A Minimal Puzzle-platformer

Just amazing! Straight 5 stars! Good Job! (Maybe a bit more energetic music, but that's nitpicky)

Cool! Because I'm horrible puzzle solver, Some stages are a bit hard for me. :sob:

Incredible game! Great work!

A really great entry, had fun playing. Cool mechanics and really smart interpretation of the theme!

I like this game ! Well level design and great level title to hint is incredible amazing :-) ,I've occurred some bug situation at the level 'Timing', gears got stuck and need to restart the level directly.
I think maybe we can learn 'Greed' before 'Timing' ? :laughing:

A very well done game, although I felt frustrated a couple times, it encourages playing again and again until solving it, good level design and mechanics. Thanks!

Great game, looks good, plays nice, sounds good, level design is on point, really just an overall great game that fits the theme perfectly. Really impressed. Keep up the good work!

This was very well done considering you only had a weekend. I'm impressed. The camera was a little frustrating at times and hitting Alt in the web browser removes focus from unity lol so Idk if you had another camera prepared, but I couldnt use it. Anyway, really impressive, I gave high marks.

Quite hard and sometimes buggy but good! good luck!

Really well executed, loved it! Though i got so mad when I saw the flappy gear level...

This is amazing. I wish I had your skills in level design for puzzle games. The game is really polished. My only minor complaint is that the movement inertia is little bit too much, sometimes it's a tad annoying when you can't connect properly because of that.

Anyway, this is brilliant, and I love that there's a theme for each level, it's so well thought. Great job!!

Nice innovative game! I wish I could have gotten further, I got stuck on level 3 where you had to go backwards and under the ledge, just couldn't get the timing right. The idea of interlocking gears for movement is cool, I wish the animation of the gears on different levels would reverse, right now it looks like the teeth of the gear are passing through each other instead of binding like actual gears. Great work!

Wowowo !
I love your game !
(In fact, I stoped after 20 minutes of playing, too much reflexion for me lol)

Great idea, and great puzzles!
Due to timings that are hard to hit some of the levels can be a bit frustrating.
Still great game overall.

I love the concept of your game. So simple but also hard to master. I enjoyed playing.

Wow, it's the best game of ld43. Really.

This concept is incredible. You just reinvented the concept of the dash in a really smart way! Congrats, I loved the spirit and the mood of this game :)
It was a bit hard at first to get the controls (especially on non qwerty keyboards) but it's but after that, it's pretty cool!

Wow! I love the simplistics artstyle, very appealing. Game mechanic are just great and the whole game looks pretty polished.. it would be even better if all gears would rotate in a correct direction. Great game anyway!

Wow, great puzzle game!

Removing the motion blur would've gone a long way. Other than that, amazing concept AND execution!

Great concept, felt the precision difficulty was a bit harder than it needed to be. I kind of enjoy just beating it cause I figured it out not because I mastered the really meager jump. Also I felt the fact that more gears = higher jump could have been taught a little better.

Overall I really like how the design explores the mechanics here, good job.

Great stuff! really awesome puzzler. Lovely mechanics, great audio. Excellent

Great concept and nice minimalistic graphics. Music was a bit repetitive after some time.
A general advice: Using Z key is really annoying at least for german keyboard, because Z and Y are swaped. So its hard to use Z and X key at the same time.

Thanks so much for the Great Feedbacks!

* Sorry for the 'z' + 'x' keyboard controls. It was too tight to fit the schedule, and I could not think of a layout other than QWERTY ( Actually I barely knew qwertz or dvorak exist. :sob: )
* I also thought it would great if gears' rotations are in correct direction but I worked alone with poor productivity and had no time...

Maybe I can make POST-ludumdare version with these feedbacks! Thanks again

This game is good! The first level was called the easiest platformer level ever and I still died xD I feel like the game response is a bit delayed but I'm not sure if that was just me. I like the concept and the abstract graphics. The Mechanic is unique and really enjoyable. It's a game I'd come back and play again!

Really innovative platforming with a twist! Minimalist graphics were very nice and well done too.

Find it not very intuitive on how many gears translate into how high you can jump, but its a cool mechanic nonetheless.

Just some small niggles: met with a small bug in this level, and also found myself unable to jump when wedged between two gears.

