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Awesome sprites, love the idea of getting supporters to send in pics of their cats!

Great devlog, looking forward to the game :)

you can just fudge it. That’s what most implementations do, fade in the image, which often uses multiple colors and hardly resembles the nonogram at all. It’s a bit hard to interpret what your objection is, honestly.

Valid point, but my knee-jerk reaction to that statement is that I don’t want to fudge it and don’t want to swap out what they’ve solved for the larger collage I have them building.

A puzzle having more than one solution can end up just being a constraint that I apply to myself while making puzzles: every puzzle I make must have one solution. Then solving by solution or solving by not breaking contract with hints doesn’t matter.

To get more specific and show a minimal proof, here is an example of a nonogram that generates ambiguous hints:

x o o x

When the hints are rendered out, you’ll have 1 and 1 in the columns and 1 and 1 on the rows. Now look at this alternate solution: o x x o

Yeah! That’s exactly what is described here.

I noticed that you don’t want to implement a hint checker, and I’m curious why that is, as checking that the hints are satisfied isn’t overly complicated or bad for performance. You’re already doing most of the work if you’re marking the row and column hints complete while the player is playing.

I’m actually not marking hints complete as they are playing, either.

These aren’t choices aren’t due to implementation complexity or performance, either. This whole game is written in C with no libraries outside the bare minimum needed on the playdate side to get the current frame buffer, get input state, handle files, and pushing audio to the device. Everything else is done on my own, so I’ve already crossed more complex tasks and everything is very performant.

Really, the main concern is just getting the game to a good playable state, then worrying about working through the Quality of Life features in the backlog. I’ve gotta make more puzzles, prize art and blurbs, and do the audio.

It could also be due to the fact that, as a player, I don’t really care much about the hints being crossed off. I think what I like more, which will cause it to bubble up the backlog, is when the current run of marked cells are tallied up and shown.

This was a really thoughtful comment - I think it’s really cool that you took the time to reflect on the game and to write all this out.

I stumbled across this post a couple months ago, and actually referenced it in a devlog I just did about a game I’m working on. Just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to post this, and your comment on this game has me thinking through Nonograms.

What an enjoyable and fun world you’ve made!

Great concept, even better execution!

Hey, thanks so much for taking the time and trying the game out, I really appreciate it :)

Thanks, man :)

The gun guys are cool, but I’m finding them limiting when designing levels. I’m trying to power through it.

Ever since I’ve seen this clip of Paul McCartney making ‘Get Back’ (link) I just think that that’s what needs to happen when you’re hitting a road block. Just gotta power through lol

Or at least that’s what I’ve been telling myself when I have a level with a bunch of gun guys and it doesn’t work at all hah

Cool entry dude!

I had fun feeding these little Peter Griffins, lol. I would carve out as much as I could without them ‘noticing’ (aka: keeping one block in their way) then releasing the flood gates :)

Thanks for submitting and sharing!

Great idea that fits the theme. The game is very pretty. The shader makes me feel like I need to dig up some old red/blue 3d glasses.

The stage design is superb and I really enjoy how each stage within a level transitions into each other. Makes it feel like one cohesive level.

This game is brutal though! Very hard lol I usually make a point of beating each of the jam entries but I dunno, this one may beat me. Very difficult, especially the last segment of level 2: that’s a real doozy!

Thanks for submitting!

Such a good idea coupled with great execution! Art is cute, game loop is tight and rewarding. Great entry!

Thanks for submitting!

I just wish there were more levels :)

You and me both haha just ran out of time :)

The music sounds so familiar, but I can’t pin down why.

Haha it’s from my 2023 Summer Game Jam entry https://purdy.itch.io/no-lifeguard-on-duty

Thanks for playing and the kind words. I had a few more ideas for influencing the level, including a ‘drill’ action but, just like the levels, ran out of time. I want to carve out some time to continue exploring this idea, maybe with a port to Playdate.

Lol glad you figured ’em out though!

Thanks for trying it out :)

I think submitting the a design doc like this is pretty cool! Lets you flush out the idea and give it a chance, while not investing weeks to find out you’re not really all that into it. Thanks for submitting!

