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Barry Hootheir's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #331 | 3.871 | 3.871 |
| Enjoyment | #400 | 4.032 | 4.032 |
| Artwork | #419 | 4.323 | 4.323 |
| Creativity | #3859 | 3.419 | 3.419 |
| Narrative | #3866 | 2.581 | 2.581 |
Ranked from 31 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?
Well it's not the greatest take of them all for sure. But it is counting down things in the scoring, board size left and levels until something sinister.
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Only these two were externals that were not made by me (during the jam). Same info also available in game.
Bear Trap by ThePriest909 -- https://freesound.org/s/278203/ -- License: Creative Commons 0
LOCK - 2 by SamuelGremaud -- https://freesound.org/s/455379/ -- License: Creative Commons 0
(Optional) What would you like to be called if GMTK features your game?
To make it easier to even closely pronounce, just Antti. My itch name is my full name.
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Comments
really jucy art effects. love the design of the little octopus wizard. feel it would be event better if more design of the background story can be integrated to the gameplay.
An exceptionally polished game, to the point of being almost unbelievable that this was made in only 4 days. The game design is very well thought out. This had me scratching by head, trying to come up with the most optimal tile placement. Really scratches that min/max itch. The animations and feedback when you finally close that big cluster that's you've been working on is super well done. Makes the effort all worth it. If it was me, I would lean even more into that, maybe recount all the tiles at the end of a level and watch your score being added before opening the update windows.
Small things: The music is great at first but quickly becomes repetitive.
There doesn't seem to be anything to do with the theme of this jam. For all we know, this could have been worked on for months and released just now. I'm not saying that's what you did, but game jams having a theme to prevent people from doing exactly that is kind of the whole point.
Apart from that, this game is a gem!
Great entry as always! I love the callbacks to past jam's themes, such a fun addition that also made for some fun upgrades! I don't care for the weak theme, I was myself about to have a really weak theme but some animations basically saved it, so why should the theme get to stop such a great entry?
Yeah, the theme (for me at least) really just serves a jumping off point. I don't tend to plan and design at all really but maybe have a vague general idea and just start messing around and see where it takes me. It's an iterative process and sometimes (or maybe even most of the time) the initial ideas don't really work and the design takes you elsewhere. And on these shorter game jams, there really isn't time to completely pivot after already sinking some time into it. Initially the game was supposed to be a bit more mathy with counting being involved in placing tiles/scoring, kinda something akin to minesweeper, but it didn't really pan out. It kept feeling too much like my last year's js13k entry where I failed to make main hook all that fun.
I see, and I feel the same. The jam page also states that you won't get disqualified for not adhering to the theme, which for me signals that Mark thinks the same. It's meant as a starting point for inspiration, not as a checkbox you have to tick.
One of the best jam games I've made had it's main mechanic discovered during prototyping, even so I'm still very focus on wanting a complete idea before I write a single line of code. In this jam, at hour 38 or so I still hadn't gotten an idea I wanted to make, but I felt like I just had to make something so I started with one of the ideas.
This turned into spending 4 hours making an 3D elevator, but then figuring out that I wanted a 3D puzzle on each floor. After brainstorming 3D puzzle design for 3 hours I finally got an idea I wanted to make, and the elevator got scrapped entirely (even if it's still in the game files haha)
Great game. Well polished. Pretty fun. Great job.
absolutely love the artwork and audio
This is extremely polished, creative and so fun to play! My only gripe is that this doesn't fit with the theme, so it feels like this was a game that had been started beforehand, partly because it's just so goddamn good!
Obviously did not start before the jam period. That'd be lame! But the theme is indeed very weak. It started off with a bit more akin to counting down the tiles and so on but it didn't really pan out. And yeah, I do like polishing a lot. I usually do 48 hour jams and aim on having the game pretty much done on the first day so I can just spend the second on polish completely. Due to this, four days feels like a long time.
