CRAMMM: Totally Accurate Studying Simulator by tuism
It's time to crack the books HARD and attain the ultimate in academic dominance over your peers in a variety of subject such as Maths, Trumpology and Communism.
Keep the distractions out of your limited headspace by tossing out the stuff not relevant to the exam!
This time there's a zero-effort Android version that works pretty much perfectly! Woo! :D




| Windows | https://tuism.itch.io/crammm |
| macOS | https://tuism.itch.io/crammm |
| Android | https://tuism.itch.io/crammm |
| HTML5 (web) | https://tuism.itch.io/crammm |
| Source code | https://tuism.itch.io/crammm |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/crammm-totally-accurate-studying-simulator |
Ratings
| Overall | 73th | 3.893⭐ | 137🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 96th | 3.765⭐ | 136🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 31th | 4.071⭐ | 136🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 20th | 4.362⭐ | 136🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 28th | 4.187⭐ | 136🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 87th | 3.637⭐ | 130🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 23th | 3.821⭐ | 133🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 77th | 3.635⭐ | 132🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 68🗳️ | 114🗨️ |
I hope I could help you!
I do realise that the difficulty balancing still has a ways to go though, and I still am wondering how else I could implement this core mechanic to make the game feel better than it does now...!
Feedback-wise, I can't see any area of improvement for a LD compo game, but if you're planning to go for a later release, I'll bounce a few ideas (I'm not sure if they're good or not);
- Sometimes it is hard to know if a word is wrong or not until after you win or lose. There could be a hint system; left click and it will glare/sfx to tell if the word is correct or not; one gets a set amount of hints for each level.
- The overheat graphic feedback is great! Maybe putting it together with an audio feedback to complement it?
- If there were many levels, you could put it into sets (by difficulty), you only need to complete 60%-80% of each set to unlock the next, and you can choose which to do (so as to avoid subjects you don't know / don't like).
I enjoyed it quite a lot, it's a very fun game!
So there *is* currently a way to figure out if something is right or wrong but it is time consuming and dumb :P (if you drag a word out of the head, if it's a right word, the LEARNED number will drop, if it doesn't it's a wrong word) I like the focus mechanic, it sounds like a good idea to make the game less punishing and perhaps even a bit more educational :p
Interestingly, there currently *is* audio feedback that compliments the overheat - the music changes to a more beat heavy version, though I guess it's too subtle :P I'll work on that too!
And yes that sort of various sets is one of the ideas I want to explore for making this game more accessible and go beyond a jam prototype! I also wonder about if I can change the scoring style to make the game less chaotic and mad. Or just better than what it is now, which is a bit too random for my taste. But that's something to think about further :)
Thanks so much! :D
When I tested it seemed already too late to fix things when the audio feedback started?
Still, awesome game overall.
The way to "fix" the overflow situation is usually to throw out a bunch of things rather than one thing at a time - it checks if stuff is over the top line of the head. So one at a time means probably more are coming than you could deal with if you do one at a time.
Thank you muchly for the feedback still! :)
I think 1/4 red might be a bit late? The overheat is pretty fast and even when you throw many things out it doesn't cool down immediately, so you'd like to react to overheat as soon as possible... (i.e. player actions: Normal -> carefully take out things; Overheat-> quick, throw anything!) You can react with the graphical aspect, but it's a bit subtle compared to the audio one.
Still this is more of a design decision than a problem; there's no right answer, just options with advantages and drawbacks.
Trumpology is a bit hard for me as non-native speaker, at least doing it by intuition with the words written sideways and over the top, but hey! The humor is perfectly fitting!
Thanks, you made my day!
Such a fun concept. I really like the graphics and the whole mood of the game!
What did you use to draw it btw? Did I mention that it's gorgeous?
It's fun to try to figure out what are the good words for each theme!
Good job! :D
I've never been so fond of short words... :D
I beat it on my first try without knowing much about Trumpology - went back to play again and couldn't get past the Trumpology level in 3 tries - so the randomness might need a bit of tuning.
A post-jam version with either progression that skips unknown topics or single-use power-ups like "show me the wrong words" or "cooldown my brain" should make this an awesome little time-waster for mobile. I'm guessing you could churn out hundreds of levels fairly easily just by coming up with word lists?
Game fits the theme 100% and is the most innovative game I've reviewed yet. Graphics look professional, smooth and clean.
I had few problems. Words sometimes got stuck and physics stopped working. Mouse click also didn't always register properly. Maybe because of this I didn't find the game play as satisfying as it could have been. Technically this could be something related to Unity raycasting and object overlapping. I've had this kind of problems before myself.
