Once I figured out the inventory and combat system, it was really fun-- good work!

Wasn't able to get it to load past the instructions (Firefox, Mac OS 13.6). Still though, it looks fun, please @ me if you post any updates/bugfixes that might make it work better in the browser!

I really love this game! Really clever idea of making your deck size based on a grid you have to manage, great job!

@floralvikings That's very strange. Works fine on both our Firefoxes. Granted, it's on Linux and Windows.

What is the last screen you see? You need to press "Space" on the instruction screen to proceed. Or maybe you just missed the "Onwards" button in the right corner on the first screen after instructions and simply didn't click it? Would it be possible for you to try on a different browser?

interesting take on the turn based game. I only found out the importance of the inventory system, once i lost the battle. but was fun to play and loved the concept.

@fabula-rasa this is the last screen I see (downsized to fit the upload limit); when I press space to proceed, the screen goes black (the music continues) and stays that way indefinitely. I'll give it a try in Chrome (I know Godot 4 had (still has?) some issues with Firefox sometimes)

This game is fire. One of the best things I've tried out this jam for sure

~Yeah same result in Chrome; I wonder if it's a Mac-specific Godot bug?~ Nevermind, just took awhile to load, playing now!

@floralvikings Great! I'm very glad it loaded. I would be very curious to know if you experience any performance issues. After all, this long load is peculiar. It loads almost immediately for us.

Might be some Mac-specific Godot issue indeed. We don't own a Mac, so it's quite hard to hunt those down (or even realize they exists, until someone mentions them).

This was well worth the wait, I wasn't able to spend a _ton_ of time with it but I love the mechanics and the take on the theme. This is one of my favorites for sure, and I'll be revisiting when I have a little more time

Good job! I had a lot of fun figuring out the best strategy for the combat.

Some things I noticed:
Some rounds that had many "actions" would not fit all of those actions inside of the console after the round. Could maybe add a scroll bar for the player.

Damage over time and the enhancers seem to be very powerful, especially since DoTs can't be blocked by shields.

It's not very clear how much damage each character is gonna take from bitrot every round.
I also had a hard time knowing which of my programs were shredded by "shatter".

I did three runs (trying different strategies each, it's that addictive...) and noticed that the inventory doesn't seem to reset between new games.

Overall it's a very fun game. I Really like the puzzle element with the programs, I think it represents the theme very well and it adds to the decision-making aspect of the game. The art style and graphics are also very well done, congratulations.

My favourite game in LD54 so far! Fuck yeah!
https://youtu.be/S8fSUBOTGkY

Best game so far, I played the first game for over an hour......
Just amazing, I like everything about it.. Would like it to be more clear when the actions takes place.
Top ratings from me. :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

Favorite game so far! Enhance - Enhance - Enhance - B-0-FLOW is OP :smile:

woa great mechanics! im finding it pretty hard to beat so is gonna take me a while but ill do it hehe >:)

Awesome game! Love the art style and sound, gameplay was really interesting and challenging. Fantastic work!

Great game. The art and the music was very well done. Once when I understood the loop, it was fun to wrack those hackers! Great job

That was a great game !!
I had a really good time playing it !

The only minor grip I have with it is when you have a program you want to put somewhere where there is already another program, you can't click to replace the one currently in place with the one you have selected. Instead, you have to put it somewhere else, remove the old one then put it into place.

That's a really solid jam entry ! congrats !

Good take on the theme.

Absolutely Love this game! Been playing at least 20min. You both did a wonderful job!

That was awesome. An interesting take on card based combat. Fitting all the programs in was a really cool idea.
Ran into a weird issue on my second attempt, the backup drive was empty but I couldn't put anything there, after a while all the programs from my first run suddenly appeared there. Seems to happen on the main hdd too when starting a new game.
I love that enhance stacks, very satisfying to 1 shot enemies.
An encounter counter would have been useful, as would something to show the active bit rot / per turn damage.

A well thought out game, it's hard to believe it was made in such a short amount of time. Excellent entry!

