Yeah, I kinda agree, it has become somewhat dated due to the variety of games available now, games that break with many expectations (even the controls). At least the tutorial is not wrong or broken, so I keep it public for now. For MTG and MTG-like games, I think it is still relevant. But yeah, I don’t think this will be my main focus of maintenance. I guess I keep basic life support (=no crashes), but that’s probably it.
I’ve toyed with the thought of maybe making a reboot of this called “Luanti Academy” which acts less of a tutorial and more as a showcase both for players and devs alike. Would be more open about the things it shows, and exposing some of the more obscure things. Some kind of interactive experience. Not sure how it would work in practice.
Useful tool if you need a quick visualization of 2D noise, I think I'll keep it.
Although I believe it could use a few more convenience features, to make it more useful to actually use the noise parameters in stuff like mapgens, or decorations. For 2D noises in mapgens, we frequently check if the noise value is within a particular min/max bounds, so customizing the min/max bounds of the rendered pixel color would be very useful.
The information could use some work as well. To make it more "scientific", it should have a gradient showing the meaning of the pixel values, as well as the axis directions (X, Z). Tooltips would also go a long way.
Very strange this is a game and not a mod. I would like it more as a mod. Anyway, this is an overall thumbs up from me.
Btw, have you heard of Perlin Explorer? It's the same, but in 3D.
In this game, your task is to fly over the world of lakes, grasslands, deserts and mountains to extract resources by placing buildings like collectors (to collect ore and more), power plants (to make your buildings work), towns and markets (to earn $$$) and connect them with rails. You can start anywhere you like on the map, which, as usual for Luanti games, extends very very far away.
You start out small but get to increase your industrial empire one building at a time.
At least in theory. In this current stage I cannot recommend this game as it appears to be in an early alpha stage: incomplete, buggy and unpolished. The rails and trains are confusing, the UI is too much Minetest-Game-like (rather than more fitting to an economy game) and sometimes some buildings appear to just not work, or I don't understand them.
The mechanics of the game are often confusing as it seems there are hidden mechanics at play. The behavior of the trains is a great mystery and you don't know or control when they will pick up or drop items.
There are many ways in which your economy can come to a screeching halt and you have no idea why: Is it because the power plant ran out of coal? Is it because a train got stuck or took the wrong turn? Is it because you forgot to tell the workshop what it should do?
The graphics are also disappointing: It literally uses textures from Development Test, for example.
You ask what I am doing? I'm doing the right thing.
LGBTQ+ youth, just like LGBTQ+ adults still face oppression and difficulties due to bigotry and misunderstanding.
If you are interested in details, here is a report from 2018 about the situation in the United States (spoiler: it's not great): https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/2018-YouthReport-NoVid.pdf
Granted, this is just one country, but in other countries, the struggles are similar.
Pride flags symbolize minorities and the fight for liberation and acceptance. The real danger to youth is bigotry. And I will stand against bigotry any day of the week. This mod is just a very small symbolic gesture towards the greater movement (of which I'm also a part of). Nothing more, nothing less.
Remember that LGBTQ+ does not just mean sexuality. It may also refer to minority romantic orientations, genders, intersex people, just to name 3 examples.
Yes, the game is now very different from its original game jam release, it's almost a different game now. I plan to officially report all or most old reviews as outdated once version 2.0.0 drops.
You just posted cringe. Pride is awesome and based AS FUCK. Pride is a movement for liberation, it is about queer people being themselves and fighting back against bigotry and bullshit sexual, romantic and gender norms that only NPCs believe in. Pride flags celebrate diversity and liberation, both fundamentally good things. Queer oppression is on the rise again (read the news FFS), so Pride is more relevant than ever. And I choose to be on the side of liberty, not oppression.
There is no “controversy”, just endless whining by bullshitters who all have the SAME debunked talking points. It’s boring and cringe.
Yeah, this incompatibility is to be expected because both mods do something with statbars and don't communicate with each other. HUD Bars is the more general framework because it manages the correct positioning of the bars, provided the mod actually uses the HUD Bars mod. I suppose the stamina mod doesn’t do that and instead just adds the statbar directly.
This is of course valid as long you use the stamina mod in isolation but once things get more complex (more mods want to add statbars), that's when problems begin. This is the main reason why the HUD Bars mod exists.
