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I'm glad you pulled through! I can't take credit for the sounds as those are the main things I didn't make, myself. But, I remember how different the game felt before sounds were added. Feedback. Is. Everything. As for the song, I actually ran into it completely by chance. I wasn't even looking for it. I thought it was perfect for the game, and thank goodness the license on it was compatible with what we were allowed to use for this jam because I can't imagine the game with any other song.

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Woah. That was crazy. I really enjoyed this game. I read you had sent a message to #jam-general about designing puzzles, and as a guy who loves designing puzzles and playing puzzles I thought I should try it out. This game broke my brain.

I read some people mentioning the steep learning curve and I agree. It's really steep, but I think more than it just being steep, what is happening is that some of these puzzles aren't as difficult as they are intimidating. Here's an example:

This puzzle introduces three new pieces of information to the player:

• Some buttons need to be held down instead of just pressed once.
• Boxes exist, can be pushed around, and are also effected by the chromatic aberration.
• Chromatic aberration can have more than only two different states. (That is: You don't just flip flop between two different positions per object.)

This is a lot of information to spring on the player in one level. In addition this puzzle is essentially two puzzles in one. The first half is the part I've drawn a red box around: The puzzle of moving the box up to the button (including its other half). The second half is the part I've drawn a blue box around: The puzzle of moving one half of the box down to the other button (which requires figuring out which half to keep and which half to move). Keep in mind that you need to do all of this while maneuvering the player character, which already requires some brainpower. So I was at maximum brainpower here.

When I first saw green added into the mix, I considered stopping. But then again, I realized that the level was just intimidating because of the amount of information I had to juggle in my brain. It was three separate puzzles, so I started isolating them in my brain and ignoring parts that didn't matter for each mini-puzzle. I think especially when there are more colors in the mix, having three or even four possible positions for each object becomes incredibly difficult to keep track of. Especially in the final two levels where you don't even know where one of the positions is. Those two levels where the screen would be tinted showing you only where two of the possible positions were were hellish. In the first one, I didn't even realize what was happening so when I saw the green character appear, disappear, and then appear near its target (on accident). I thought it was a bug. So when I got to the final level, I had to figure out through a lot of trial and error that there were hidden positions for each element in each color (which I should've learned in the previous level) and where those positions were. It really felt like the puzzle game equivalent of a dark souls boss.

I'm really happy I powered through and beat the game. The ending was really cute.

I hope this comment isn't overwhelming or too long. But I really liked this game and I think it could be improved significantly if the levels introduced new concepts one at a time, focused on solving one problem at a time, and maybe limited how much information you needed to keep in your head per level. You can make a full game with multiple sets of levels with what you have already. Thank you so much for making this game. I had a great time with it!

Thanks for trying it out! I'm glad it felt good. 

It definitely can be finished but as it is right now, it really doesn't build up the mechanics and guide you towards coming up with a strategy for beating it. Some people have figured out one strategy that involves resetting the game (but that's not the one I think most people use). Mathematically speaking, I don't know if the game is beatable given any possible configuration. So I do believe at certain points, enough mistakes can be made that the game becomes unbeatable.

Thanks for your comment!

Thanks for trying it out and thanks for the comment! Which game are you referring to with the robot ninja, by the way?

Congrats! 5 buttons is the lowest button count I've heard yet for the game! I'm glad you liked the button slicing.

Re: difficulty: I agree. I think if I were to fully flesh this game out, it would need a reset button and some sort of progression system so I could introduce the slice button later. As for joining buttons, the issue with that is that it introduces the possibility to create concave polygons. This particular polygon splitting algorithm only works with convex ones. I believe destroying polygons below a certain size might be the better option for reducing polygon count, but I'll need to test it out. 

You're right about the math thing. At one point I looked at it and thought "Maybe there's a way to prove that it's always solvable. It's just modular arithmetic after all." But slicing and locking makes that math so much more difficult. So I didn't even try to prove it.

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Congrats! That's the same strategy I found when I first tried playing it. I only know of one other major strategy that one of my friends found when they tested the game. I'm glad you enjoyed the game.

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I've actually asked friends to playtest while I was watching instead of recording playtests just because I wanted to see the frustration happen in real time. It's very fun to watch. Usually when I do a team project, I get shoved to UI because no one else wants to do it (which is understandable). So for this project, I thought it was time to let out my own frustrations with UI by making it breakable and bad. Unfortunately it was more difficult than making good UI.

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This comment made me actually laugh out loud. I'm glad you enjoyed it! 

Re: Minimum size: I think that's probably the best solution to the tiny polygon size issue. Someone suggested a Join Polygons feature but the way the polygon splitting algorithm works doesn't allow for concave polygons. I believe destroying polygons with an area less than a minimum would dodge the concave polygon issue. Though that means someone could probably exploit it to destroy polygons surrounding a polygon to create an isolated zone. It's not too big an issue because creating isolated zones is possible but only via locking. It's definitely something i have to think about.

Thanks for your comment!

Thanks for your comment! The splitting was definitely the hardest part of coding this game. I think one of the problems with this game is that it doesn't really build the mechanics up. If I were to make into a full game I'd probably introduce splitting and locking later on as mechanics so as to not have them compete with people figuring out the game's goal in the first place.

Hello!

