Hazel & Hector by cassowary
Hazel and Hector are two snowshoe hares who live on a series of tiny islands and eat grass. However, they are very nervous about camouflaging with their surroundings! Help Hazel and Hector eat all the grass in 10 different levels.
Educational Fun Fact: In real life, snowshoe hares' coat colors change between brown and white with the seasons to better camouflage with snow in the winter!
This didn't end up having that much to do with the theme, oops. The idea was like "there are spaces where your movement is limited" but, whatever, lol.
I ended up being quite busy this weekend (and I kind of spent way too long on graphics), but I'm generally happy with how this turned out in light of that. It's pretty rushed in some places, though.
How to play * Click and drag to move Hazel or Hector. * Hares can move freely on spaces of their color, or on mixed-color spaces, but on spaces of the opposite color, they will become nervous due to lack of camouflage and be unable to move. * When a hare is nervous, their partner can push them around by moving into them. * If Hazel or Hector moves onto a grass tile that matches their color, they will eat the grass. Eat all grass to complete the level (and make sure both Hazel and Hector are on matching tiles.) * There are 10 levels in total. * Use Z to undo, R to reset, M to mute. (There are also undo/reset buttons in the upper right corner.)
Unfortunately, this one doesn't save your progress! I ran out of time :(
Tools used * Programming: zucchinibread.js, my JS game engine * Art: Aseprite * Level design: Tiled + ulvl * Sound effects: Audacity + fingernails / breath / carrot / acoustic guitar * Music: Ableton + Keyzone Classic VST + electric bass + reversed acoustic guitar through fuzz filter
| Link | https://github.com/cassowarii/ld54 |
| Link | https://cassowary.itch.io/hazel-and-hector |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/hazel-hector |
Ratings
| Overall | 16th | 4.21⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 43th | 4.048⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 66th | 3.911⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 121th | 3.911⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 17th | 4.347⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 13th | 4.139⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 71th | 3.409⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 8th | 4.192⭐ | 62🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 29🗨️ |
puzzles are well thought and the difficulty curve is good. sprites are nice and hare's animations are great!
i thought the click and drag felt a little bit strange from time to time but i don't know what exactly (don't worry: the annoyance was minimal, i still finished and enjoyed the game).
(edit: oops i didn't see i wasn't able to vote yet, i'll come back tomorrow!)
The undo and restart buttons sometimes wouldn't click for some reason. The dragging was fine, though.
Though I must admit I found myself - once or twice - thinking that a level is deliberately leading you into a trap you can't get out of without restarting. Thankfully, both the Undo and Restart options are available.
The controls are pretty polished. I especially liked that you can drag over multiple tiles in one go, even when pushing another hare, rather than forcing you to go one step at a time. The pushing also worked pretty good, although I found one possible bug - when one hare pushes another into a grass tuft, sometimes the pushed hare will eat the grass, and sometimes it won't. Here you can see the white hare on a tile with grass still present, but they won't eat it.
Overall it's an amazingly polished compo entry. The graphics are great, and the hare animations are very cute. The music is pretty chill, allowing you to relax while solving the puzzles. Great work!
@lcstark has already mentioned the only bug I encountered (only once I think), so I'll leave it be - who would expect a game without bugs, made in two days, right?
This was a really nice relaxing experience. I appreciate the real-world inspiration behind the mechanic and the cute character art. And I can't stress enough how nice the undo button was from a quality of life standpoint --- there were a few times I made one wrong move very deep into a level, and it would have been painful to start over completely.
I will say I feel like I "got" the mechanic fairly early on, after which the puzzles weren't very difficult. While the one mechanic is really interesting and clean, I feel like it may have needed *just a little something extra* to get a satisfying ten levels out of it. But obviously time is a very scarce resource for Compo and the game is very complete and impressive as-is.
Thanks for making this!
@jeremy-ryan I know what you mean -- I think adding another "standard" mechanic like sokoban boxes or one-way doors or breakable ground or something might help. As it is, it suffers a little bit due to the "if a character can get from point A to point B, they can always go back from point B to point A" effect, which is something I usually try to avoid in my puzzle rule sets. (both characters together don't have this issue, which is probably good enough for tiny short game, but I think if I expand it it'll need like 1-2 more mechanics.)
Once again a very fun, little, enjoyable puzzle game.
The hare animations were cute, the audio was nice and cozy. Controls were easy to use, however I do wish it would've been possible to move both hares at once (while waiting for the first one to move) but this might just be the speedrunner tendencies in me and I can imagine it'd mess with both the "pushing" mechanic but also the undo.
I'm surprised by how you manage to come up with entertaining puzzle ideas every jam!
Keep it up <3
I haven't made any puzzles like this, so perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, but once the player learns how to effectively use the mixed tiles, it feels like every puzzle has the same solution. The most interesting situation this game puts you in is trapping you in a corner if you get the grass in the wrong order, which I really enjoyed. Finding some more interesting ways to get the player to really examine a level's design could make this a masterpiece.
Anyway, giving feedback on a puzzle game is difficult, so here's a video of myself playing the game. I hope it can help out and show you where other players might get stuck!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_00qyxDjpT4
The only detail that could have been improved imo is that sometimes it's a bit tedious to move them around. Tho the few solutions I have in mind can quiclky become time consumming, so you may have been wise to just keep things simple for compo.
Anyway, very nice job!
Loved the animation/sounds when you get the hare to its wrong tile.
Great entry.