Oh my! It reminds of a fully fleshed out flash game :D, somehow it brought me into my childhood even though I've never quite seen a game like this before. Here's some feedback, at first I was confused which attacks were mine and which were my opponent's, so I would either color-code them, or put them on each side of the screen respective of whose charging bar is whose. (though i understand in order to time your attacks they need to be close to each other). And also, the strategy I used the most was simply filling up my inventory with as many "smacks" "smack mk2" and "beam em" as possible and the rest of the space with "enhance", and I thought this strategy would fail when I encountered the shielding robot which enhanced three times and then shields, im guessing it was designed to counter the smack enhance strategy, but I beat him pretty easily, so I would nerf the smack and enhance strategy somehow, I'm not sure how though, maybe adding a limit to how many of one component you can have? I'm not sure. Other than that, this game was awesome :D, the artstyle was coherent, and nice to look at, the music was good, and not distracting, the gameplay didn't feel repetitive and it felt satisfying collecting new parts and thinking about strategies, and the story was, well it wasn't that awesome, it was generic but, since you spent all your awesomeness points on everything else the story has to take a hit I suppose, which is fine by me :D. The dialogue each robot has is also a great detail. Overall, well done! I hope you make more games in the future X

Cool robot game. The lines were pretty funny.

@rossk @floralvikings @pyrousha @smiley405 @chusmimax @jerem-watts @incd021 @digital-bacon @jinbu @laserpanzerwal @toasteto @evilmurlock
Thank you all for playing and taking the time to leave us feedback! And thank you for so many positive impressions! We are always happy to hear what others think about our creations, good or bad. All ideas are valuable, and you all rock :smile:

@redoxeide DoTs are indeed powerful. But they can be blocked by encryption. We didn't really make it clear enough in our description, as we say that encryption blocks hacks, but nowhere do we explain that yellow and most blue programs ARE hacks. Our bad - the overscoping and lack of time is too blame, as usual :grin: We also totally dropped the ball on visualizing the DoTs you/enemy have on you somewhere in UI. That's one of the things we are adding in our post-jam. Along with better descriptions, of course. We're glad you had fun with the different strategies!

@baubau Yep, Enhance - Enhance - Enhance - B-0-FLOW is my favorite one as well :fire: None shall stand before me :wink:

@furano Great to hear! The exchanging idea is interesting and could work with some programs. Although there are not that many that have the same shape and could exchange seamlessly. However, such exchanging might diminish the feel of the almighty Limited Space :wink:

@someone Yeah, there is a bug that sneaks in sometimes where programs sort of disappear from view. I really have no idea how they do that or why would they want to hide :shrug: They are there, just invisible. Clicking on any taken space on the drive reveals them back. And we indeed should have visualized the per turn damage. Our underslept brains didn't seem to come up with that brilliant idea at the time :wink: Very glad you enjoyed the game!

@mooptychunk Yep, we also can barely believe we did all this in jam time. We must have gone insane :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: Still tired, by the way.

@geronimo Very nice to hear that you enjoyed the game! 3xEnchance and Beam is the killer. But so is 3xEnchance and B'O'flow :grin: Some enemies are better at defending themselves than others, but there are indeed things that just level everything to the ground. With more time, the balance can be reconsidered and maybe some solutions can be implemented. However, it's also true that it's cool to FEEL THE POWER from time to time :zap: and probably not a good idea to just impose an arbitrary limit on the player. Would feel bad.

I love the idea of the hard drive containing skills :smile:
Nice game, fun to play, intelligent, beautiful art and plenty of humor, thank you for this entry! :heart:

Really really fun idea, and well polished entry (could be seen as a full game already!)
Buuut in case your team decides to continue this, it would be great to see even more different modules, maybe a small shop with a couple a modules (and a storage upgrade?), maybe a way to go back to a checkpoint or run away from an enemy (I spent waaay to much time on an enemy that kept healing and shielding himself without ever attacking me, luckily had a scramble module to stop him from shielding.)

Anyway, thank you for the submission and hopefully see you next jam!

The combination of card mechanics and inventory organization is such a brilliant idea! It's truly impressive to create such a strategically complete game in such a short amount of time.

Fun deckbuilder, cool to use the grid and rob my enemies of their own abilities. I think there was some initial confusion in how the animations and commands didn't quite align, so if I was going to change one thing I'd make sure the affordances there are just a touch clearer! Really well made guys, Bravo!

very interesting game... I was a bit swimming in the abilities but I wonder...

the only problem I have is with the colors ... obviously green and blue add buffs, but green can also add shield points (which are marked with a blue shield) and blue can hack if the opponent does not have encrypt points which are marked with a green wall...

then the colors don't matter anyway, but the text does. then a bit of confusion in it

byut hey... great entry

Awesome game!

We were a little confused in the beginning, but slowly we got to get it, and managed to win the game after an hour of playing. :smile:

Cool music, nice graphics and fun gameplay. Well done!

