Less is Moore by Aurailus
Description
It's hard fitting all of our modern conveniences into a computer the thickness of a pencil. Find out how the people in the biz really cram all of the tech into your phone by doing it yourself! This completely factually accurate phone-creation puzzle game is sure to teach you very important things about phone construction, such as
:package: More effective box packing.
:iphone: An intense hatred for technology.
:dog: What a "DogPhone(tm)" even is.
Play Game
Please let me know if you find any bugs so I can fix them!
Features
🧩 Puzzle gameplay!
:five: Five unique levels!
:iphone: Pixel art that took way too much time.
:speech_balloon: Pretty funny dialogue?
:timer: A potentially superfluous timer!
Cheats
If you’re stuck on a particularly difficult level, you can skip it by opening your browser’s Dev Tools (Ctrl Shift I) and running the following line of code in the console, and then reloading the page.
localStorage.setItem('ld54_level', parseInt(localStorage.getItem('ld54_level')) + 1)
Tips
Check for new parts at the beginning of every level, sometimes they'll be required to solve it!
The timer doesn't impact your score so long as you make the phone before it runs out. Take as much time as you can to perfect your design!
Bigger parts provide better scores, but also have larger footprints.
Play Game (again)
A message from me, myself, and I
Hey there! This was a hell of a Jam. This was my first time entering a Compo that overlapped with my university semester and wow, it was something else. I streamed the whole thing as per usual on my Twitch, totalling over 30 hours of Live time by the end of it. Once it was over I just wanted to fall asleep forever, but I had a great time, and I'm really happy with how the game turned out :zzz:
I feel like the concepts in this game are stronger than my LD53 entry (which I'm still really proud of), but the execution is a bit more rough. I had a much more ambitious idea, so it makes sense that I wasn't able to complete it to the same level of polish. I really wish I had found time to add audio, as I think that added a lot to my last entry, but sacrifices had to be made :smile_cat:
One other topic of note is that I created my very first YouTube video recently, which is about how games render lots of textures using Sparse Bindless Texture Arrays, an advanced OpenGL API feature. It would mean a lot to me if you'd check it out, as I'm very much still starting on the platform :heart:
Please keep in mind that this was a Compo entry! Everything was made solo during the 48 hour deadline, so some stuff is still a little rough. ✨
Play Game! (if you somehow missed it the first two times)
Post Deadline Changelog
(this one was a lot more buggy when I first released it. Sorry!)
- Tutorial and Level 2 accidentally had unreasonable min-scores for completion because of last-minute score rebalances.
- Tutorial prompt to encourage user to right click didn't appear if they placed the part out of bounds.
- Fix pixel scaling to properly detect screen dimensions.
- Background wasn't stretching across large screens.
- Various Typos.
- Final screen incorrectly said 'Product Fail'.
| Link | https://github.com/Aurailus/LD54 |
| Play Game | https://aurail.us/ld54/index.html |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/mobile-game |
Ratings
| Overall | 2th | 4.518⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 4th | 4.357⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 25th | 4.214⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 2th | 4.679⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 2th | 4.679⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 3th | 4.518⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 29th | 3.964⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 13🗳️ | 16🗨️ |
This asks for soo much bigger space than a jam game — even with current mechanics you could play with different starting setups and other restrictions (money, new parts, manager requirements, etc.), and this could turn in a super addicting game (preferably MOBILE game, haha, get it?). There are already dozens of "fit tetraminos in square" type of games, but this just adds so much depth and meaning to all of it.
But for now — only lack of sounds and music stopped me from giving 5 starts in all categories. Rock on!
back at it with a killer game.
brb while I find out where I can buy a DogPhone(tm)
This was so much fun! All those funny quips of your senior colleague and all the corporate talk! It really added to the experience!
Well done! 😄
The game looks and feels fantastic, the puzzles are insanely well done, if not a little ill-explained: the dialogue was hilarious, just everything, it's all so polished for a compo submission. I do wish there had been music or sound effects, but honestly I barely noticed the lack of them.
My BIGGEST problem, is just how counter-intuitive the mechanics can be. I found myself ready to leave on the second level and give this a remarkablely lower score, until I learned that the only requirement is that every outlet needs to connect to a wire, and those can pass through other parts. Specifically when it introduced the BAT 5000, and I had to pass a current through another disconnected piece on the board to power it. I really wish you had time to explain it better, the difficulty was *perfect* after learning how to play the game, but the learning curve just took a 90° turn upwards when the timer was introduced. Seriously, such a fantastic entry, I just wish you had a little more tutorialization, for silly people like me who don't know how phones work. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
AMAZING AMAZING entry, 5/5 stars -- I'm excited to see what you come out with the next time because so far, you've blown me away. See you next jam! :beers:
Since giving feedback on puzzle games is difficult, I have provided a recording to show where I got stuck at times, and hopefully my feedback is useful!