The splits were a nightmare to implement! I'm glad you liked them. Were there any tooltips that gave incorrect information? Because if so, I need to fix that. I was trying for the tooltips to be the one part of the game that actually helps you. The tooltip on the Start buttons tells you the "goal" of the game.

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The art was so good. Each level down felt more terrifying than the last. I wasn't ready for everything to get flipped on its head but I loved it!

I loved the atmosphere. The walls breaking each other were a cool mechanic and the timer made the puzzles more challenging.

This was really fun! It took me a good two hours to beat. I love the aesthetic of the game and how the puzzles really ramped up in difficulty like you said they would. Thrice and Three's Company really did a number on me.

Oh! Sorry for the late reply, but upon replay, I can see the water meter now. It's just kinda tiny but it's there.

I love the audio and visuals of the game. The fact that spraying water pushes you around is really funny and it makes movement very interesting. I wish you could use that to your advantage though because usually the targets I wanted to hit would be out of range whenever I sprayed for too long. Also I don't know if this was just me, but I didn't see a health bar so I didn't know when I had taken too much damage. This a fun time. Good work!

I like how this game made me strategize how best to run around in circles so I survive for the longest amount of time. The level 1 humidity zone was so nice to have even though it didn't replenish the hydration levels. I think it would've been cool to make the cucumbers also replenish some hydration because they're mainly water. That way they could be different than the mushrooms and also could be placed more sparsely as super power ups of some kind. Great work!

The game mechanic for this was really cool! The art is really cute too. I like how hectic the game was but I think it would have been nice to have the cacti a little closer to the center just so the bugs we wouldn't be so close to where the chompers spawned. Good work!

I like the art style for the plants and the well. The gameplay lets you make your own system for watering everything so that's a lot of fun. It'd be cool if there was a sprite drawn in the same style for the player. Good work with this!

This was a really fun game! The art for the fish was really cute and I liked how it contrasted with the background. It made it really easy to see the fish. The gameplay was also really fun and challenging. I managed to get through the game without losing a life but I got really close to doing so at times. Great work with this!

This was fun! I got it in around 2m07sec. The level's design made the game have some challenge, especially with the little cave bit. I really enjoyed the pitch/speed of the song being used as feedback. It really helped convey the stress of almost running out of water. Making the cloud slow when overhydrated was another nice touch. Great work!

This is really interesting. It had me trying to figure out which tiles each building wanted to be on or next to to give me more points. I wish there was a more guided way to understand the buildings rather than just throwing them around randomly. But given the time limit, this was really cool. Makes me want more. Good work!

This was pretty fun and challenging. I wasn't able to actually beat it but I managed to make more progress with each run which was pretty satisfying. I think having traps is a good idea but they're pretty difficult to see. This might be the intent but the traps slow me down for what feels like longer than necessary. Whenever I ran into them after the little starting area, I knew that the run was basically over. I like the little trails in the sand. They helped me figure out where to go. Good work!

The atmosphere and ambience are stellar. I like the main character's walking animation. I don't know if I got different endings when I played but I did have it say "they came to nothing" and then "she came to nothing." Gameplay-wise, I like how the gameplay supports the idea that no matter what, you'll die in the end. Good work!

This was a really fun game and it kept me on my toes. I liked trying out some of the non-water bubbles to see what they did and I think it would've been fun to see those appear more. I'm still unsure as to what some of the events were but they did shake up the gameplay so I enjoyed them.

This was a really fun game and it kept me on my toes. I liked trying out some of the non-water bubbles to see what they did and I think it would've been fun to see those appear more. I'm still unsure as to what some of the events were but they did shake up the gameplay so I enjoyed them.

I like this game's concept and it fits the theme. Some of the other comments mentioned the size of the coffee cups and the water buckets were a bit too small to see easily. I think if you wanted to add a bit more challenge to it, it might be cool to let the coffee move in a way that lets it get to all parts of the floor, because right now it just seems to be oscillating around a certain point. The visuals are cute and I like that you're by a sink. Good work!

This game was fun! I appreciate that the spawn point changes per playthrough. The visuals and audio gave the game a nice somber feel.

Thanks for your comment! The controls seem to be an issue multiple people have mentioned, so I'm going to look into making them more intuitive. I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for your comment! I'm glad someone commented on the two atoms on top of each other because I was trying to use the low-res style to be sneaky >:] I'm going to be looking into adding more variety so that it isn't always the same kind of atom that generates on top of the others.

Thanks for the comment! I have to admit the game isn't too balanced because I was rushing to hit the time limit, so I just had some semblance of a progression system. Once the rating period is over I'm going to see if I can balance the difficulty and add some more variety to the molecules.

Thanks for letting me know. It seems Space was not the best control to bind for that action. I'm going to see if I can change the controls around and re-upload the game.

Thanks for giving it a try and thanks for the comment! I'm glad you enjoyed it ^^

This was fun! It wasn't easy and definitely got stressful at times. I love the plant asset. It's very cute

Thanks for playing. I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Also thanks for letting me know about this. I'll see if I can change it once the jam is over.

This was really fun. I like how the screen pulse and the heartbeat get more and more intense as you run out of water.

I don't know if this was an issue with my computer or if it was intended, but there seems to be a delay between my click and the character moving.