@skel3ton Ha! You're totally correct about the colors! It never occurred to neither of us in our sleep-deprived brains :grin: Brilliant. The lack of clarity in program descriptions did occur to us and that we actually fixed in the post jam. Thanks for playing and for taking the time to leave feedback :smile_cat:

Thank you for submitting this game, it has so much going on, really impressive. I like the aspect of a turned based combat game mixed in with proper strategy and stacking. Everything was coming together very coherently, I really liked playing it. Well done, +1 for robots ! :D

Incredibly good work for the team of two people within 3 days! Very immersive game. The only imperfection is too repetitive music.

This is one of the games that are perfect. I can imagine how a full game could easily be made out of this! I want more!

excellent mechanics, nice work! the second fight was brutal though, i will come back to play more but just shredding my newly acquired programs before i even have protection! :'(

@griddolini It is a bit tough encounter. But no worries, you should get 4 programs after the fight if you win!

I spent more time playing this than I expected! I haven't managed to get to the end yet (I plan to come back to it), but so far enhance and bitrot (and improved versions) look like they're an excellent combo :)
Everything works well together, congratulations on an excellent game!

Great game guys, as always! Your post-jam version basically covered everything and tidied up the game nicely as we said on stream. Thanks for joining us, it was fun to have you on stream and play your game. ^^

Really incredible game. Well thought out in just about every area. Love the art direction, and WOW is the gameplay mechanic fun. I still have to try the post-jam version to see what's changed but the in-jam version is one of the better ludum dare's that I've played. The inventory system is actually fun and not cumbersome at all, and so much of it just makes sense from a basic usability perspective. Great job!!

OMG, I somehow spend an hour playing this. Sooo addictive. The game allows to create character builds which is awesome. Great job! Would be nicer if there was an ability to mirror blocks.

Cute visuals (enemy designs are not too complex but cute and compelling, the UI is nice, and I just love the box with text that appears before/after the battles!), inviting main menu and some quite unusual music. Not sure if I personally like these mechanicy-squishy sounds in the rhythm of the music track (not sure how to describe them >_<) but overall music sounds cool and complex (to me :'))

Props for showing controls in the corner, that really helped. The text is big and comfortable to read, I appreciate that as well.

I played through a few opponents and have to say you created an interesting battle system! It is complicated enough, but not TOO complicated, it is fun to use, you have to think, respond to your opponent's actions - and you also made use of the limited space theme! The enemy ability to just destroy one of my abilities on my panel made me sad :")

+ Overall: honest thoughts - I would love to see this battle system as a part of RPG/adventure game. Just going through battle to battle got me tired pretty quick (of course as a Jam entry your game is fantastic!! you made something great in a limited time) and I resorted to filling my line with SMACKS AFTER SMACKS. That's when I thought: I love the mechanic, but I don't want several battles like this in a row. If (in theory!) we could walk around exploring the map and getting some kind of story, and sometimes ran into enemies and had to fight them, for me personally it would be a banger! Ofc other people might have different opinions (just looking at the previous comment before me, they obviously got in a groove and didn't mind endless fighting), just wanted to share my point of view ^^ Thanks for the game! I had fun trying out your fighting mechanic :)

Wow! I love the mechanics from your game! It's really interesting!

The battle system it's cool and probably with more time deeping in it you can make a really good battle system, with it and a good story you can make a good game!

Well done! Take a candy! :candy:

Such an awesome game, it reminds me a bit of 'Rounds' because it allows you to make some amazing builds. I decided to go with a whole lot of enhance modules together with bitrot. While this did work for me in the end, there was always the risk of scramble destroying my setup and I really appreciate that. Liked it so much that I kept playing for a whole hour, so my compliments!

Awesome game! I really love turn based games and the composition of abilities while keeping it random was a really nice mechanic! It kept me engaged for wayyy longer than a jam game should (played for well over an hour) so amazingly well done! The completeness of it was so nice to see in a jam gamne with the instruction screen and menu.

The variety of the abilities was really nice and scaled well with the trade off between piece size and strength being well balanced. I would have liked to see some kind of status effect on each character though as it was hard to keep track of who had bit rot on them and when damage was going to be reflected etc.

The graphics were really cute and all fit together really nicely, the game all felt well polished and loved the background grid movement and idle animations of the characters keeping everything lively. One thing I would say on the pieces would be that their animations may have been a little too lively. The amount that they grew when placing a piece was too much and a bit distracting, especially when moving many things around. I did like the growth when hovering although, again, this was maybe a little too much but that's just my preference!