I have no idea how you can make a game like this by yourself, let alone me and my team! We started 2 years ago and have a lot to learn, you're an inspiration my man!
I will need to play it again when I get home, the rotate function doesn't work on a macbook trackpad, I wish I could press a button to do it :)
Congrats on the gamejam game, impressive dude (had to post this from my personal account, itch is block the other one because I play too many games I guess :p
Haha, yeah I've been making games for over 30 years 😅
Really dropped the ball on the rotate functionality, so maybe people seem to be playing with trackpads or touch screens. Something I already improved on for the post-jam version.
Damn okay, I have much to learn! I think it's always funny how some of the best games just have only 30 rates. I guess age makes you wise so you stop promoting your own games and just let them be as creations
Thanks for the post jam update! I'll play it with a mouse later today though I think :)
I think it's also a factor of solo vs team as multiple people can play/rate more games and therefore receive more rates too.
Music and art is great. But I absolutely don't catch the theme!
The gameplay is immersive, I'm always interested. Very cool!
Also, the controls are not suitable for a touchpad :-(
That was a fun core mechanic that you expand nicely with the upgrades! Super satisfying feedback effects and I absolutely adore the little wizard and the colour palette. Very addictive and fun game that is quite a feat to have built for a short jam.
Only downside is that the theme implementation is a little thin.
reaaally good game, everything works together and the mechanics are simple but challenging! Well done :D
This game is really fun to play, and pretty addictive ! The music is really nice, and with the art add something nice to the game, congrats !
this was incredibly polished! with the tile matching alone it already takes a bit of strategizing, then with the bear traps added it adds even more planning out required to disarm them, and then the roguelike elements on top take it's quality to the next level! not to mention the visuals and sound design are all great quality as well. probably my favorite of the jam so far, i got 7th on the leaderboard for now but i may come back to try and get higher :D
A VERY well crafted game, amazing job!
Probably the first game so far that I found myself really thinking about and enjoying as a game, and not just a game-jam game.
However I have to say I don't think it really fits the theme at all, but I am glad that didn't stop you from making it!
The art and music are great, lots of juicy SFX and visuals. Not to mention the gameplay itself is pretty addicting.
Well done, keep it up!
Funny)
Traps seems a bit confusing) Great entry overall!
really really solid entry, i loved the way the traps fought you for making high combo strings, i liked the play with the multipliers... i liked the concepts of a lot of the upgrades and how they played into eachother,
was a bit unfortunate that some of the gear only worked if they were in specific slots, i wish that maybe they had a base effect and were better in those slots, or that there were more interplay with the actual item placement on the character, because for a lot of the upgrades it just didn't matter (though it was also confusing at times so, maybe it was for the better that they didn't all interact with the item slots)
some things were unclear,, i ask myself ; "what is a loop? what is a cross? what is a square?" "what does making stronger mean for simple effects" "how bad could a curse be" it sounds obvious, and maybe from a rules standpoint they are, but i just couldn't really get enough info from what i saw while playing to figure it out (i also basically instantly died every time i got a curse, so it seemed unreasonable to ever go for equipment that gave you them)
the gameplay itself is well balanced, however i think the upgrades/equipment are not, the power difference between them is very severe to the point that it's impossible not to take some items, vs some which strictly don't work somtimes, or only show you what you might get next (which doesn't change anything at all about your decision-making)
i did find a pretty uh... powerful strategy, which allowed me to get these scores legitimately by getting a lot a lot of multiplier ("lllllllllll" was my first run, "ibrokeit" was my second run, "rutbnyRBLY" was my last run where i perfected the strategy)
cute game, puzzling out the boards felt nice, had a lot of fun, one of my favorites i've played so far, GG!
