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Thanks for playing! Yeah, there were a few more sound effects that I wanted to add so that levels did not feel as plain, such as attack and teleport sounds, but just getting the ticking clock sounds right took me long enough to reduce it down to the essentials and use jsfxr to get hastily made, vaguely fitting win/lose condition sounds.  (it also made me notice I forgot to credit jsfxr in my description so thanks for reminding me about that too I guess :-D)

Very fair critic, I agree with basically everything you said (I was also thinking of it as a reverse Osu! too while testing it).

The reason I went with a difficulty spike that may feel unfair, especially on a first playthrough, was that "easier" level that always give you enough reaction time to dodge might feel a bit hard at first but get really easy with prior knowledge. I probably failed to communicate that clearly enough but starting from the third level I am not expecting the player to get everything right on the first try (and playtests seemed to agree with me on that), hence why I made restarting the level as quick as possible

With all that being said, Boxed is definitely overtuned and would probably be better with a bigger area to move around in (especially on mobile devices). Sorry for that one :-)

I think there is a interesting idea but some elements did not make sense to me, especially the gun related gameplay. The enemies did not seem to shoot at me even though I was crossing their red line-of-sight, and my own gun was not having much of an effect either. Maybe I missed something, but I think focusing on the stealth aspect would make the gameplay more interesting (but also maybe more difficult to generate interesting maps for).
Speaking of, having generated maps was a really cool feature and it did make me replay through the game a few dozens of time to check out what it managed to create. The controls themselves did feel smooth so repeating it again and again was not really an issue for me, but longer levels would have been even more fun :-)

I found the game quite interesting, although it did felt a bit too fast paced for my taste on medium and especially hard difficulty. I managed to survive on every level but could not achieve a high score on anything but the easiest level.

Something I am not sure I understood very well was how the movement of my robot worked. Sometime it felt like I had to full press the key each time to move a square, and other time I saw it zoom across the map when holding the key down ( I cannot guarantee that this is not an issue with my repeating keys settings or my keyboard being faulty though :-/).

The art and music both felt very polished and were a joy to experience. While the controls felt a little bit too "floaty" and the hitboxes hard to estimate (especially for the fists that come from above and linger a bit on the ground), most of the difficulty still felt well balanced and the final victory only felt better because of that. I really loved it!

That is a weird bug that I have not encountered yet... The wizard does gets squashed a bit during the teleport animation to smooth it out a little, but everything gets reset each time you click so it should never grow and stay past its original size.
Glad you still managed to enjoy the game despite this. Thanks for playing it :-)

Is it wrong that the first reaction I got from the end was a laugh? Granted, it was more out of surprise than anything, but given the poem's overall mood it made me feel a little bit out of place. An interesting experience, as I wanted to replay it instantly and, thinking about the lack of a button or any way to reset it, I got it by the poem's message a second time, on a more personal level since this time it affected me a little bit.

The puzzle was short and sweet enough to be discovered and solved in the 20 seconds you have to play the game, but I would lie if I said I enjoyed it more than the other option I had. I liked how the last words are used for the next playthrough, they did manage to reach someone in the end :-)

Thanks! I did try to make each level unique and scrapped a few ideas along the way that felt too repetitive, hence why I ended up with only 6 levels, but I am glad that this feeling of each level have something special to them got across in the end.

(by the way, that sound that made you sweat was me pulling on a roll of measuring tape. Nothing to be scared of :-D)

Thanks, glad you liked it! I played a bit of Rabbit & Steel earlier this year, the concept and desire to do something similar really stuck with me even after beating the game.

I loved every second of it, the atmosphere was incredibly well built and the puzzle were short and quick enough to retry not to become too much of a chore even when I got stuck on one (the ERROR one took me a few tries to understand the correct order of operation, as did the 4 coloured buttons). In a way the puzzles reminded me of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, except without a  manual reader to help me through the solving process :-D

That is a neat little game. The snowflakes look very good 🙂

While the trees in themselves looks pretty simple, getting them to go through a whole lifecycle was a cool trick and I definitely felt a little bit sad each one a tree I looked at its whole life ended up dying. Nice submission :-)

I wonder how the generation works here, since I got a few different- looking trees including thick-bodied ones and thinner, split-body growths like the one in the cover image.

The planets look really nice, both in terms of texture and colours, and the fact that it actually translates down to tile once you zoom in was a nice touch too. I wish I could make something that looks this good :-)

I also liked how the music seamlessly goes from a dreamy, background-type track to a more active one the closer you get to the surface of a planet.

A fun generator to play with! The cards' aesthetic, while simple, looks very clean and I enjoyed reading the descriptions made by mixing the sliders' values around (although i am still unsure about the exact effects of Cartoony vs. Realism to be honest). Having the ability to filter cards by type and rarity is a nice touch too; I played an actual, commercial card-based game that sorely lacked this feature so seeing it is always a plus for me :-)

This is a fascinating game you made here! Setting aside the extensive documentation (which was really helpful to understand how everything worked under the hood), the idea in itself is interesting, and the fact that your implementation of it works and works well is quite impressive.

It took me a few tries to get a grasp of how each slider affected the evolution of my world (especially the "Growing energy cost" which worked in a counter intuitive way for me, killing my worlds at low values while making organisms thrive at higher values), but I did eventually manage to stir it toward my goal of making the biggest organisms I could. I hit the threshold at around the size of that little fellow I included here, anything I tried to change would result in smaller-sized organisms...

I think my favourite part about it was playing around with the values, looking at the mutations organisms received and trying to reason about the change in behaviour I saw. I really liked how I often saw "zoomer" organisms develop in the early stage, suddenly growing more whip at speeding around for a few turns, then dying out because they ate all the food in their path and could not sustain that lifestyle any more.

A few things I would love to see would be a slider to control how fast food regenerates in the environment, and also some way of looking into the brains of an organism and see how all of its parts are connected together.

I am left with a big smile on my face after playing and writing all of this. Thanks for making this game, it was a lot of fun to play with :-D

That is a nice little garden you have there! I liked how the averaging and small mutations naturally lead to smooth, nice looking gradients of colours all across the board. I often saw flashes of bright colours that did not last more than a frame; I guess those were single plants that reproduce all around themselves and then got quickly averaged/taken over by their neighbours?

I was left a bit confused by the menu though: I was not able to edit any field other than the death chance (which I got stuck a few time on random high values, my bad T_T), and it looked like my cursor was still planting colours in the garden while I tried to click on those buttons.

I loved how smooth and natural the generated cave felt, I would be interested in learning how you went about generating those.

Snooping around a bit, I managed to find a glitch in the Matrix and escape my prison of stone. The view from outside looks great too, it would be nice to have an option to see the whole cave at once like this :-)

Well I will be damned, I never knew about those but just by looking at that Google search I can see so many obvious ways to improve my own system, I feel sad just thinking about it T_T

I did experiment with having a preview overlay when hovering over a cell with your pointer, however adapting that behaviour for touch screens would have meant a two steps, tap-and-confirm selection, and my messy code was already bursting at the seams at that point... Now that I am getting feedback about it, I feel dumb for not leaving that feature in.

Audio is probably my biggest weakness; that could be a nice thing to research for next year :-)

Thanks for the feedback! Glad you liked the tutorial, I wanted to do one like that for so long and was glad I found the motivation to do it this time around.

I did experiment with a few different ways of displaying the patterns, including showing the grid on the planet's surface, having a two-step selection with an preview overlaid on your canvas, and even screen-space textures so that everything always faced the same way, and I ended up making some compromises to fit the vision I had for the overall look of the planet. They may not be the right ones from a gameplay point-of-view though...

These birds look like adorable little dorks, I love them :-D
Seconding the idea of a log book or history function to catalogue encountered birds, there are a few whose cry I would have like to be able to hear a few more time in a loop because of how nice or funny they sounded.

Hearing that your issues were on the same track intrigued me so I did a little bit of sleuthing.

The error I was getting in my browser's console was "The buffer passed to decodeAudioData contains invalid content which cannot be decoded successfully."; this does not help a lot but confirms that the issue is with specific files being unreadable for Firefox (or at least the AudioContext part of Firefox, as opening the file by itself in a new tab works like a charm).

Using the sample code from MDN's documentation (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/BaseAudioContext/decodeAudioDat...) I managed to reproduce the issue locally, which definitely excludes the issue being from your code (yay !). I still do not know exactly what went wrong with those files, but simply re-encoding them with a newer version of the encoder (Lavf57.56.100 => Lavf58.29.100) fixed the issue for me (I did that using ffmpeg, ffmpeg -i ladiesandgs.webm ladiesandgs_fixed.webm) made the previously unplayable files work just fine in Firefox.