Forcing players to the upgrade path for the ghosts is devilish! Made me really try to think through the lesser of each evil.

Very cool submission! I got lucky a couple of times where I got surrounded by a bunch of ghosts that collapsed lol

Nice work and thanks for submitting :)

Simple ideas that are built upon by the level design - nice work!

At first when I died and got kicked back a level I was thinking, “Oh, a little bit of risk/reward is in each of these jumps”.

Then I got kicked back like 5 levels in a row. Brutal!

Took a lot of time, lol but I beat it. Thanks for submitting!

This game was made by Mike Purdy, Jack Lawless, and Brandon Aguilar

Thanks for the kind words :)

Glad someone got the King of the Hill reference :)

I fumbled on the readability of some of the sprites, difficult with limited palette and size (but ultimately an excuse for lack of skill haha)

Thanks for giving it a shot!

Thanks for playing around with it. Hoping to use this ‘demake’ to really hone in on the game loop and the fun.

Just got my highest score: 68

Ah man, that does sound frustrating! Sorry, should have been more clear with goal/expectations. Thanks for giving it a whirl though, and glad the game was still fun despite the shortcomings :)

I’ve been working on bug fixes and will see how I can better educate the player as well. I’ve already got some quality of life changes in place which I think will help players.

Real easy to implement :)

Thanks for the suggestion and playing the game!

Oh, man, I remember the Molotov cocktails in the old GTA games were so badass hah

Was surprisingly difficult. RNG got me pretty good a few times by stacking dragon + eye making an impassable wall of death.

The characters run cycle is great lol, real goofy. I like the death animations too :)

This was enjoyable.

Took a little bit of time to get the hang of it but I felt real good when I was making money, lol. I feel like I’m better off with 0 cleaners haha just a bunch of bots and towers surrounded by cones.

The boss’s voice was a nice bonus.

Difficult! But not unfair.

Love the art and the attention to detail like the tape!

I felt like I got in my groove when I realized my ‘pro strat’: Grab box, go to right side and move crane all the way up to stop the movement, then go back down.

This was cute game, I really liked it!

Most of the games I’ve seen you make have a core concept that is tightly nailed down, and then polished up - the recipe for success. This one was no different :) The game felt good, and I agree with @multivoxmuse, I think the difficulty was spot on.

I loved how the last day was flipped around.

Ah. Seems there is an unfortunate bug slipped through my iron-clad codebase.

There is the possibility of one package having the same destination as another. If this happens, you can push the delivered box out of the way, and just deliver the new box in the spot. There will not be the spinning indicator, so be careful, lol

Ah. Seems there is an unfortunate bug slipped through my iron-clad codebase.

There is the possibility of one package having the same destination as another. If this happens, you can push the delivered box out of the way, and just deliver the new box in the spot. There will not be the spinning indicator, so be careful, lol

Yeah… I think I did the players a disservice by not baking control explanations into the game or something similar. My son (11), who plays a lot of Geometry Dash, bounced off of this when he first played it. I realized then that I messed up haha

I was planning on having some structured levels in place; my hopes were to ease the player into the controls and mechanics and how they build on each other. Didn’t get around to it though, lol #gamejamlife

Thanks for playing :)

But triangles are the strongest shape!

My take: No.

Thanks for giving it a shot!

it took me a fair bit of time to figure out the controls

Yeah, in hindsight I should have just baked the control explanation into the game instead of putting on itch page.

Feature request: Allow changing side mid jump :D

Ah, that would be a good addition - noted!

Cool entry! Seems we both had some similar ideas with our games, nice to see how you executed on them :)

Cool concept - really would have liked more content.

I see you took a step away from Unity to try Bevy, very cool.

I’ve been experimenting with ECS in a couple of these entries but using tiny-ecs. You’ll have to share your thoughts on Bevy + Rust.

Killer entry! Had a blast playing this, very fun concept.

I was avoiding the purple asterisks, until they were sort of in front of the Chosen One. I thought since they were on the right side of the game, that they were safe. Putting them there was smart because that’s how I learnt that they’re actually badass and very essential.

Music was awesome (all by Kattywampus, right?). I found myself bopping to it.

Unlocking fonts was a fun progression mechanism.

Great work on this!