A heads up on the visuals in my recording, **I have an extension that turns every page into dark mode**, so if the text boxes are unexpectedly in darkmode for the first half, that's why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qdvfrVfhUs
I actually got a bit tired of the dialogues and I think that the timer is a bit redundant (I had to restart the level where 5000mAh battery appears many-many times). But overall I very much enjoyed it, thank you for the game!
* Game was very solidly built; in 3 days, the level of polish found in the UI, general art style, and gameplay is astonishing.
* I enjoyed a lot of the humour you worked into the dialogue; at no point did it detract from the experience.
* Requirements were clearly signalled, and I didn't feel overwhelmed at any point by what was asked of me. Tutorial sections felt like the appropriate amount of handholding.
Cons:
* Game could've benefitted from sound design; even just little blips for scrolling dialogue.
* This would've been outside the scope of the 48 hours you had, but some sort of "endless mode" might've been nice to allow for the player to take on random puzzles after the campaign.
* Personal preference, but I feel that remapping rotate to "R" would've been more intuitive.
Bugs: N/A
Overall a very solid package; the amount of stuff you were able to cram into this game is amazing, without any noticeable bugs at that.
All this in a compo entry, I can see how sounds were the last thing. Still impressive!
Also, great pun in the title!
I agree, I think this game could be something more than a Jam game, I had a lot of fun making it and it felt very extensible while I was putting it all together. I had all sorts of things I wanted to do, including:
- Odd phone shapes (flip phone, T shaped phone, etc)
- Parts with more placement restrictions (adjacent to a part, directly connected to a part, less than some distance away from a part)
- Tighter restrictions on budget, and more parts to work through.
- Actually R&Ding new parts outside of the main gameplay loop.
- A reviewing system, where during the game different things would be prioritized (headphone jack, screen brightness, etc), and your final score would be influenced by those factors, so you'd have to watch the news to get an idea of what's important (which would hopefully have some humorous dialogue in it as well).
I am definitely tempted to make this more of a thing, I might put a more concerted focus into that if this game scores well (and if I get the motivation). I'll have to wait and see!
Thanks again!
As for the money aspect, there were initially going to be a lot more parts to force you to make choices as to what is most important given the budget, as well as shifting priorities for reviewers that would influence what you should focus on. Unfortunately I didn't have time to implement those features, which left the budget feeling a little vestigial. I retooled it last minute to act more as an indicator of how well you're doing at getting the maximum score, setting the max budget to the optimal layout for the level, but that wasn't explained super well.
Definitely some of the mechanics were a bit ill-explained. I kind of assumed people would grasp certain things which weren't that intuitive, in retrospect. Mainly, that the outlined parts could not be moved, and that the charging ports / anything with a blue portion of the sprite had to borders of the phone. Definitely they could have used more explaining, and possibly a dedicated level introducing their finer workings, if I had the time to implement it.
I do think the tutorial section had you link a part through another one, but it was also a wire part, so I get how that could be something that people might not connect to any part being chainable. Just a single line like 'connect the part to any exposed wire, as long as there's a path back to the CPU it'll work just fine!' would have helped with that. I think that I did pretty good with the tutorialization on my last jam, and this time I focused a bit too much on making silly dialogue and not enough on making the dialogue helpful (it's possible to do both, I just have to be better at it :P)
Thank you so so much, though. Hearing these pain points helps me know what I should do better next time / if I continue the making the game. I'm really happy you enjoyed it, and I'll see you next jam!! :sparkles:
I definitely wanted to get sounds in, really badly, but I just ran out of time. Oh well. I managed to get sounds in my previous LD entry, which I think added a lot to the experience. A better rotation control scheme would have been nice, I saw that some people really struggled with it with touch pads. An endless mode would be super cool! But definitely out of the scope of the jam :P
Thank you so much!! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Overall great game! It'd be so cool if you expanded on this idea. I could see a full game made from this being really fun :smile:
Also some music would really set the mood (even if its some basic stock music)
Well polished entry, good job!
I think the tutorial said RAM was required but it turned out to be SSD drives?
It took me a while to find all the hints about invalid building (missing component type shown in orange in the left panel, orange highlight on overlap, half transparency on disconnected component) but even with that I would have liked to get a proper message on what's wrong with a given building as it can be stressful when counter is close to zero, everything *seems* okay but the Deliver button cannot be pressed and you're not sure why.
Otherwise I like that you can go on with a minimal design and get some ranking, then try again to cram more components and get a better ranking next time.
It would be nice if you could:
- skip the dialogue as it fully plays after each retry
- disable timer for experimentation mode (to find the best designs)
- a level select / time attack to try missions again with better ranking
Anyway, I'm playing this as part of studying Ludum Dare submissions with good ranking to get hints on how to make minimal, successful games, so that is really instructing!