itch.io

Aww thank you so much for the kind words. Honestly just totally made my day you would take the time to play and then write such thoughtful feedback!! 😊

I think you're spot on about the problems with the payoff, and gameplay<->theme disconnect. Puts it into words better than I could. I'm still interested in exploring ways to use the output of piccross puzzles to build something bigger, but don't want it to feel forced. Time to take a step back to the drawing board I think and apply these learnings. I may take you up on that offer to test again if I get anywhere with it!!

Picture Cross Towns

Thank you SOOO much for the really thoughtful and detailed feedback. I really appreciate it. ❤️ It's funny, I tried easily a dozen variations on the 5-block separator and just couldn't find anything that felt right to me either and settled on what you saw. I'll take another crack at it with your suggestion. I also really like your other suggestions for the tutorial text, x-shade, row/column sizing, and being able to rotate the result, and see if I can track down that greying out bug (my code for that is a bit messy, not too surprised a bug managed to sneak in..). 

Again, thank you for all the great ideas (☞ﾟ∀ﾟ)☞ you're awesome.

I started working on this a little while ago. Personally, I think the concept did not turn out as well as I hoped it would and I fell out of love with it but forced myself to finish and release it anyways as I thought it would be good experience (it's my biggest Unity project so far). I would really love to hear what you think about it, both good & bad.

Is there something you think could have been done better? Did you understand how to play? Should I just have stuck to standard picross? Did you encounter any bugs?

https://imwolfgang.itch.io/picture-cross-towns

Really lovely art and music. Creates a wonderful relaxing feel. The wind & orb fx are really nice too. The music slowing down & screen darkening as you get hurt are a nice touch.

During the tutorial, I feel like you could get rid of the instruction text after the player has collected an orb while avoiding enemies. Keeping it on screen made me think I was doing something wrong (that maybe I wasn't doing it correctly or why else would the game still be telling me the same thing).

I also wasn't sure about the overall objective. Is it to survive as long as possible (get a highscore)? Or is there an ending? If there is, I didn't manage to survive that long lol. If it's a highscore, just a little counter in the corner of how many orbs I have collected, or if it is reach a fixed amount then a little progress bar would help me know how I am tracking.

Cute :) Made it to the boss

Sometimes it felt like I take damage even though it doesn't look like I hit the enemy. Think the hitboxes could be a little more generous (= smaller). I find it often helps to have hitboxes be a little smaller than the sprite to avoid that kind of thing.

Took me a couple tries to understand how to play - think the instructions would really benefit from an illustrated example. As a visual learner I think I would have understood it a lot quicker just seeing an example.

I like the general format of having to get from 1 word to another. My issue with the current setup is that it doesn't really feel like I am building up to something. Since I just need the last letter of my last word to match the first letter of the solution, I could theoretically often get it in 1 go so I found myself entering whatever at the start and only caring / planning for success on my last word.

Hope you make something of it, I still play wordle daily and am always happy to see a new word game!

You solve Picross / Nonogram type puzzles to build cute little towns. That's basically it, that's the game.

Normally with these types of puzzles you create little pixel art images so this game is an experiment to see if the puzzle gameplay is fun when used to produce a different type of result.

↑ this turns to this ↓

 Going to try and release a little demo on Itch soon. What do you think, is the concept interesting, would you play it?

Wow a game a month, that's intense! Congrats on finishing another one. Managed to beat planet recovery force on my first try, although things got pretty hectic there at the end! I pretty much agree with the feedback you already got that you listed.

Terrier Tennis was really cute, especially liked the dogs in the crowd. A majestic shepherd losing to an inferior terrier though? Shocking!

Nice game! I like that everything has visual & sound feedback fx like even the ball hitting the walls particles. I think the blue/red blocks would benefit from a partially broken visual so you see how many times you have left to hit them to break. On 1-5 I got an (R) thing from the colored block but not sure what it did. Then I got stuck with the ball on the right side just going up and down in a straight line along the wall without a way for me to unblock it other than lose a life. I think for that reason games of this type usually apply a directional force based on the area of the paddle the ball is hit (so for example since I was hitting it on the far right side, and right direction impulse).

Maybe an illustration or something would help explain the idea and how it works?

Played through to the end, really fun and well made!

• Yep, the boss dialogue and his battle are definitely the highlight! Really funny and engaging.
• I liked the reset functionality that counts my resets (took me 13 to finish). Fun way of keeping track of progress / fails.
• Took me a minute on the first screen to figure out I need to press E to advance the dialogue. Maybe that instruction is given somewhere but I missed it. Think it would be nice for space to also advance the dialogue, and have a little graphic of a space/E key in the dialogue corner to let players know what to do.
• There was a big jump in difficulty from level 1 -> 2. Understandable for a short game jam game, for a longer game I would like the difficulty to ramp up more slowly over a larger set of levels.
• When jumping while running against a wall, the player doesn't jump as high as when standing a couple pixels back. I assume due to physics friction or something? Would have liked my player to jump equally high when running against a wall.
• The barriers have been mentioned already, but me too I thought they would benefit from a pixel graphic that looks impassable (not translucent).