itch.io

Great entry, really polished and very addictive, the weapon upgrades are cool and wanting to try out the next upgrade really gives it that "one more try" feeling. Love the art style too, it brings the old bitmap bros games to mind :)

World rendering is fantastic, well done. Gameplay is pretty simple but you have so many elements in place and working, it's a really impressive achievement in such a small amount of time. Nice work!

I couldn't wall jump reliably enough to get up the right side of the maze but you've got everything in there, pickups, animation, sound effects, lighting effect - nice work!

Dude this is ridiculously good. I was going to gripe about the camera and suggest you should be able to drag the view around with the middle mouse button, then I dragged the view around with the middle mouse button so I have no criticisms left. Incredible job, great entry!

Really nice looking and runs well. Controls are odd but when you get used to them you can control it okay. The game is simplistic but the hide and seek mechanic is a clever way to use the lighting as a gameplay mechanic, and given the time frame it's impressive to get this sort of rendering working from scratch, good job!

Strangely compelling, the loop of panning for gold, collecting gold from the auto-panner and from the processor and cashing it in is very satisfying. I wanted there to be more progression in the tech tree but for 9 days work you've already achieved a lot there. Nice entry!

Good work, difficulty is a little extreme, I think that 1.5% speed up you mentioned definitely should go! 

I love the style of it, the controls really do make it hard to enjoy though. As backwardspy commented, I'd love to have a go at a version with the controls refined. Well done getting so much done in 9 days!

Wow, really great work. I love the art style, I felt like I was playing an old software rendered 3D game but with fully dynamic lighting and an impossibly smooth frame rate. Sound and music were good too. The only suggestion / criticism I'd offer is that there's one sound effect, I think it's an impact sound, which doesn't fit well. Sounds like a lever or button being activated or something like that, the first few times I heard it I was convinced something had changed in the world and I hunted around to find out what. Eventually I worked out it was just me knocking into stuff :D

Nice, I liked the presentation, very clever lighting effect. I'm not sure if smiling is the appropriate response to the phenomenological theme of the work but it made me smile anyway.

Fun game, nice work! I liked the difficulty balance, very easily to suddenly find you're nearly out of energy but there's generous amount of health pickups if you can get back to them. I couldn't work out if something odd is going on with the bullets - I felt like the occasional bullet was much faster than normal but couldn't really be sure. I did get stuck at one point, collided quite fast with the corner of a wall and then I couldn't move away, just rotate on the spot.

Great job, really impressive. Love the style, love the music, great SFX, very satisfying shotgun. Really captures the great things about Wolfenstein 3D era shooters well. My kids said the graphics are better than super mario 64 too - that's some high praise!

Great fun, love the art style and the dancing flowers are such a good touch. Music is awesome too!

Fun game, I like the legs / slingshot switch. Nice transition after falling in water. I got stuck after I fell in water though as the pills didn't seem to respawn?

Thanks for giving it a go - seems to be a pretty consistent theme in feedback that the puzzles are too puzzling. It's disappointing but I knew that it might be an issue, I was hoping with the documentation and solution guides that it would click for more people. I'm not sure yet if I'll do much more work on the game now the jam's over but if I do I'll be trying to make it more accessible and will probably start by seeking more feedback from people who were stumped to try to make sure I'm solving the right problems.

Nice entry, good work!

I got just past the first kilometre before being destroyed, then the game exited - not sure if that's intended or a bug but a chance to see my score and how far I got before being booted out would have been nice!

I'm not sure many of the pickups were very useful, it wasn't always obvious what they were doing and things like speed-up (I think that's what the blue/yellow pickup is) don't seem very helpful when going faster doesn't seem to help. I'd suggest pickups that restore the train's health / armor, temporarily provide immunity, make guns more powerful (could be short-lived or permanent), temporarily stop the gun from overheating.  It was also a bit non-intuitive having to right click the pickups to collect them, having them automatically fly into the player or shoot to collect/activate would have worked better imo.

I couldn't run the tool either so I had a look at the source code to review your submission. Nice work there. I'd have probably used some more of the STL for a tool like this (e.g. std::vector<entry_t> to hold the list of entries, and std::regex could be really helpful), but I understand that sometimes it's a deliberate choice not to use the STL and that's perfectly valid too. One thing I would definitely change is to make sure you initialize your variables (especially the global ones) - it never hurts and can avoid some tricky bugs if the code (or the people using it) do something unexpected.

Yes, it's definitely not microcode. The in-game CPU is not-so-loosely modeled on the 6502 which uses a PLA to activate the signals and control wires based on the output of the timing logic and opcode decoding. I know a little bit about how it works but I don't actually know what that form of microarchitecture is called. I don't think I've ever seen it named. "Hardwiring" seems like a useful name for it :)

Thanks for trying it out Loubi, it's definitely a game for nerds! I've thought about how it could be made more accessible, and even how it could casually teach people about microarchitecture, but I haven't had any ideas at all about how to make it less nerdy :D

Audio was on my "to-do" list for the jam but I ran out of time. I have code lying around to play sounds which I could have used, but I don't have much in the way of sound effects and music to hand, just some fantasy RPG stuff which wouldn't have fit the theme at all.

You wrote a game on Windows, in assembly, in 9 days. Mind blowing!

I enjoyed the theme, presentation is pretty good for a jam, nice attention to detail through the menus. In game the sprite blending's a little messy. Gameplay would have benefited from an extra lane, a more pulled out field of view (so you could see further in front / behind), and having slower cars in front of you as obstacles sometimes.

But overall very well done (IN ASM)!

ETA: The font is fantastic, best font I've seen in the jam!

Wow, thanks so much for the kind comments. I definitely agree the learning curve is too steep. More gently graded puzzles, including puzzles which focus on using the individual circuits before having to combine them to build opcodes is something I've thought about after submitting. Another idea I had early was to include an RPG / quest element in the overworld which would serve to slowly introduce the different parts of the microarchitecture, but that proved to be completely unrealistic in the 9 days of the jam. I might develop it further post jam but for now I want to focus on reviewing as many other entries as possible!

A tag as suggested by backwardspy, and/or a branch to continue development. (I went with a tag for my repo.)

Thanks for the comment @Megarev, but I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say TI console? Is it possible you meant this comment for another entry?

Can I piggy-back on this topic with a related two part question?

1. I would like to provide a solution guide for my entry - I'm pretty sure this would be within the rules and spirit of the jam rules, but I'd appreciate having it confirmed. 
2. If I am allowed to provide a solution guide can I add it to my downloads on the itch.io page? If I understand correctly there's a technical requirement to get a token from Javid to allow changes to the files during the judging period?

Thanks Tezza. I knew the puzzles might be a bit hard to break into, I tried with the docs and some UI tweaks to make them more accessible but seems I've missed the mark a bit. I'll put together some solution guides which I think will be okay to share during the judging of the jam, then I've got a couple of thoughts about how to improve the experience after the jam too 

Thanks so much for this great feedback, I was really pleased with how the puzzle mode came together and I'm thrilled to hear other people are enjoying it!

The scroller makes it!

Clever take on the theme, nice.

Nice execution, looks and sounds really good and a good range of robots with distinct behaviors.

Replying to myself - was confirmed in Discord that this should work with EmuTOS

Very nice, took a few turns to understand the subroutines but once that clicked it was fun trying to plan optimal (and correct) actions.

Nice entry - got a good "one more try" thing going on there. It's brutal that the oil doesn't respawn when you are destroyed, I got so close to completing the last screen I got to on my first attempt, but then I died and I'd picked up all the oil already and I ran out of energy on like the third attempt.

Do you know if your submission will work on Hatari if using EmuTOS?

Great take on the theme, clever to do it with a spreadsheet, but I couldn't actually try it out.

I couldn't make a copy when following the link from the project page on itch (the google sheets menus are not visible and I don't know how to make a copy without using the File menu in google sheets), and I couldn't obviously edit the sheet from your link, and the link in the Enigma.txt download just gives me a "Page not found" when copied and pasted into Chrome.

Thanks, I figured that one out, it's fixed in release 0.0.5 :)

Oops, sounds like I need to check the collision flags on some of the tiles, thanks for the report!

It's using my own framework (which is heavily inspired by the pixel game engine's API).