Music is repetitive and doesn't loop accurately. Otherwise the sound effects are superb.
Humor and mood was top-notch.
Overall one of the top contenders for sure. Well done. :)
It's a challenging game really funny and intuitive.
It really fits the theme and I think it's my favorite so far.
You did an amzing work!
Agree with a few of the other commenters... I need to brush up on my Trumpology, I ended up just playing at random and doing better than when I was paying attention to the words.
Everything feels polished, the idea is simple and great at the same time.
You could probably drop this it the iOS and Android app stores and I bet it'll sell.
I think a grading system(so like needing only 70% to pass a level) would go a long way because i wanted to play longer but the difficulty was too punishing.
Displaying what words you're looking for before the level starts would also help make the game more accessible.
Quite an impressive game, especially the aesthetic.
What I like:
- Beautiful art and sound combination
- Cute, funny, light-hearted game.
- Fresh idea with potential
But I don't like how the gameplay is balanced right now.
At the moment (and as a non-US?) I find the game easier when I just play randomly. The process of "dealing" with word is "Read the word" -> "Determine if it's related to the topic" -> "Keep or discard". All 3 steps are hard. In fact it's so hard that throwing blocks out randomly waiting for rng god to magically solve the problem is easier. So maybe 1 of the 3 steps can be simplified?
Maybe have a visual cue to show if the word is "on topic"? I honest have no idea which word belong to the "Trumpology", even if I see the word.
Or maybe you can have a dictionary so player can check to see if a word belong to the corresponding category or not? Categorizing is a largely subjective matter so you can't expect people to have the same categorization as yourself.
what a polish.
Im amazed by what some people can do in 48houres. I salute you !
what a polish.
Im amazed by what some people can do in 48houres. I salute you !
While I didn't enjoy stuff like "Trumpology" due to not following "trending topics and news", it's an enjoyable game overall and I consider it quite innovative, especially within this jam. Everything is polished really well, feels finished and I could easily see this ported to mobile with a bit bigger word panels.
Great job!
There's an idea of holding for a little while on a word to see if it's on topic or not. Exchanging time for clue, which may even be educational in the long run 😋
The reading and processing is pretty crucial to the core game, as, if the game was changed so that the elements to keep or toss were represented by another criteria of recognition (say, color, or another aspect to perceive about some graphic things), then the challenge changes fundamentally. Whether that makes it better is going to be subjective.
Definitely for non-US people the topic of Trump is not going to be as recognisable. If the game gets further produced, the levels wouldn't be linear and people would be able to choose the topics they challenge. But also my writing is pretty terrible right now, and hopefully I would improve that if it gets built out more.
The fact that the random generation is too random is a thing that I noticed but didn't have time to fix, so yes unfortunately sometimes one could win without doing a thing, or never win. This is something I already know how to fix (I think).
Thanks for your input! 👌
The art is awesome and I like the music but it gets quite repetitive after a bit.
Others have mentioned it but I am also just going to mention that I did find the RNG a bit frustrating. I would try to be careful and selective but then would get screwed at the end. So I adopted the "throw everything out" approach to playing which is less interesting.
I am not sure if it was the web build but some of my clicks weren't being registered and a few times longer words were getting stuck half way through the characters head. It started acting like a pinball paddle XD
Congrats again on the entry!
...Music was a bit too repetitive and the gameplay.
---
*But for a ludum Dare game, Well done!*
Knowing whether a word belonged was basically the core and the writing can definitely be improved still. I do wonder and am figuring out if there's a good system of auto-correcting for a better collection of words, either through user-generation or through ongoing curation. Maybe.
I mean, you had a chance to put some sneaky thoughts in that head! :laughing:
Great job.
A couple of ideas for increasing the difficulty as the game continues:
-Penalize points for clicking incorrect words
- Take away points when you click on the same valid word twice.
It was quite lovely and fit the theme very well.
As said by others, add visuals with words (in the same tile or in 2 different tiles) could be cool.
I love the vector graphic style, it looks cute, it's easy to read and IMO it really suits the game. Sound design and music also felt quite polished, although I agree with other commenters that music can become repetitive (but to be fair, since this happens to lots of jam games including my own, I believe that time constraints make it hard to come with some music that just fits exactly the length of the experience unless you can have someone on the team dedicated to that).
