Space Box Rescue

Nice little puzzle for a break!

I commented on the #ludumdare IRC channel alread, but let's leave a comment as well. I liked the music which set the mood. Indeed, level 8 was quite late for a new mechanic but I really liked the element anyway. It gave some additional pressure and required to think about how to control it. The final level had a yet another new thingy which needed new tactics.

You said that the first route is probably optimal, so yea, maybe the levels could have some more complex routes. Additionally, level 9 is significantly easier than the one before it, so the order could be changed or level 9 deleted. However, for some levels I have no idea if I managed to find the optimal route. I played through the game twice and here's my step counts for each level for the second run, asdidn't note them at the first time:

5,10,10,26,44,34,36,11,4,36

(Unfortunately, I'm not entering LD this time so I can't rate :< )

Thank you for reviewing it Tegu! I have added some stats to the "level over" screen post-compo to make it easier for people to see where they fall.

I think it's okay to sometimes have a "breather" level that's easier than the one before, but overall I think you're right. Puzzle design and flow could be vastly better. In the end there was not enough time...

A really nice puzzle game and a nice implementation of the Theme. I'd have to lie saying it was hard, but it took a second or two to figure out the right way to solve most levels. I would have loved it to be more difficult though. The new element at the end was very interesting and makes me believe your game could have the potential for some great additional levels if you'd want to keep working on it for a bit. As said in a comment above the music did fit well and set a good mood without occupying ones mind too much. The statistics were a nice add to know if you did everything right.
Overall a good entry with more potential to be unlocked.

@deadmandomi Thanks bro (literally) :smile: Yes, more (and better) levels wouldn't even be that hard to do, one more day would have made a huge difference here. That said, the levels are simply in text format, maybe I'll release something that takes advantage of this post-compo.

cool and funny puzzle game! The falling blocks are quite tricky! Cool system with the leaderboard an percetage! Nice. Add some post processing and graphics. Some lights are a bit to shiny. Overall a good game!

> This is a really interesting concept. Loved it! :heart:

Very fun game, steep learning curve as with many puzzle games (although I am bad). If you like this sort of thing, it's highly recommended.

This game looks amazing. It's very sad that I couldn't go through level 4. It's just too difficult. But the animations and the graphics is top notch.

Definitely a fun and challenging puzzler. I had trouble getting past level 4 too but I enjoyed it. I liked the graphics and the controls. Thank goodness for the undo button :smiley:! Nice work!

Thank you for the feedback @mistersdevelopment - yes, in hindsight the difficulty of level 4 is out of whack. Thank you for not giving up, you're one of the very few people who made it.

really creative, love it

Whow, Im in love with this game, minimalistic yet polished looking. I love the end game screen staying on the screen between scene transition, makes the whole thing look very continuous. I like everything about the game, nothing to add to it. Great job!

thank you so much @nam-nguyen and @iballs - I'm still conflicted, maybe I should have done the Jam, one more day would have worked wonders...

The puzzles are well designed. I like the overall mood of the game. The graphics and music fit together. Good job!

thank you @gimbalock !

One of my absolute highlights this jam! I like puzzle games, but find it hard to come up with ones that aren't blatant copies of existing games or overly complex. This strikes a great balance of existing principles, used in somewhat new ways while hitting a good learning curve/introduction of new elements/field size. The fact that there is a efficiency statistic and it uses the themes in multiple ways, while being presented in a pleasant way and all this in a Compo game too makes this my first 5/5 for this LD.

Holy crap, this game is excellent. The best I've played so far. Where to start?

The puzzles themselves are so good. Great level design and great core game mechanics. The mechanic introduced at level 5 or so is genius and makes the gameplay so interesting.

I was thinking that it would be cool if you could push two boxes in a row, and there would be a special kind of box that could *not* be pushed this way. Would have opened up some interesting level design possibilities, where you have to line up many boxes in a row in order to efficiently push them all at once.

The music is really good, kind of dreamy and spacey. I just wish it didn't restart when you restart or complete the level. Speaking of restarting the level: THANK YOU for including the hotkey to restart. Much appreciated.

I also love the visuals, particularly the bloom. And the smooth way the character moves from one square to the next is :ok_hand:. Nice work there.

The leaderboards are a GREAT touch, thanks for including those!

One complaint I have is that I wish the "you can't go there" sound only played once if I hold the key down. It gets pretty annoying :P

Some technical questions: what's the "engine"? I see you used a lot of OS libraries, but is this something you've been working on for a while or did you throw it all together for LD? Additionally, the game appeared to run in a fairly low resolution. Is there a way to force it to run at my native screen size?

All in all this game is so FUN!!! You should be SUPER proud of what you've created. And in 48 hours, holy cow. I just wish it was longer :smile: I really sincerely hope you keep working on this post-jam and polish it up, I would buy/play the shit out of an expanded game. Maybe it could even have larger levels where the camera pans to follow the character?

