itch.io

Thanks for giving it a try. I’m still working on a complete overhaul to the design aspect of the game, albeit I haven’t made much progress lately because I’ve been focusing on personal things.

Previously, most of the changes I focused on were to do with quality-of-life improvements. Those are still important, but I realized earlier this year that I’m going to need to stop constraining myself to whatever Naev came up with, go back to the roots of why I once thought Naev was an interesting project, and develop things my own way. There’s a design document here if you’re interested:

https://github.com/naikari/naikari/wiki/Design-Document

You mention the map; that’s something that I’ve already completely scrapped on Git and have a plan to redesign from the ground up. I’m planning on a UQM-inspired design of “constellation” clusters, with 4 major regions: the Empire in the center, the Frontier to the west, a mysterious region far north, and the Nebula to the east. I’ll of course be posting the update (0.13.0) here when it’s ready, so feel free to check back when that time comes, if the design I’m working toward now interests you.

I think I should point out that some of the puzzles are very strongly not colorblind-accessible, namely the “code” puzzle and the “balloon” puzzle, and in this case that feels rather arbitrary and unnecessary. You’re basically just not allowing dichromats to play the game (and possibly making the game more difficult than it should be for some anomalous trichromats, thô that’s hard to verify since anomalous trichromacy varies so widely).

There’s a number of ways to fix this, but one very easy way would be to include distinct patterns and/or shapes alongside the color information.

Thanks! It does have mobile controls, only visible if your device has a touchscreen.

Thanks! The faster diagonals is an interesting one: the way I programmed it involved applying forces multiple times in nested conditionals (largely stemming from GDevelop’s very unfortunate lack of support for an “else” condition), so the otherwise simple math would have involved complicating or rewriting the code so much that I just decided to leave it. Seeing the end result, I’m ok with that now.

Thanks! I did consider putting music in (and actually composed a basic music track before scrapping it because it was a rendition of public domain music I decided I didn’t want the baggage of), but ultimately decided that music would get in the way of the Atari style, given that most Atari 2600 games didn’t have music. And besides, there wasn’t anything interesting I was going to do with music, so it felt rather superfluous. I guess hypothetically if I revisit the question in the future then the music could exist to speed up as the workload increases to its maximum, but I feel like in an optimal play, you already get that auditory response from starting to hear the “crack” sound effect more and more often.

This game seems real nice, but it’s badly in need of some tutorialization. I get the impression that there’s some sort of interaction between the different buildings with the resources on the left, but I can’t quite figure out what it is. Also, the goal is unclear.

This is a real cool idea for a game, but, uh… why is the horizontal recoil for the cannon backwards? 😅

It’s still really good and I’m giving you a good rating regardless, but that’d be something you might want to improve on after the jam, if you are so inclined.

Thanks for the comment! For an abstract arcade game like this, I don’t think a more concrete story would be appropriate, but it does have a subtle story. The story is of an invisibly disabled worker who is pushed so far beyond what can reasonably be expected of them that they inevitably fail. Hammers are an abstract representation of workload, and the tiles in the game are an abstract representation of the worker’s ability to do the work (i.e. spoons in spoon theory). The conclusion of the story is, of course, the worker getting fired, and then getting blamed for it by their employer.

I could of course spell this out in the game, but I feel it works better as an abstract story.

Thanks for the comment! I don’t think your suggestion would be in-line with the game I set out to make, however. Bombs dropping along with hammers would give the impression that your boss is deliberately malicious, when what I’m actually intending to portray is a boss who’s so indifferent to their employees’ welbeeing and/or so ableist that they overestimate the abilities of workers, push them to work harder than they really can, and then blame the worker when they fail to live up to the unattainable standard set for them.

Thus, this game is designed in such a way that if it was the case that you could rush indefinitely, you would be able to not only work indefinitely, but do so rather easily; the workload never increases to a point that this would even be difficult if that assumption held true. Deliberately, the only reason it doesn’t hold true is because rushing breaks the tiles you’re walking on, and because you can’t even move at walking speed in a location where there are no tiles left.

