Roustabout by bitdecay
A hard working roustabout finds himself the lowly deckhand on duty. Now, with sole discretion on the manifest, you have to decide: what it going to ship?
Controls:
WASD/arrow keys - Directions
Space - Grab/Release
Q & E - Rotate a piece if still attached to the crane
F - Fast Forward!
The dock crane will lower cargo onto the deck.

It is your job to organize the deck for the shipment.

Rats live on the ship and will occasionally infest some of the cargo. They cannot be stopped. You must dispose of the infested cargo or face hefty fines.

Tools used:
Unity
Tiled
SuperTiled2Unity
FLStudio
FMOD
Pyxel Edit
Sound effects were either created during the jam or built up from base sounds found on zapsplat.com. Go check them out! Donate to keep that site going. It deserves the love.
Ratings
| Overall | 196th | 3.811⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 148th | 3.764⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 103th | 3.797⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 725th | 3.149⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 319th | 3.905⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 59th | 4⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 385th | 3.103⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 367th | 3.514⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 38🗳️ | 36🗨️ |
It felt like I was playing Tetris, and there were times I felt I wasn't going to be able to move all those pianos on time on the second level, so that much added to the challenge. It makes me wonder if the rats infest at random or always the same item in the level. I didn't have to skip/sacrifice any object at least, otherwise I'd rate it higher on the theme. But good game!
One thing that I would have liked is to make grabbing and letting go of objects a little more fluid. Perhaps if you are grabbing from the bottom and want to move left or right, take a moment for the character to move around to that edge and then continue pushing. I never really felt the need to sacrifice anything unless the mice got into it. The last level was a challenge with how many objects were given, but I broke the crane before I had to start chucking things overboard!
Great Job!
The mechanics are really interesting, I think they’re the basis for some really nice arcade/puzzle game, but may need some polishing: everything feels a bit slow, and I was often stuck because of what seemed to be tiny offsets smaller than a pixel, so it was hard to see what object was in the way. Maybe snapping objects to nearest pixel (or grid) position after moving them could help with that. Also having the space key toggle drag on/off was confusing at times; have you maybe tried the variant where holding space drags objects, and releasing it goes back to free movement?
As for the music and SFX, I thought they were quite pretty and fit well with the game. Congrats!
Maybe you all can improve somethings:
- Is difficult to see when an object collapse with other object... maybe mark these objects with a different shader or color (example red) is better to identify this situation.
- Maybe you can add inside the gameplay an interface identify the scores and the stars at the same time, something like this:

- When the players complete the game, they are at the credits scene... but is impossible exit in this section! xD
Overall, Congrats people! Amazing job!
Some of the collisions felt a bit too sensitive, and the game often seemed to stray from grid patterns. I had a nice grid going, with a one sized hole that I slipped an item into. But the item was slightly sticking out, despite being pushed in as far as possible, and this lost me the game. The shadow of the dropped item didn't even look like it was overlapping the item. I think that the game could have benefited from a forced grid, wherein socoban style, boxes can only be moved whole grid spaces. This would have made the placements a bit more intuitive.
I liked the details in the game world; the person on the wharf, the buoy, seagulls and mast as an obstacle. This felt rather polished, so well done! Could have maybe had a lineup of items along the dock, to both act as an opportunity to plan and polish off the fact that items currently appear at the end of the crane. Otherwise, the animations are very smooth, and it is nice that you can speed up the crane movements. Very well made game, I hope this feedback helps. :thumbsup:
What stopped me from playing was that I don't understand why I can't move the object only forward or backward. That's really a pain in the a** to be forced to turn around the object all the time. Too bad because the overall realisation is good.