Just finished the game! I have several observations to make.
- The soothing marimba is really nice, and helps get an intuitive sense of which faces are rolling.
- The visuals have a very ‘pure’ and clean aspect, which matches the sound. You went (explicitly) for relaxation as an atmosphere, and I like this choice too. :) (If you are interested in seeing what comparable games did, I would say that DOS — not to be conflated with the operating system XD — also went for abstract ‘minimalistic’ looks.)
- I admit I tended to solve the levels through some kind of semi-blind semi-intuitive ‘brute force’ approach… :S Not proud of me on this one. X) But I think it is very hard to solve these puzzles because of the abstract nature of only having distances (= numbers), although the ghostly projections do help immensely (great idea you had there). The combinatorics seems too baffling to really plan several steps ahead, but of course, that depends on people (and I guess seasoned chess players could do better than the average).
You may not realize this when designing the levels, but if you crafted them by first thinking of a winning path and then putting the ‘decoy’ (= all the other tiles and walls), then it is way/exponentially more complex for someone to figure out a solution out of the indiscriminate global level. I am not saying this is what happened here, but you could probably shed light on what your thought process was! - Oh, by the way, testing WASD with my AZERTY keyboard: as with many games, this one is QWERTY-based, while for the record, it is possible to make the keys independent on the layout. Thankfully, the mouse controls make this almost a moot point here — but I still like to point it out, for future programming. ;)
I have only tested a handful of puzzle games from this game jam so far, four out of which were die-roll-based (the last one was a variation on Sokoban), and I must say they are all different enough from each other, with strengths and weaknesses. On the level design side, I feel mindDie was the most compelling (and I am saying this while my own game is one of the four, so no bias or string-pulling, here XD).
(For the record, the games I know are DOS, mindDie, your Marimbla just here, and mine. The Sokoban one — which is nice — is plainly titled Sokoban, by Koce.)
I think yours may take the cake for ergonomic design (both the ghost projections, the sound indications/design, and the mouse controls); on the other hand, it has less mechanics and visual identity, may be less intuitive to solve (see some possible reasons above in my own experience), and has less levels — which is not necessarily a problem, as I think the games here can be seen as prototypes which mainly demonstrate a concept. ;)
I have not seen enough games already to say if your main mechanic stands out as original or not (please tell me, people! We need a state of the art for puzzle games from GMTK 2022!), but it is different from those of the games I mentioned. So, I am happy. :)
A little question: why is the title Marimbla? I get the ‘marimba’ reference, but not the ‘bla’. I may be missing something simple, do not scold me. X)