Basically, in Tile Crunch, you’re playing as an invisibly disabled worker whose disability isn’t being taken seriously. Able-bodied workers, by contrast, would control the same, except their tiles would never crack. In other words, tiles in this game represent the same thing as spoons in spoon theory.

I’d like to see something done about the fact that it seems to be so beneficial to spend long periods of time standing around in empty rooms waiting for the stability bar to fill up. I don’t mind that being possible, but I feel like either it shouldn’t require standing still to get that effect, or there should be some sort of obvious soft time pressure to deter this as a strategy.

Also, please please consider changing the controls to work on key/mouse button press, not release. Making it at release causes the controls to feel delayed.

That said, this is a nice game.

That’s perfectly valid, and I’m glad you made a game that you like to play! I should clarify, improvising solutions isn’t something I dislike in principle. Actually, some amount of that is found in The Incredible Machine. It’s more the perception that I might be handed an impossible puzzle (informed by the text in the instructions) and the fact that as far as I could tell I couldn’t just retry the same puzzle with tweaks made to my setup.

If indeed it’s generally possible to beat a level, I’d highly recommend you just get rid of the note that it might be impossible. If there’s a rare chance of something not working, I’d consider that to be a bug and try to work on solutions to that, rather than warning the player about it.

I’m not sure what you mean when you say that the levels repeat until you beat them. Looking again, I noticed that clicking the “Give Up” button in normal mode over and over again seemed to randomly switch between a couple different basic puzzle templates with randomly distributed objects. I assume the “levels” you’re referring to are those templates? But from my perspective, this is effectively randomly generated puzzles that you can’t repeat. For example, suppose I come up with a solution that’s very close to succeeding, but not quite; I’d like to be able to repeat from where I set it exactly, adjust further, and see if that leads to a solution. Unless there’s some button I didn’t find other than the “Give Up” button, that doesn’t seem to be possible currently.

This is a cool idea, but I don’t feel it’s living up to its full potential with its current design. With the repetitiveness of clicking the towers to cool them, this seems like it’d be best served as an idle game (where the clicking action slowly becomes obsolete as you start to buy upgrades instead), but this game doesn’t do that, so it just kind of feels dragged out as I constantly click on buttons for several minutes without really any strategy at all.

This is a very good idea, kind of similar to The Incredible Machine (a game I loved in my childhood), but some basic aspects of the design stop this from being compelling for me.

Firstly, having a message tell me upfront that some of the puzzles might not be solvable is rather demotivating, and if that’s true, you probably ought to fix that. The simplest way is to move away from the random generation aspect and hand-design puzzles.

Secondly, I didn’t like that I couldn’t retry any given puzzle. To compare to The Incredible Machine (the game this reminds me of), that game lets you run and reset any given puzzle as many times as you need to, and the way I used to play that game was to start by seeing what happens if I did nothing, then decide from there what exactly I should do to achieve the goal. Here, I’m instead expected to just guess what arrangement of things might lead to a solution, try it once, and then give up, which is further demotivation on top of already feeling demotivated not knowing if there’s a solution at all.

The idea is there, and it’s a good one with a lot of potential, so if you are at all inclined to develop it further after the jam is over, I would highly encourage it.

This is an overall decent puzzle platformer idea, albeit feels more like a techdemo rather than a complete game, but the connection to the theme (the game glitching out at the end) feels rather forced to me. It has a lot of potential if you were to keep developing it after the jam, thô.

I’m real surprised by how amazingly done this is. What a fun and original concept for a puzzle platformer, and a creative use of the theme! The only weak points in my view are the graphics (which are somewhat mismatched) and that the spikes seem to have too big of a collision box for how they look (making it hard to judge how close I can get), but this is overall an absolutely solid game.