The final level is also odd in that zooming out the level doesn't focus on the entire stage.

Thought it was really nice, had a great atmosphere. Was tough at times but yeah good work!

One of my favorites, love the concept, smart way to use the theme, love the minimalism, leveldesigns are fun and well though, amazing job.

I had the same problem as @randomphantom and could reproduce that very reliable. Another bug I had was that very often the sacrifice directly after jumping did not work. I had this bug very often in the second to last stage, but sadly I couldnt pinpoint exactly how to reproduce it.
The music got pretty annoying very quick.
But other than those bugs and the music this was probably the best game gameplaywise I played so far. I am not a big fan of puzzle or platformer games, but this one hooked me. The yoshi style sacrifice is a great mechanic and great implementation!

Great game. I played over and over. Got to Flying level and don't know what to do. 5 stars.

I really like the game. For me it was not z and x but y and x since I have a german layout and this really is a bit annoying. There were some levels where I repeatedly failed and I wanted to skip, that would have been a better option that trying again for me. Saw the skip message to late. Just my view. Good work over all!

Very fun game, nice simple graphics and some good levels, I think that the blur should be turned down slightly when moving fast, but otherwise well done.

Really liked the mechanics. Personally I would've preferred more snappy controls as the gears slipping and sliding for a second after I left go the movement made them very hard to control. Also I didn't like the controls. Pressing Z and X to jump was very fiddly and foreign. Maybe add custom control schemes? Criticisms aside I still really liked the game and played it for quite a while.

Gameplay-wise it's an interesting platformer, but some things stop it from attaining its potential. Controls are weird, I'd have preferred a single button for both jumps. It's pretty buggy, but it totally makes sense for snapping mechanisms, they're hard to do right. I expected more level design around the orientation of the gears, and less "connect many gears then jump high". Honestly though the gameplay ideas here are really interesting, there is definitely potential! Congratulations :)

Excellent work! Stages could use a bit of balancing but it's a very neat idea and pretty well executed. I could it was quite blurry on my screen but otherwise the clean aesthetic was great.

I would love love love love for this to be given some more time for polish and expansion. As a huge fan of puzzle-platformers, I'd say this has a lot of potential to be something great. The idea of having a dynamically sized character that can jump as long as any section of it is touching some sort of "ground" is incredibly novel and intuitive. And you guys have demonstrated in your level design just how much mileage you can get out of a simple concept like that.

Some things I would suggest improving on if you were to continue working on this:

1. It's kind of difficult to keep track of the little notches on the gears that tell you how you're able to match up with them. I would say 90% of the time, I wouldn't even pay attention to them until they became the key factor in solving a puzzle. Not sure how to solve this issue (or if it was even an issue for anyone else), but it would be nice if there was some more visual feedback on it.

2. Right now I'd say the platforming segments are a bit TOO precise. I found the most joy in figuring out the puzzles, and how to set my gears up for the right outcome. Failing to execute a solution that you KNOW works can get a little frustrating. Perhaps be a little more generous with the platform spacing and also lower the hitbox on the spikes so that the player is able to execute a solution more easily after figuring out the solution.

3. I dig the screen shake on each gear connection. Would be nice to add a nice, crunch sound effect to go along with it. Pretty minor, but would be a nice touch.

4. Consider adding a visual indicator to how high the player should anticipate a Drop/Jump to be. I pretty quickly picked up on the fact that dropping multiple gears at once resulted in a higher jump, but I never really knew for sure HOW high it would launch me until I did it. Maybe a sort of transparent arrow pointing up to the max jump height the player should expect to reach if they dropped at that instant would be helpful (especially if you could somehow do it in a way that was unobstructive. Make it transparent, perhaps?)

5. The camera is a BIT too zoomed in for my tastes. I personally like using the fully zoomed out camera mode (thanks a ton for including!), but that was likely because the zoomed in camera mode was a bit too restrictive. I think a nice middle ground should be possible.

Whew, that was a lot of typing. I'm usually extra critical to the games I really really like, because I would love to see them taken further and expanded upon. This is easily one of my favorites of the jam so far. I look forward to future work from y'all! :smiley:

It's like riding a whole herd of Yoshis! I do have to agree that the platforming might be a bit too precise for a game that has so much of a focus on puzzle gameplay. But it's an awesome experience all together.