Some things about the gameplay:
* Regarding controls and brain-words interaction, I was a bit frustrated by the physics-based gameplay and the RNG. In some cases you would suddenly be flooded with a lot of long words and your attempts to carefully pick up the words and organise the brain went down the drain, so the best bet was to just discard a lot of concepts.
There were also a couple of occasions where one long word would get stuck on one side, as "Puerto Rico" on the screenshot. It would rotate a bit, but there was no way to get rid of it.

* Besides this, I wasn't really sure about what was the condition that caused the "danger" trigger to be fired, in some cases the brain didn't really looked that packed.
* I appreciated that you had to give some thought to whether a word would actually be relevant or not, but Trumpology in particular is a bit hard as a non-American, mostly because of proper nouns that might not be particularly well known outside the US. The subject was hilarious, but I had to double check a couple words.
These things aside, the whole package feels really tight and the concept is really funny. Congrats!
:point_right: Well the music fits well with the gameplay (frantically flinging unrelated thoughts out of your head), I find that is did not fit well with the overall narrative (In my experience studying it not a very frantic activity). The music loop was also a bit repetitive (though the mode switch crossfades were nice).
:bulb: I have not seen too many of these "word association puzzle" style games, so it's always nice to see what people come up with. I'm pretty partial to Little Inferno in this budding genre.
:star: Overall great job. Thank you for making this!
Here's a video of my play: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/298011915
Loved the work on both sound and graphics, as both really give off a nice mood for the game.
Great job at making it for the compo too! :open_mouth:
I don't see an HTML5 version on the itch.io site - the Windows version worked fine, but maybe there's something that needs to be tweaked to make the web version appear?
The graphics are really polished, and the audio is really good for a compo entry (although the music can be a bit repetitive like others have said).
I like the word association mechanic, I think that's a really smart way to score it.
It feels very frantic, but balanced for the complexity. I lost about twice before getting to the end.
I am struggling to think of ways to add to the formula here. At it's current pace it's quite easy to make mistakes and be limited by your dexterity. I'm playing on mouse, but I suspect it's also challenging on mobile (though maybe ideal on an iPad). I'd like more agency as a player, but I tend to be a player who demands a lot of agency and this might not be in line with the actual audience for the game.
If you were to take it further, the thing that feels like the big challenge would be giving the player a bit better control over what they remove, maybe just slowing things down could do that? If you can get things a bit slower then you could add some more complicated rules, like words the behave differently.
e.g. some words are so symantically opposite that they repel each other and must be separated. Or some words are fragile and crumble when particular meanings are nearby. Or some words explode in certain conditions.
I suppose what I'm suggesting is other rules that can be understood by perceiving associations, **because that's where the gold in this game idea seems to be.** I also suppose I'm suggesting that if the game were more complicated then it could be slower and that would make it more strategic and less reactive... but this might not be where you want to take the game and I realize that my preferences as a player might diverge significantly from the expected audience for this game.
I've frankly been frustrated by this concept - it seems quite divisive, some people get it easily, some people completely don't. I personally am on the fence about the mash-up of physics "mastery" being in very polar opposition to the word association "mastery" - the two very disparate skills needed to master the game feels like it pulls in two opposite directions.
The scoring - it was the best I could come up with in the time we had, and while it seemed to work for most people, there were also a significant number of people who straight up didn't understand the scoring. That's problematic and I wondered if it were more a UI visibility/understandability/juice problem or a fundamental mechanics problem.
I also have been trying to make the game feel more thoughtful and slower - first of all I should have made the procedural generation more stable, winning/losing by sheer randomness is boring and I would fix that, it's not difficult. But it's the sheer randomness of the physics movements that's difficult to contend with. I've tried to "settle" the physics more but pulling stuff from below inevitably made stuff fly all over the place. And sometimes it's even desired. So I've tried to redefine the rules of this game's physics, for example, picking up an item would "lift" it out of interacting with the rest of the physics objects, but that created yet more problems, either making it too easy (seemingly) or too illogical.
I haven't thought of different word rules, that sounds interesting though I feel like I have another hurdle before jumping that one - ambiguity of words is a thing a lot of people struggled with, and that's probably down to needing better writing on my part.
I've thought of changing the physics part of the game design to change the game into more perhaps tetrisy, block-driven design with the same word association core, but haven't found anything satisfactory yet.
I think a slower, less chaotic design is definitely the better way to go, I've been exploring that direction too in my head, I just haven't quite found the design that seems to make sense for it. I don't think a frantic, mad dash random audience is the right audience for this. But I might also be wrong :/
Thanks again!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SIZhon4MYE