*(oh psst, i had to use trackpad to rotate, and it was an uncomfortable control, Q and E to rotate or something would have been so much more comfortable)
Haha, that L name made me groan due to UI breaking and went to add a trim for name on server side. And after I managed to do that and also fix the broken geolocation solving due to my server host having done some changes, I see that you also managed to break the UI with too big scores. Hey at least it didn't go integer overflow! 😅
But yeah, 4 days wasn't really enough to do proper balancing. Especially considering there was always other (more fun) things to focus on like doing art, audio or adding new stuff.
example loop (just a string of one tiles going around with a hole in the middle)
❇️❇️❇️❇️
❇️🅱️🅱️❇️
❇️❇️❇️❇️
example cross (one in middle and straights to any dir from that)
🅱️❇️🅱️🅱️
❇️❇️❇️❇️
🅱️❇️🅱️🅱️
example square (same width and height)
❇️❇️
❇️❇️
And for the booster one that enhances others, they are always just increasing/doubling the amount/multiplier on the target and the effect is shown in the effected tooltip. So like this would normally be double but it's upgraded to triple due to the neighbouring booster.
And I already added alt ways to rotate (just in place click without drag, Q/E A/D left/right while holding and second finger tap on touch screen) for the post-jam version.
I also don't get it why your scores show up multiple times. It should only show the best for each player (name changes don't matter, it uses random generated unique id). 🤔
Never mind, it looks like indeed did take names to account too which I changed now to how it should have been. I'm pretty sure it was like that earlier, I've been using this same leaderboards on all my games and it used to behave so that even changing the name afterwards and doing a "bad run" would update your name for existing top scores.
yeah i'm so sorry about the long name - it was my first run i didn't expect anything and i was just seeing how big i could make my name and thought it was funny when i was playing buhahaha
yeah, still doesn't answer all my questions, and i could ask you more - but mainly i explain to communicate to you that i couldn't intuit what was going on via the text alone, some sort of visual indication or explanation would have helped me understand while playing is all (something like showing example loops on hover, highlighting the outline of each loop when breaking a combo, things like that)
oh and also at some point it said quintuple but i only had one of those strength things, was that a bug?
Yeah, probably would make more sense to include examples like the ones I put here to explain the shapes on the tooltips themselves.
The multis go double -> triple -> quadruple -> 5x -> etc so definitely no quintuple anywhere. But even if it was quad with just one booster, I guess that might have been a bug. But boosters also affect other boosters so you could go booster -> booster -> multi and end up with quad even if it only had on direct neighbouring booster.
i meant quadruple my bad !! * it was during the "missing head equipment curse" - maybe the booster saw itself as adjacent after the head equipment was removed or something?
this was the setup - the cross item on the left and the head itemsaid quadruple i think
Haha, looking at the code now it seems like booster is completely broken. Every time you add an item it evaluates the stats for them all but doesn't actually reset the previous ones so it just keeps applying again and again. That explains a bit how your score got THAT bonkers. 😅
well, honestly what i did was abuse 2x planter, my entire board was practically minimum 5x score tiles, i spent the whole game doing 2x combos with the planters to farm for multiplier tiles, i used the wildcard to make it two colors that were doing planter stuff to farm much harder, i had basically zero score until the very final combo, the entire score was done on the last level where i made one giant combo to finish it off on top of all the x10, x13,x15,x8,x9,, panels across the board: big number happens
Right right, that seems ridiculously exponential scaling in comparison to everything else. I guess at least adding the area bonuses together instead of multiplying them wouldn't make it quite as ridiculous. 🤔
I added these for the post-jam version, I guess these would at least help a bit? Any other weird things you didn't quite understand I could try to improve for the next version?
those do really help yeah!
me and my friend who was watching could not for the lives of us figure out how much damage the traps were supposed to deal, if i could take a guess it would be the round number or something? but otherwise there was no indication.... lost a few runs to saying "yeah i could probbs spring a trap and be okay" - i could not
i had NO IDEA what finesse could mean in the slightest "receive no bonus" is not text on any relic many would ever willingly decide to pick up - in other words i don't know why the text is relevant to me
i don't know why i would care about "scoring closed areas in reverse order" either.. we don't know enough about the way scoring works for this to make any sense..
