The rules started making sense as I played but I think I got lucky a lot!

The visual art is nice. Well done!

Interresting puzzle mechanics!

Good work. I found the game to be really hard to understand at first. I understand "Find out the rules by playing it" but it would be helpful if there was some explanation on the mechanics of the game. Mouse controls on the menu would also be nice.

Beautiful assets. The game mechanics were pretty tricky to understand at first. Very cool!

cool puzzles.. a tutorial would have helped a lot

Thank you. We tried to aim so that the rules of the game were presented in the early levels by discovering them. Of course, we can do better but the lack of sleep and too much caffeine didn't help :P.

It took me a while to figure out the rules, but once my dumb old brain figured it out I really enjoyed it! Really smart puzzle game, although I think it could've used more of a tutorial

Very cute! I agree that the mechanic is a bit hard to understand at first, and dealing with figuring out how to rotate your character is a bit tricky in the first couple of levels. Perhaps you could add a short description explaining that?

The puzzles are fun to figure out! "Crossroads" especially gave me trouble. The music is really, really good, and I love how you have a new random track each time. Very upbeat. I also love the little dance the guy does when he gets a trophy :) well done!

The mechanics were a bit hard to wrap my head around at first, but it allowed for some pretty creative puzzles after some practice. Good work!

I love the idea that you learn how to play the game while playing it without any tutorials. The mechanics are great, the visuals are simple but nice, would like to see the UI visuals fitting in the in-game visuals.

thank you @slimmerburger @masterfulmonkey @not-tomo @transylvanian-blacksmiths. All the feedback is welcome. We wanted to finish the UI, but we ran out of coffee :P.

loved how much this game made me think

A hard puzzle game but all good level designs made it fell not impossible

Nice

Damn it took me so long to understand what i should do, i almost gave up, glad i didn't though, it's fun once you get the hang of it, very clever mechanic and puzzles.

Takes a while to pick up on the rules, but its a cool puzzle game once you get past that.

@edevjogos Glad that you enjoy it. It is very motivating that players give us this kind of feedback. We aimed that the players enjoyed a process of discovering the rules.

@edevjogos Glad that you enjoy it. It is very motivating that players give us this kind of feedback. We aimed that the players enjoyed a process of discovering the rules.

@rookrules with @almagor, we enjoyed watching you suffer while solving the puzzles :P
@albyk, @edevjogos, @lucasglass thank you for taking the time to understand the rules. One thing we acknowledge is that the difficulty increases too fast (in our opinion, of course). Thank you all!!!.

I wish I understood how to solve these puzzles better; unfortunately the concept never clicked for me. It would be great if you had the time to introduce more, easier levels to help new players learn the mechanics.

@bluishgreenpro first of all, thank you for the interview and playing our game. We are aware of this issue. We want to develop an off Ludum dare 49 version introducing these types of levels. For the Ludum dare, we built the game from scratch, so we ran out of time to test the balance of the learning curve. Thank you again for the feedback, we appreciated it a lot.

I think it could've fit the theme more, but this is an extremely clever puzzle game and I had a great time playing it! More of a tutorial would've helped, but I got the hang of it after the first level :)

Really great job!

Fun game with unusual aesthetic. The aesthetic is gorgeous. Well done ++

I don't know how things work; objects spawns in empty grids and rotate, which is weird. I like puzzle games and here is something good in this game, but it does not come out on this first play.

@python-b5 Thank you for the feedback. We did not use a tutorial on purpose, the concept behind is that the player figures the rules out. Still, we know that the levels scaled in difficulty too fast, but as I said before we did not have enough time to do the fine-tuning in terms of difficulty balance. We want to publish an extended version that does a better job at this. About the theme, the idea was that if you made mistakes under the rules of "shells cloning" then you will start to have more turtles on your puzzle and therefore the solution will become more stochastic and therefore unstable. Again we are very pleased that you liked it, and for the next jam, we will try to take all feedback that we have received and improve the way that we try to expose the ideas to the players.

@geckoo1337 thank you for playing the game.
Even though we did not model the character and turtles, we try to come with a good color palette and post-processing effects to give this look and feel.

@hiisileiri Level 3: "crossroads" was supposed to introduce the cloning rule to the player. And then level 4 tried to solidify the concept. I think the levels are too tricky and so maybe the player can not focus on: "AAAA so the rule is this...(no spoiler :D)". And then from 5+ things get crazy. I hope you can give it a try again and maybe give us some more pointer on what you have issues with. Thank you very much for the feedback.

