itch.io

Glad to hear you enjoyed it!

https://dichotomouscreator.itch.io/invertio

https://dichotomouscreator.itch.io/sunflower-maintenance

I am pleased to report that the trigger conditions bug you mention should be fixed; I found it as occurring if you retried the same level multiple times in a row, and the updated version on the game page shouldn't have it any more. It was sadly one of a few things that slipped through during the initial period; new version fixes a bunch of that stuff (did you know bombs were meant to have a tile next to them indicating which tile they blow up? I broke that last minute before submitting >_>), and does some minor rebalances/tweaks plus adding 10 more levels.

That said...the video was fantastic and seeing Invertio showcased like that was super satisfying. It's kinda hard to express the degree to which that's true, especially with what you said about match 4 games generally. I'm checking out the rest of the video now; honestly I was kinda wiped after the jam and didn't get much opportunity to actually look at the other games, and I'm a big fan of this "portrait + dialogue commentary" style of video (I don't know if you're familiar with a "MegamanOmega", but he uses a similar style and has done a couple videos on Danmakufu scripts I made a while back). Plus the editing/showcasing for each game is definitely on point. So yeah, just...thanks for doing this. Major feels good moment for me and I'm sure a lot of other people too.

Glad to report that we're fixing that post-jam; I'm going to put proper effect descriptions in the first level where a mechanic is introduced, and there's supposed to be a whole other icon for most of them that helps illustrate better (it...didn't show up due to a surprise bug I didn't notice I'd introduced with a late change). Dunno how many people will come back to have another look, but it can't hurt.

I forgot to enable window scaling AGAIN after messing that up for sunflower maintenance; it's like a flag in the godot editor or something, super easy. I told myself I'd do it next time after sunflower maintenance, but whoops :v

Lotta stuff that just slips through during game jams, I suppose. Also got a few more levels planned (they're super easy to make), and something of a change to the RNG so it can't give you long runs without a specific tile. It probably helps that I don't really play this sort of tile-matcher either; this is also why each level unlocks two more, so you can just skip over stuff you can't/don't want to bash your head against.

Yeah, the level select screen had a minimum of time and thought put into it; definitely needs to be more obvious that you click the level text. There's a reason we've put that in four separate places now >_>. Having it be keyboard controlled would probably be even better, although my wildly optimistic projection for post-jam is that there's so many levels that scrolling through with a keyboard is a chore.

The tile inversion attack is definitely not supposed to stuff out matches; that'll probably be some kind of race condition bug. The tiles themselves, though, are in a weird spot. Some of the later levels DO take advantage of the tile inversion by having triggers on one half of a pair but not the other, and...well, originally they were placeholder dev assets and I then found that while playing them increased the demands on the player's attention since you have to focus on differentiating them, failing to do so and messing up a placement felt frustrating but in the same way Seija screwing you over in any other way felt frustrating. That plus time constraints plus the levels that needed them made me ultimately decide to see how leaving them in would go, and I think they're just "part of the game" now, for better or worse. I might be doing a couple updates post-jam (at a minimum to make it obvious how to start playing ._.) but ultimately I don't think I'll be changing those.

You are absolutely not wrong that doing that essentially breaks a cardinal rule of match puzzler design, but if there's a place to try doing that and see what happens, it's a game jam game.

Since I completely overlooked how confusing this would be on booting the game up for the first time: The text that says "Level 1" in the top left is, in fact clickable, and does, in fact, start level 1.

Whoops, missed that and haven't been here for a while. Should be done now.

So I've played around with this a bit...and I'm not sure if the alternative (i.e. keeping track of the current music time and returning to it) is actually better, since when you die the music changes to the first course character so you don't get continuity either way and it feels disjointed (especially if you die quickly).

Plus, one of the draws of the current system is that you can tell how fast you're going through the level via audio cue (i.e. which part of the song you're up to tells you what pace you're on). Maintaining that requires that the music time be set to 0 when the game time is, so doing anything to maintain the position in the song would remove it.

(Note that in practice mode, where the timer doesn't reset on death and the audio cue thing is irrelevant, the music actually doesn't reset when you die. Additionally I'm planning to add at least one other mode where the timer keeps going on death and this will use the full soundtrack in the same way as well)

I did try several other options, but I didn't think any of them were an improvement over the status quo. If there was another solution you were thinking of, I can potentially give that a go instead. (For after the jam is finished, of course :v)