The gradual introduction of new pieces was nice although, about halfway through, I didn't feel the need to adjust my loadout at all since there wasn't much new. I was doing fine with what had so lost that planning aspect of the gameplay a bit but I guess it depends how different players approach the loadout. I did appreciate having the extra area to save pieces I didn't necessarily need, and the appearance of the friendly loot robot was an really great touch!

Overall, really great, engaging and addictive game! Incredibly well polished, well done!

Love everything about your game! Fun, cute, silly, and strategic with lots of possibilities. Most UI improvements I would suggest are in the post-jam version, so good job on that! It would be nice to visually clarify which program goes first (yours or enemy's) when they both end on the same square in the timeline.

Such an amazing game! Love the names of the programs. Cracked out laughing when I noticed the robots pull out floppy disks as they play the programs :D Only complaint I have is that the combat was a bit fast so it took me a second to notice how and which programs the scramble program affects. Also DOT's seemed the way to go in the end, managed to somehow beat the game on first run with them.

Great job!

The gameplay and mechanics are fantastic, especially the "RULES" of the points!

I just couldn’t tear myself away from playing.

The art style is also amazing. Great job:)

@flying-butter-studio @somewan @papaver @javasaurus @alextengu @jadener @griddolini @frank-gevaerts @burchyn @kobylarz @hare-software @dsk
**Thank you, everyone, for playing and leaving us your feedback! This is my absolute favorite part of Ludum Dare - reading impressions of others, sharing ideas and learning from one another** :smile:

@jvdwijk In a possible longer campaign, we were considering a shop, as well as a storage upgrade. The possibility of running away from enemies never occurred to us, but it's definitely an interesting idea worth thinking about! Thank you.

@clayton-bonura Yeah, we dropped a ball a bit on player feedback in the jam version (usual culprit - lack of time and insufficient testing). Improved on that point in the post-jam :smile:

@mnemosynevl I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "mirroring block". Can you elaborate? :smile:

@kanity Our initial, waaaaaaaaay overscoped :wink:, idea actually included a world map to travel, branching paths you could choose to take, story encounters and so on. As you might imagine, all got cut for time and only the small text before and after the fight was left. I totally agree with you - having a story and some other encounters than battle one would be great. Some day, maybe, if we decide to work more on this concept :smile:

@hagamosvideojuegos 'Nom, nom, nom' *crunching sounds*. Thank you for the candy!

@teto Thank you for such thoughtful post! We ran out of time for a lot of useful player feedback in the jam time. We fixed that in post-jam :smile_cat: - there is a bitrot counter and much more besides. The growing reluctance of some players to mess with a neatly stacked inventory is something we noticed. So, you are not alone :grin: If we decide to turn this concept into something bigger, the inventory system will definitely need to be reworked.

@kirsybuu You are right about that clarification. It's actually simple - Rollie always cheats and goes first in the event of a tie :wink:. We should have included that info somewhere.

@kuggenhoffen In the post-jam version, we actually made the combat slower by default and included a switch to make it faster at will. There is also better feedback there, so (among other feedback improvements) you can see which program will be scrambled before you even press "play". Congrats on beating the game on your first try! Definitely not an easy thing to do!

@fabula-rasa of course, I understand the time crunch ^^'' if the game gets updated with this initial vision, would love to try it again :)

@fabula-rasa By mirroring I mean flipping the block like so:

@mnemosynevl Thanks! Now it makes sense :smile_cat: And you are correct, it would make program blocks indeed easier to stack.

Finally, I got around to give my opinonion:

https://youtu.be/WNxtdUAkewQ

Sorry if it comes of as a bit too harsh - real time evaluating a game's much tougher than I thought lol :D

If not made clear by the video's length or what I say: I LOVEDD it! My fav this time, for sure!

The concept is very interesting. And the execution how to manage the shapes of the programs in the limited space is very clean. The fighting phase is interesting with the fact that we can refresh one time the elements, and how to combine them against the enemy programs. Nice mood. I like the humor. And I didn't find any bugs. Good job, you two! :-)

@trexxak Not harsh at all. You raised good points. We had a good time watching your playthrough! Even finished the game on the first try, congratulations! It turned out to be quite long: I guess most people who don't manage wouldn't go for the second try. We had no clue how long it will be since some of the systems were implemented mere hours before submission. I honestly thought it's a 15 minutes game :sweat_smile: Thank you for playing and for your feedback! :smiley: