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boxers hate ghosts's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #1045 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Enjoyment | #2131 | 3.464 | 3.464 |
| Narrative | #3288 | 2.714 | 2.714 |
| Audio | #5169 | 2.643 | 2.643 |
| Artwork | #5293 | 2.893 | 2.893 |
Ranked from 28 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
You are a boxer and you have a 10 second countdown whenever you get knocked out
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Puzzlescript Next
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Comments
very creative and fun idea!
Wow, I didn't expact this complexety from such a small mechanic, its brillian!
amazing job!
Nice little arcade-like game! I think I won, but that was a little unclear!
Fun game with interesting, creative concept! I'm curious about intended solutions, though. It's a bit hard to tell..
Is bonking to wall to skip turns intended solution?
Yes, for some levels that was intended. I didn’t do a great job of enforcing intended solutions though, because I didn’t have time for any playtesting. Thanks for playing!
Really fun, figuring out what the mechanics are took a bit, but I still liked all the solutions.
I like the idea of the ghosts getting back to their body, but I don't understand how to win a single level of this (I tried a bunch). Every time I go near the guy, I get punched out again. Edit: Thanks for your reply, I figured it out.
Like I wrote in another reply, I think this is more of a fighting game than a puzzle game, which is fine, but may not match the presentation in PuzzleScript. I enjoyed the fights after I got into the swing of things, and I like that it slowly builds complexity by adding holes and walls and extra fighters. I especially like the kicking bodies mechanic. Good job on this!
The main criticism I have is that it can be very hard to maneuver guys into the right place. I often find myself in "zugzwang" where I want to just wait a turn for the other guy to move. Here's an example: I am trying to get this leftmost red guy to punch me while I am adjacent to the pit, but I can't because every time I move up, he moves down, and vice versa, so we are always vertically misaligned.
[Edit: I can't get this picture to show up, anyone know why? I can see it in the edit mode but not on the page.]
I think this would be improved if I could just tap X to wait a turn. This isn't common in Sokobans (Baba is You does have a Wait command though) but like I said, this isn't really a Sokoban, it's a fighting game.
Remember, there have been reports of boxers passing out when seeing ghosts. What do you think would happen if a ghost went to a boxer?
Ah lol, I get it! Yeah that's my mistake. In my defense, I read that and first thing I did was attack the red guy (successfully) but then didn't get back to my body so my brain decided attacking as a ghost was the wrong thing and I forgot to ever try it again.
The puzzles are tricky but lack focus -- though I'm unconvinced the mechanics could lend themselves to many interesting ideas anyway. Funny take on the theme regardless, and certainly not a bad game.
Thanks for the feedback, I really enjoyed So-Kaboom! When you say they lacked focus, do you mean you felt puzzles didn't develop the mechanics in insightful ways or that they just weren't very interesting? I'd love to improve my own puzzle design, so any honest criticism would help.
I'm guessing what they mean by "lack focus" is that they don't really have "solutions" as much as "tactics". I think this is almost more of a fighting game than a puzzle game (once you work out the initial mechanics). Which is fine - after all it is branded as a boxing game - but the PuzzleScript presentation kind of suggests it's a puzzle game.
In a normal puzzle game you have a specific set of steps to achieve a goal, whereas here you just kind of amble around until things line up in the right position and then you execute, and it may take several tries for things to line up (similar to how you might approach a combat in a Street Fighter).
I can see what you mean; the mechanics are probably too open ended to enforce specific solutions like in a typical sokoban. Thanks for taking the time to write such insightful feedback!
Mostly the latter; I felt that the puzzles overall weren't too interesting. And in this case, that might have more to do with how I experienced the game than with the puzzle design itself. Since the puzzles are easy to brute force, it's very possible that players will play through the game without thinking very much. It's a shame, because there's some pretty cool ideas showcased that one can only understand by actively solving the puzzles. Levels 10 and 11 are both well designed, for example, yet I still only really understood half of the logic. They both present a core problem very clearly (ie. ghost has no time to K.O. boxer on the right side of the hole), which imo is a sign of good design, but I stumbled into the solution too easily to really appreciate how it all works.
Perhaps the problem is that the mechanics cap the puzzles at a level of quality that I think you've already achieved. They don't allow for a huge amount of logical potential, and they don't allow for specific enough solutions that would force the player to truly think about the puzzles. I don't really see how one could shift more of the players focus onto the logical process without editing the mechanics in some way.
Edit: just saw the post about this as a fighting game, if it's not really meant to be a puzzle game then disregard my comments
It's definitely intended to be a puzzle game, but I think the fighting game comments had some similar issues that you did that made it come off more like a fighting game. Either way, this is some very insightful feedback, thank you so much!
Nicely scoped and done game. Very minimalistic but worth checking, nice work!
This is a really clever puzzle game based on a really funny concept. The puzzles are surprisingly challenging but it's pretty fun to find the solution. I especially like making projectiles of the corpses of my enemies.
Great job!
Cool concept, it was fun.
Took me a minute to figure out what to do, but once I did it turned into an interesting puzzle game. And the puzzles are good too. Well done!
Simple and good mechanics that can be nicely expanded and are explored well in the levels! I did struggle a bit initially with understanding why I constantly got knocked out and at times I did get stuck in endless loops of being constantly knocked out, but eventually I did learn how it works!Some of the levels are really quite tricky, so good job on designing them!
Awesome concept, I can see a lot of mechanics branching out of this solid base, really clever!
Cool use of both a countdown mechanic and an almost sokoban map style boxing with ghosts meta narrative based grid puzzle.
Wonderful scope for a jam game!
Really clever and well made! I like how it's a puzzle game but it keeps me on my toes at all times!
Its pretty fun when you get the hang of it, I ended up letting my spirit wander and KO everyone before getting back in time, I like that it was turn based rather than time based, it did make it less anxiety inducing haha. Well done for making this, your page mentioned it only took a couple of hours? crazy good.
I am adict to this game . super good