First of all: there should not be any "crazyness" in a puzzle game, because otherwise things do not work logically and/or the (regular) player do not enjoy the other time on the game because in not the same "world" he or she want to play in again. So i play this game again now for a while and just list (of not really polished views i had here) in order i see and/or feel in there:

When i start the game i have no idea what different lines or even the colors on the character stands for.

Controls are weird also while i can choose the direction up or down by pressing W or X, but i can't press D to look "behind".

The hostile character is not giving feedback from the hitting light, but it is normal for now while the game is on testing level.

There character with lights is illogical; the lights don't seem to come from anywhere (This feature still not necessary for now while the game is on testing level, but at least there could be some instructions. Also while the character has walking animations but rotating does immediately is not good)

Levels are so difficult straight from the start, i can't get the "AAAH" experience as in tutorial experiment.

The dancing movement feedback (imo) is not on the same level what player just have done; e.g. the appear would be relevant if player beats bunch of players in a challenge or beats the entire pack of levels, the stretched animation part would be epic for the completed feedback.

And on level 3; suddenly THE SAME LOOKING HOSTILE characters start moving with no reason and more is spawning. No any "tutorial entries" to play and to see/and to learn from first. And the direction of hostile characters (while the next spawns) looks away the player and the come right at the player, makes no sense

But if i get it right now, the player character uses blue light to stop creatures, and red light to make them hostile; well that's a really interesting and clever part of this game, which is not clear thing on first play. That concept would work very well if the game would be in real time and the directions of light could be switched to one or an other color, or swap the color or even have colors to rotate. Maybe the player would be able to place lighting torches on the ground and lure the animals: i see the animals here are the "unstable" part which would make this to overall clever and unique game, and due that the game has much potential.

Interesting idea of a puzzler, having the shelled enemies move base on your current direction adds a good level of challenge. When your instructions described only being able to move forward, I initially assumed the game would play with tank controls (i.e. W to move forward, A/D to rotate). I think the game would function better if the control scheme was like that, because there were times early on where I wasn't sure if I was moving or turning because of the key I pressed, same with having the player rotate as an animation instead of it snapping to the right angle.

@hiisileiri thank you so much for the detailed feedback.
@gamepopper we wanted to add the rotating animation, butwe ran into some weird bugs therefore we had to remove the feature. I see that the controls can be a little tricky, so thanks for the observation. When you test it so much, it becomes second nature, and then one can lose sight of what it feels if you are new to the game. Thank you a lot!!!.

It took forever to understand the mechanics and go through the first level. I don't think it would hurt any learning level and maybe the first few levels very simple. I appreciate a good idea with a red and blue ray. Good entry.

I absolutely love the idea of making the player discover the rules by playing! Discovering every new rule is incredibly satisfying.

I spent too much time before I understood how exactly turning worked for some reason, and even after that it didn't quite feel logical to use absolute directions for rotation. Just using W/A/D keys where A/D is turning CCW/CW and W is step forward would be so much more intuitive and natural for this type of motion.

I like the design of the puzzles and the way they introduce new concepts gradually.

Great entry!

Good game idea. I like puzzles.

The controls are not very intuitive to me: I would prefer to use left/right (or a/d) to rotate and up (or w) to go forward. This made me make many annoying mistakes while playing.

It took me quite some time to figure out that the blue ray stops the enemies and the red one activate them. A little tutorial would have been a good idea (or at least a first level where you have to put the red and the blue rays on enemies no matter what choices you do).

Congratulations on making this game!

Very challenging game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 49 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/gL5Jq5zIm84

nice job

Past the third level there are a ton of moving parts in each level! My brain feels like it would explode trying to solve them...

It was a little tricky to understand the moving conditions of the shells, but once I got the hang of that it was a pretty neat game! I like your implementation of the theme as well, rather unique!

This is a really hard puzzle, I did not make it past the "Do not stop me now" level. Nice game

This was really hard, but I liked how you learnt as you go. Maybe we would need more of the same learning levels and easier variants, but I think that was really cool. I also really liked the concept of unstable rules and this general craziness! Good job!

Cool game! the graphics are very nice and the puzzle design is really good. keep up the good work!

The puzzles seem neat, but the controls feel incredibly unresponsive - maybe speeding up animations if the player has pressed a key would be a good thing to do?

nice game

It takes some time to understand how to play the game, but overall a good puzzle game with a nice graphics and I like that the music change every next try.

Hey there! This game was really amazing to play! Thanks for joining us live!

I finally had the time to come back and rate everything I played so far!

Here is a link to the vod of the review if you wish to see it again: https://www.youtube.be/watch?v=1gUA0Q2dn6I&t=17019s