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Ashline's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #23 | 3.163 | 3.417 |
| 🧠 Mind | #23 | 3.086 | 3.333 |
| ✨ Soul | #25 | 3.240 | 3.500 |
| 💀 Body | #25 | 3.086 | 3.333 |
| 💖 Heart | #26 | 3.240 | 3.500 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
What did you revive? What was your inspiration?
A forgotten DOS-era genre: the 1989 "lay the pipe before the water comes" puzzle game (Pipe Mania / Pipe Dream by The Assembly Line). It was everywhere for a few years and then went quiet. Ashline brings it back with a theme to match: the town burned but the water mains survived, so every house your water reaches rises from the ashes. Colour sweeps back up its walls, grass regrows along the hose, and the family walks back outside. It also fits "The Embers Remember" modifier, since the genre is 37 years old.
How do you play your game? Is controller required?
No controller needed. It plays in the browser with a mouse or keyboard.
Click a square to lay the NEXT piece from the queue (you can't choose or rotate pieces). When the timer runs out the water flows along your hose, and it has to pass through every glowing doorway before it reaches an open end. Water puts out fires next to it. On later streets fire spreads and burns dry hose. Click a dry piece to swap it for a points penalty. There are six streets, and you can retry any of them.
Mouse: click to lay hose. Right-click or F: open the hydrant early (bonus points), then rush the water.
Keyboard: arrows/WASD + Space. R: restart street. P: pause. M: mute.
What asset packs did you use? What, if any, content is AI generated?
Asset pack: Modern Exteriors by LimeZu (https://limezu.itch.io/modernexteriors), a paid, licensed pack made before the jam. All sprite art comes from it. The burned look of the houses is done in code, and the hose is drawn in code. Fonts: Bungee and VT323 (Google Fonts, OFL).
AI: I used Claude (Anthropic's AI coding assistant) to assist with the game's code when it came to debugging and features I had no clue how to implement.
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Comments
It's pretty intuitive and presented well, but it sure is difficult.
I often felt like I would just lose attempts to pure RNG of pipe selections. The maps are super open, which should make creativity in pipe placement really easy, but I often just did a lot of sluffing pipes that I didn't need while waiting for the pipe I wanted to show up in the queue. I actually think that maps that feel more restricted in terms of space to sluff off pipes might get players thinking in terms of using pipes in places where they could "potentially" be useful if the queue ended up giving them the right combination rather than just dumping stuff in the corner.
I don't know if you've already got some level of logic behind the pipe selection for the queue, but this does feel like a great opportunity for "controlled RNG" that appears to be random, but somehow always guarantees an adequate set of pipes to complete the puzzle or somehow tracks the current build of the player so that it can throw in the pipe that the player is looking for with only limited time left before failure. Just thinking of ways to toss players a bone for the sake of letting them feel less like they lost to RNG and better be able to point at something they personally could have done better during their play.