The files I noticed were affected and confirmed fixed with this workaround are "Ladies and G's", "Take a amen break", "Heatwave" and "Memories".

While a bit confusing at first, I ended up liking the game a lot more by the time I was done with it. I had some trouble understanding how the spell system worked (I think I figured out that you actually combine spells by selecting a slot to put the newly-dropped effect in?), and my final run eventually ended when both me and the boss spawned inside the walls of the level, but in the meantime I had fun overcoming basically any number of heads with a legendary spread-shot/trained asteroid/common strengthen combo :-D

A really cool project! I had a similar idea a few years back but eventually had to scale it down due to issues I encountered with "seeding" the generated pattern from user input and overall convergence issues.
Here is hoping you manage to find the time to improve it as you wanted, having this tool around to play with would be helpful when trying out WFC for the first time :-)

I always like to see a bunch of parameters in a list, ready to be tinkered with :-o
I know that this probably happens because there is a height limit in the first place, but seeing how everything starts to bunch up together at the end made me curious about knowing what it would look like if we could see it...

Playing alongside the generated patterns was more enjoyable than I remember Tangram to be :-o

I also liked your article and explanations about the whole process a lot. The line about simple systems creating complex outputs really resonated with me, and I think it also applies to your project in the sense that I was positively astonished at how small and clean the codebase was given the quality of the output. Great job!

I like comparing the various overlays to the final map and seeing how each part influenced the end result, it made me think about how those small details all come from those sort of complex interaction even in our world.
Regarding the generation, I guess it happens on a plane because of the hexagonal grid. What happens at the boundaries? How different would it be to simulate on the surface of a sphere? (totally not asking the questions that made me go for a simple noise-based generation on my project :-p)

The cars look good and colourful, if maybe a little bit impractical to actually drive for the longer models :-D I think my favourite part was the small ornament at the front of the car, especially the bird one.
Regarding audio I always encountered an issue on the same few songs (namely Ladies and G's, Take a amen break and Heatwave) on Firefox, but they seem to play just fine on Chrome.

As someone who runs ad blockers on very browser I use this almost made me feel nostalgic for the 2000's Internet. Great idea you had there :-)

Haha, I get what you mean. The more I played with it, the more I kept thinking "This feels rewarding to me because I know how it works but would probably frustrate anyone looking for a game".

Thanks for trying it out anyway :-)

What an interesting idea! I played a few round on different seeds, and some of them definitely offered an interesting challenge.

I have also seen a few cases that produced this kind of half-and-half table; I wonder if this could be detected and dealt with in some way or another.

The car was a bit too powerful for my driving skills, but it was still fun to try and hunt down the various pieces of the OST by going down the streets. I liked the atmosphere of the night, especially the various lights on both the environment and the cars.

That comment about the default number of iterations being too large for a large number of systems should probably be unrolled by default ;-)
Aside from that I enjoyed playing around with the various examples. I never found an excuse to dive deeper into L-systems than the superficial rewriting-grammar analogy but seeing how much parameters and control you can encode into those rules is really inspiring!

I played around for a bit trying to recreate the cool looking effects you show off in your screenshots and it took me a few minutes to notice that you can use the arrow keys to control where the camera is looking at; combined with the "peintre" command this instantly made the experience better, I liked it a lot!

I liked having the parameters on both sides of the screen, it makes it easy to experiment and play with the generator! As I remember from when I tried a similar project, it seems like the more rocks you have the easiest it is for our eyes and brain to see the path to the exit...

I would love to have more details about how you generate those levels :-)

The process used to generate tracks generates some interesting results while staying really simple and easy to grasp. I want to race on that track :-)

The layout generation in itself is quite interesting and does look like something that could be from an actual game, but the building process visualization on top of that is really awe-inspiring.

I am looking forward to see what comes out of that next "tricky part" :-)

I like how you can see the whole city building itself and rising in front of you, and of course the end result is stunning :-o

1400+ sprites is a lot (even when accounting for 1-bit depth and multiple frames per building block), but the variety it offers really shows, the buildings still look organic and quite different from each others. How long did it took you to draw all of them?

Despite the numerous options to adjust I think my favourite results were the more abstract ones I got by reducing all shapes to 1 and the number of colours to 2. It got me something that looks like a lion's head (on the right) and a minotaur that could come from a Rayman game. Pretty fun to play with!