Solid arcade game, great concept, and great use of the theme! Nice work!

Now that I’ve actually been able to play this, I have to say that this is really well designed, especially from an audiovisual standpoint and from a feel standpoint. Playing this, it seemed like I could feel the main character’s desperation and weakness as they’re slowly killed by the poison.

The ending was a bit confusing and felt rushed with it just immediately going to an end screen with a bunch of text, but overall, solid work!

That link seems to work. Thanks!

I’m real happy that I was able to pull this off. My girlfriend has been playing this too and has even gotten competitive on the high score list! I’ll be real curious in the coming years to see just how much money it’s possible to get. 🙂

Thanks, I’m glad you liked it! 😄

Thanks! It can sometimes be hard to explain the struggle of burnout, and I’m really happy that I’ve managed to convey some of that in this little game. 🙂

I’m glad you liked it! And yup, learning to cope with that downward spiral to delay the inevitable as long as possible was exactly the game design I was going for. 🙂 I didn’t consider a tapping method myself, so maybe I should experiment with something like that!

Haha, yes, that does lead to a faster gameplay loop, at the cost of more tile crunching. Glad you liked the game!

Thanks, I’m glad you liked it! 🙂

Thanks! I’m glad to hear it had an impact. 😄

Unfortunately this game doesn’t seem to work for me; instead of whatever I’m supposed to see, I just see a splash of pink. Unfortunate because the screenshots look nice and the concept sounds interesting.

Not a fan of the controls myself (I prefer arrow keys), so I doubt I’ll finish it, but this game is pretty good!

This is pretty good!

Not a bad concept. Reminds me a little of The Incredible Machine, just physics based, and I really liked that game as a kid. That said, I think this could use some more fleshing out; all the levels feel rather samey to me, and while it’s nice that it gets harder over time, the lack of new mechanics or new approaches to the setup got me bored after a few levels. There’s a bunch of potential ways you could fix this, but one idea that comes to mind is simply to give levels more complex layouts with static collision objects or something, rather than just different flag positions and number of flags.

I also found it rather annoying that the little balls you use to control the plank thing push each other around while you’re constructing the setup.

I’m a bit confused by this game. I’m glad you’ve added keyboard controls and I can play it, but what’s the strategy supposed to be? As far as I can tell, all I can do is hold the D key while mashing the mouse button on the rocks; it seems like all I can do is very slowly walk to the right by holding the D key and delete rocks by clicking on them. Is there a strategy or some aspect to the controls that I’m missing?

I didn’t get anything about society’s stability from the story to be honest, and I find the premise rather abstract, considering humans will never be around to experience a dying Sun (in fact, the Earth will turn into a completely inhospitable Venus-like planet long before the Sun.

Which, again, is not necessarily a problem, but its impact can only be as strong as any other unrealistic completely fictional idea. I brought up The Lord of the Rings not because I think your story has to be that complicated, but because that story is pure fiction and yet gets people fully invested in its world. The fact of the matter is if you want quick and efficient investment into your story, it needs to be grounded. The less realistic your story is, the more work you need to do before it really makes an impact.

I think if a dying Sun is a really interesting idea to you as a sort of fantasy horror concept, you should spend more time really creating a fantasy world that a player can get invested in despite its lack of connection to the real world. Alternatively, create a sci-fi scenario that at least somewhat creates a veneer of realism. As it is, you show a flat Earth – something so obviously at odds with known scientific reality that it’s practically a meme at this point – and a giant room with a giant lightbulb. If you at least made your universe somewhat grounded by saying that humans moved to Mars or something, and if the World Government established some kind of nuclear-powered light-producing satellite or whatever, I might be able to suspend my disbelief enough to take your story seriously with less investment.

I have some rather mixed feelings about this game.

Firstly, I’ll say that the graphics and audio are spectacularly done. No complaints with that, 5/5. But my complaints have to do with the rest of the game.