most other relics were self explanatory, maybe the "preview the next upcoming curse" relic is confusing to me but not comprehensionally, just contextually; again, you aren't given any resources to prepare for a curse more or less, so knowing one that's coming doesnt help so much, but even so it took me a while before i even knew where curses came from, i hadn't seen anything that gave me curses, so i really couldn't gauge it at all
(uhm, and this one is maybe just a bit unfortunate, but the first time i played the game i was putting the equipment i got in the hand slots then head first, and came to expect the sprite changes and orbs.... and then i put an equipment on the one slot below the torso and it didn't change the sprite! which was very humorous to me; "where did it go?" i asked., on a later run i later noticed my guy had a tail, it might be worth to always give out a tail or something to avoid this unfortunate question)
Thanks a ton for these, they really help me pinpoint what descriptions need to be given some thought to make them clearer! ❤️
Traps indeed do damage equal to the level number. I guess it'd be nice to show it somehow to leave out the guesswork.
Finesse and Broken Chains indeed need knowledge on how the scoring happens to really evaluate. So you've probably noticed that when an area is scored, the size of it becomes the base multiplier for the next scored area. And the areas are always scored from smallest to largest. So with Broken Chains, the order is reversed and by scoring the biggest area first, you have more control on what multiplier it uses (as often you'll also close some smaller areas at the same time). Finesse in same way skips the adding x2 multi for those small (often accidental/forced) areas and lets you keep the previous bigger multiplier.
The curse preview was indeed intended as a way to see what the curse on the 12th level would be so you could prepare for it a bit. But I think it's even more useful for checking whether the next cursed fork item would be a "safe" item to take. But yeah, would probably help if there were more ways to prepare for the upcoming curse.
Peli oli muuten aikas hyvä, mutta tais bugaa tai sitten en ymmärtänyt jotain, koska ruudukon täyttämisen jälkeen niitä päivityksiä ja seuraavaa tasoo ei tullut. Olin tyyliin nelos tasossa, kun tää tapahtu.
Varmaan joo onnistuit jonkun bugin löytämään, kun kyllä sen pitäisi siitä ihan aina vaan suorilta jatkaa. Eli jos neljänteen asti selvisit, niin ei siinä mitään uusia systeemejä ole tullut väliin ja siinä vaiheessahan jo ansojakin oli aiemmin ollut. Eipä oo kyllä itellä tuossa mitään tollasta tullut vastaan. Ehkä vaan joku bitti vinossa jossain tai sulla oli joku erittäin outo kombinaatio. 🤷♀️
Bravo 👏
Super cute puzzle game! Great artwork! Loved playing this!
Great game bu the connection to the theme is pretty weak and some things are a bit hard to understand at first. For example some what is meant by "closing a shape" or "loop shaped areas"? Also the range and yellow looks way too similar imo
Yeah, I'm well aware that the orange is a bit problematic as it can be confused with both yellow and red. But that's why the icons are there too. It's never great to only rely on colors to pass on information as different forms of color blindness are way more common than most people think.
Hmm, didn't really think too hard to the wordings and explanations. I guess I thought that "closing an area" would be clear enough as that's basically the only mechanic you keep doing ie. when squares of one color are surrounded by walls or other colors (and the area is scored). And I thought "loop shape" was self explanatory too, basically a shape with no extruding pointy tips and a hole in the middle.
❇️❇️❇️
❇️🅱️❇️❇️
❇️🅱️🅱️❇️
❇️❇️❇️❇️
Wow, the game looks really high‑quality and deeply polished. The art is great and the sounds are funny :D The presentation is really impressive. It definitely deserves more attention. Thanks for your work!
The art is so good, the gameplay is fun, and the sound is great too. I honestly can't think of anything to improve. I didn't completely understand how the game fits the theme, but I'm sure you had an idea in mind. Great job!