I still feel the pacing is slower than intended but I'm able to pick any bottom piece to start, which definitely cuts out a bunch of time spent staring at the game without making progress.
I would remove the sound that plays when connecting the wrong symbols, it happens so often, there's no real penalty and often it plays when make a valid connection or just making good progress, and thats confusing.
would be nice if connecting a symbol would remove all adjacent symbol of that type, like in bust-a-move, which would allow more long-term strategy than removing each individual tile.
the pathing code here must be complex
Thanks for all the candid feedback! We didn’t have time to get a proper tutorial in, so the game definitely starts all at once. It didn’t occur to us to be more explicit about being able to swap pieces outside of just listing the controls on the page (relying on things outside the game is obviously not ideal).
I completely agree about the ‘wrong connection’ sound effect. It was one of those things that we thought would be helpful before playtesting, and we never got around to cleaning that up. You are correct about the pathing logic being complicated. We had some bugs that took up whole last day of the jam, which is why some of the other stuff didn’t get polished/balanced as much as we would have liked.
Color mixing doesn’t have any mechanical purpose, but we found in early prototyping that without some indication of what the pipes are connected to, it was very hard for the player to keep track of the board. We had some other ideas on how to represent connections, but Color was the easiest to implement. Mixing the colors was the only way we had during the jam to make it obvious that multiple shapes connected to it. Any shape/color connected to the pipe should succeed when connected to a matching output regardless of how many colors feed into the pipe.
I plan on making another pass to clean up a good handful of things, but specifically want to tackle: how the connections are visualized and cleaned up, how points work, and pacing/piece distribution. This is our team’s first attempt at a puzzler like this, and we underestimated how much effort it takes to balance the gameplay itself once the actual ‘game’ is built underneath it. I’m quite happy with how it came out, though.