Thank you for making Box Rescue!!

This is amazing! I hope you will get more attention!)

I find it very impressive that you have been able too do this much in such little time.
It's a cute and fun puzzle game with nice sound effects and unique graphics. Well done. :)

@radow I know exactly what you mean about the balance between imitation and experimentation. Thank you very much for your feedback.

@flower thank you :smile:

@cheetahcat a day more would have made a huge difference, though... that reminds me: still gotta post the timelapse!

@iamsodarncool Thank you for the detailed feedback! Yes, I thought about more mechanics, but I suddenly ran out of time on Sunday, that's also why the difficulty curve is a bit off.

About the music: at first I just exported each instrument from Logic Pro into its own track, because I wanted the game to mix them down dynamically. However, due to limitations of web audio, I never got this to work without horrible glitches. So in the end I took the song and mixed down/baked a couple of versions of it, literally in the last few minutes before submission. But yeah, limitations to the audio portions are mostly down to the fact that it was a rushed "fix" in the end. I forgot to mention in the description that I used howler.js, which is a pretty minimal web audio playback library.

About the "engine": there is pretty much none, it's really just Three.js (which is a webGL renderer) and some very minimal glue code I've kinda been accumulating during the last LDs. It's available on Github as a starter package, but I'm hesitant to post it before it's properly documented. What the starter code does is taking care of the boilerplate to set up the scene (apart from some things that I didn't use in this game, like my own pathfinding lib and such). It also doesn't yet contain the effect pipeline I used in this game.

So my philosophy is pretty much hacking this together for each LD, which of course isn't very sustainable. But in the end, this isn't a very complex game either (have a look at the js/game.js file if you're interested, it's a horrible mess, but apart from the levels file js/levels.js this is pretty much the core).

I think I'll make a proper write-up later.

Really nice puzzle game and fantastic music. This tree.js looks very promising and worth to try for web based games.

Neat game! I included it in my compilation video series of the Ludum Dare 42 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/x7vAI59f_1I

Wow, great puzzle game. Your game is waaaay prettier and tougher than my puzzle game!

Thank you @jupiter-hadley :smiley:

Hehe @rexpeppers we will see, I'll have a look tomorrow :wink:

Simple, challenging, awesome!

Nice ambient music, Cool 3D graphics.

Also the game is pretty challenging. I haven't played many challenging puzzle games nowadays, I missed that. The difficulty progression could be hard to other people, but I like it a lot!

Thank you @g12345, as we talked about in the IRC channel, the difficulty thing is ...difficult :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: Obviously, this would have been a lot smoother had this been a Jam entry (or with better time management), however, I'm also very surprised about the difficulty perception of different players. Something I'd have to seriously think about in a broader context if I were to make a post-Compo version...

It's a refreshing take on Sokoban.

@udo I liked the music and ur take on the theme. Also dig the UI elements too.

Nice. The puzzle mechanic itself is great, the rules are explained with the levels in a smooth enough way, but I didn't feel any level was particularly difficult. Having the stats after each level is nice, and it shows that there isn't that much variance across solutions for the majority of levels – not totally unexpected given the rules.

As for the graphics, they were not terribly interesting, but it was clear what was happening. Still, I wonder how this would have turned out in crisp 2D :)

@aurel300 sorry it wasn't your thing, but in my defense it was only a Compo entry ;) I already talked about the level design stuff and such... To be honest I personally like the graphics, and I disagree: I wouldn't want this to be in "crisp 2D"

Always love me some Sokoban, despite being awful at it. Here's my video feedback: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/298012515

I don't know @aurel300 or @deadmandomi, but I don't think we can be friends if they think this game isn't difficult. I stopped counting the number of times I played Level 4, and now I'm backing away slowly from Level 5. I like the graphics! The slidey sound is very satisfying. The music is great; not like "jamming while cleaning the apartment" great, but definitely game great. My quibble: I don't know why it's called Box Rescue when I'm the one that needs help.

@wrenpirate I learned something important about difficulty making this game. My guess is it all comes down to whether people have experience with these kinds of puzzles or not. Those that have, find it too easy. Those that don't, tend find it too hard. deadmandomi is my little brother and I know he played games like this before, and aurel300 I know from the #ludumdare IRC channel (which I keep plugging!) and I was far, far too dumb to solve *his* game :smile:

About the music, it was supposed to be better, but there's a whole story behind this salvaged version of it in the Post Mortem...

@udo Okay, I just did Level 5, but Level 6 looks logically impossible to me.

@wrenpirate heh, sorry for the torture, I swear I didn't make this to aggravate people :laughing:

Well made and polished game! Enjoyed all 10 levels. Thanks for sharing your game with my stream awhile back. Your game was played around 5:46 into this vod: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/298692367