This game is basically a slightly unorthodox kinetic visual novel, and that’s a decent framework, but it’s not very up-front with that. In my first playthru, I spent a great deal of time wondering when I was going to play the game. The part that gives you a menu and tells you to click everything, most egregiously, felt like a forced tutorial for some kind of menu system that you might find in a different kind of game. It put me in a mindset of tending to ignore the story you were trying to tell.

And as for that story, given that it’s tasked with carrying the whole game, I’m not really impressed, either with the story in general, or with its connection to the “unstable” theme. Firstly, the “unstable” theme… while there’s a token mention of an “unstable climate”, that’s not actually what the story is about. The actual story is about a worldwide government conspiracy where the sun is secretly a giant lightbulb in a giant room that the flat Earth is on the floor of.

And to be perfectly honest, I find that story just in general to be rather uninspired and uncompelling. How is this supposed to make me feel? Because I don’t feel anything. There’s this message that’s shoved in your face the whole time about how you shouldn’t trust the World Government, but… in the real world, there is no World Government.

Now, it’s certainly possible to make this into a compelling story. Just take a look at, for example, The Lord of the Rings, which manages to make a compelling part of its narrative the dangers of the fictional One Ring. But it doesn’t do that just by painting the One Ring as one-dimensionally obviously bad. We see both in The Hobbit and in The Lord of the Rings multiple occasions where Bilbo Baggins and Frodo Baggins are actually materially helped by the power of the One Ring. It has to be destroyed and its power cannot be trusted, but we can fully understand how attempting to use it against Sauron might seem to characters in-universe like a good idea, even without the corruption of its direct influence.

This game, by contrast, seems to pretty much be going out of its way to paint anyone in-universe who believes the World Government as stupid sheep who don’t think for themselves. Which I suppose might feel good to real-world conspiracy theorists, but doesn’t make for a particularly good story.

This game is way more fun than it has any right to be with how unserious it is. Genuinely, thô, the gameplay is simple, yet addictive, and a great use of the theme. Rather impressive!

This game is fine, but I find it gets a bit stale after awhile, around the point where you have what is effectively a shotgun pattern. After that points, extra bullets don’t change the way the game feels at all, they just increase the rate that you get points. And with how easy the game is, I don’t feel particularly incentivized to play for a high score.

Also, I should say that it took me quite a lot of fiddling to figure out both what the controls are and what you’re supposed to do with the nuts. Some tutorialization would really help here; a simple example would just be to include the character the player controls shooting a nut in the cutscene at the start.

I’m guessing you didn’t get to the point of actually breaking the tiles. 🙂

In fact, my game is quite similar to yours in its theme. The black spots are actually slowly forming cracks in the tiles on the floor, not dust. If a tile gets too cracked, it breaks completely, leaving a black hole where your movement is slowed down tremendously. Holding the space bar to rush in this game represents pushing yourself to work excessively hard, and broken tiles represent burnout as a result of that. The overall effect of this is to create a downward spiral as you try to keep up with your workload (represented by catching the falling hammers), but the level of workload requires you to push yourself to an unsustainable degree. As holes accumulate, it gets harder and harder to get around the room until eventually, the burnout is too much and you fail to catch one of the hammers in time.

Incidentally, falling in the holes was my first idea, but I decided that slowing the player down instead would have a stronger connection to the message of the game, like forcing yourself to do work that you really can’t do and making very little progress as a result.

I played the gd.games link for your game, personally.

Honestly, I think it’d be better if you started by going back to the basics of tower defense games, where the enemies follow a single set path, and then tweaked it as necessary from there. There needs to be some sort of strategy the player can employ to exploit the way the enemies move. They way you did it, there’s no possibility to do that, because the enemies come from all directions and simply move in a basically straight line to the core. That necessarily means that the best strategy will always be to concentrate as much firepower as possible right next to the core, since that’s the only place all enemies are guaranteed to go.