effect of only needing a set amount of sequences to complete the level, there's not meant to be any discarded outputs. The point of the buffer is to combine two connections into one, so you can connect up different things to one action (I guess it was a bad naming choice, I copied the object from a buffer action I didn't use but never got around to changing the text). Here's how I use it in the first level with a buffer https://streamable.com/00n2jd . I'd love to see some of your solutions to the levels! I'm going to be posting updates in the discord server linked in the games description so I'd be grateful for your input during development