itch.io

Hey Lava Eater, thank you so much for the kind review! I'm very excited to keep working on this game. I have a whole story sketched out and loads of ideas for new puzzles mechanics.

I love this so much! Really focused and polished execution of the concept.

Hey Wilsk, thanks for the review! Would you mind sharing your Firefox and OS version so I can try and narrow down the source of the stuttering issue I’ve been experiencing with Firefox. I’m on an M3 MacBook Pro, so perhaps it’s specific to Firefox on Mac.

Hey Pyrious, thanks for the feedback!

I definitely agree with the difficulty spiking too hard with the rotating blocks, most of those puzzles were made very late in the Jam and I didn't have enough time to get people to playtest and refine them like the earlier levels.

Regarding the music, I actually wrote a few more tracks but didn't have time to integrating them into the music system which had already ballooned significantly in complexity as I'd never implemented an audio system before. I hope you were able to locate the mute button in the settings / level selection menu and listen to your own music after it got grating.

If you didn't already you should check out the last level "Transcendence" as I'm particularly fond of how ridiculous it is.

Thanks for the bug reports! Unfortunately I discovered both of those problems after the submission deadline. 

The later levels definitely feel qualitatively different from the earlier levels because they were all made on the last day after I was happy with the QoL features in the UI. I think I made the multiple player character levels just a few hours before the the deadline. As a result they didn't get any real play testing and so don't feel as refined / intentional in trying to teach you something as the earlier puzzles.

I've also realized that the "turning" blocks are very very hard to intuitively reason about their behavior and they should be used a lot more sparingly and require a lot more training puzzles to teach you tricks about how they work, especially with how they interact with walls. Because if you can't intuitively reason about them like you can with Ice then you resort to brute forcing like you mentioned.

I think I few things could help with the apparently complexity of the turning blocks, a step debugger, and a "ghost" projection that plays out once cycle ahead would help a lot I think, but in general they need to get tuned down.

It's also hard to visually distinguish between the clockwise and anti-clockwise rotating blocks, I think their color schemes should be inverted so it's easier to tell at a glance which is which.

Hey SecretPocketCat, thanks for the review! The angle of the camera was definitely something I went back and forth on. I too struggle with messing up Left / Right and with the player character facing Left->Right across the screen for most puzzle’s there’s an implicit 90 degree rotation you have to do in your head. I ended up leaving it because a) in most games the character goes from Left to Right, it’s an intuitive goal for players and b) the finish tile was more easily visible in most levels from a side on angle. I think I’ll make this a configurable option post Jam as once you have all 4 commands the starting orientation of the player doesn’t matter mechanically. Perhaps being able to issue commands with WASD/Arrow keys might also help.

As for the brute forcing, I definitely feel the same way for some of the later levels. I wanted even the complex levels to have at least one simple, but inefficient solution, and hoped the alacrity goal would drive people towards finding the faster solution after discovering the simple one. There is one level “Spinors” which is intentionally so complex with all the spinning pieces that brute forcing its 2 command solution was kinda intentional, I didn’t consider that it might have a demotivating effect on people given it’s right at the start of the rotating pieces puzzle section.

I think as you pointed out, a step debugger is really needed once the  rotating pieces are introduced as the player moves so fast it’s hard to grok how the rotation and action plan are interacting. That and drag and drop I think are the biggest missing QoL features.

I love this! Very clever use of phase as a puzzle mechanic. Quite a few head scratchers in there.

Hey Joda, thanks for the early review. Now that the final build is submitted there are way more puzzles and even more challenges for each level.

Hey moshyfawn, thanks for the feedback! Would you mind elaborating more about the reset button? Are you referring to the button next to the start button? It should be enabled (and colored red) whenever the player is executing the command cycle. If not, would you mind sharing your browser version with me so I can try and reproduce the issue?

> In terms of experience, there are cases where you can complete the game in less than the maximum number of commands, which is currently never acknoledged by the game; a little feedback on this could make the game even better.

I totally agree and this is the first thing I'm implementing tomorrow morning. The maximum number of commands is always one less than the number of commands required to walk straight to the finish but most the puzzles (other than the beginning ones) are definitely possible to finish in fewer commands. I plan on adding two "challenges" to each level, 1) The minimum numbers of commands, 2) The minimum number of steps. This should help communicate more clearly to the player that smaller solutions are both possible and desirable.

> There aren’t too many levels, and they aren’t too difficult either, but in the possible future an option to speed through the steps might come in handy if you get stuck and have to try several times.

Please come back at the end of the Bevy Game Jam (Monday) and check it out again, there will be lots more levels.  I  have loads sketched out on paper.

> A restart button and the end and audio on/off would also be nice.
I plan on adding a Puzzle Selection screen. With the audio toggle, do you mean just music, or the sound effects as well?