The stamina mod can fix this problem on its side by optionally depending on the HUD Bars mod, if the maintainer wants to do it. If the maintainer does not want to use HUD Bars (a valid choice), at least the incompatiblity should be made "official" IMO.
It is unfair to put the blame on HUD Bars, however. HUD Bars is the more general framework so it is technically nonsense to alter this mod to "please" a more specialized mod.
Fun fact: I wasn't even involved in this discussion or was even aware that it happened (I’ve stepped down years ago), but I’m OK with the new name.
Fun fact 2: The name “MineClone 2” was only for historical reasons, basically. It was a fork of MineClone, made by davedevils who did very very early (and very basic) work on a simple MC clone. You can still find their commits at the very beginning of the commit history. I admit my initial name choice was not creative at all, but back then when I was still the main developer, I didn’t really care.
Because I have stepped down as the main developer from this project years ago, and I haven’t followed the development closely in the last years, I'm not aware of any debates or discussions on new media stuff, which is why I will NOT edit this package directly, just to make sure no information is missed.
For reference, here is the readme for the old game version 0.66.2 just before I stepped down:
As you can see, the license information on that version was:
GPLv3 or later for code
Mixture of libre licenses for media, but for ContentDB's sake, it could be summarized as CC BY-SA 4.0
Please reply to this thread if you are aware of any relevant additions of media that would affect the license.
And if everything looks OK, please fix the license info of the ContentDB page. Thank you.
The 1st levels are trivial; it’s intentional. I want to be sure the player has understood the game, so they had to be fool-proof. I plan to shake up the level order so the teaching levels aren’t all at once at the start.
You’re not the first one to complain about the spiral level. Maybe I need to make it much shorter or delete it, but then I intergrate the idea somewhere else. This game MUST have at least one level with a laser spiral because otherwise it doesn’t count as a laser game. :D
I'm a bit surprised you like that you can’t save in-level; that could be seen as a missing feature. But yeah, that one wasn’t on my TODO list anyway, most levels are short enough for it to not matter so much.
As for no bugs: I’m also not aware of any bugs, I can’t believe it myself. I started priotizing stability after I left MineClone 2 due to (among other reasons) frustration with the ever-increasing bug counter.
As for dead ends: Most levels should be solvable in all situations, but not always. In Inside the Box (the server), dead ends are forbidden. But in Lazarr!, I’m less strict to allow more puzzles. The existence of bombs implies dead ends anyway, but it creates a new layer of complexity where the player must think before exploding things. I’m still careful to avoid all annoying level fails, like when you fall into a hole you can’t get out of, etc. (please report any unfair dead ends as bug, thank you)
Lazarr! won’t have graphics like The Talos Principle, I’m simply not good enough for that yet, plus, the Luanti engine makes it hard anyway. But even if I’d switch engines, the blocky design would stay, as the whole game was designed around it, it is 100% intended. But Luanti’s recent releases offer more and more fancy shaders and light effects but must be enabled first, like volumetric lighting (which Lazarr! allows). I assume future Luanti releases will improve shaders and lighting more.
Thank you for the kind words. There is no sprint feature in the game, nor do I plan one. But I do plan some upgrade/equipment system that upgrades your passive capabilities, and walking faster is one of them.
I don't understand your problem with mob hitboxes. I just reviewed them all again, and they seem OK, except for maybe the mese monster, which has a larger hitbox. (I should probably remove the mese monster anyway.) But no hitboxes are too small for missing the mob IMO. Do you have a specific mob in mind?
The mobs are probably going to change in a future release anyway.
Thanks! Yes, this game aims to have easy, medium and very hard puzzles. I'm also looking forward for the big 2.0.0 release. ;-)
But building good levels is hard …
Thanks. I look if I can consider your review for the big update, for version 2.0.0.
Yeah, probably the help manual shouldn’t give the whole game away from the start. At least I moved these books to the lower floor. I think about progressive unlocking of pages, but I’m not sure about that. Because this game is not truly about keeping its mechanics a secret but about learning how to use it all together to solve puzzles. In the levels you rarely need to search for hidden clue. Basically, you start with all (or most) the information and need to work from there. That’s the current game philosophy. On the other hand, progressive unlocking of pages can help to not overwhelm the player with info initially. Hmmmm …
I'm surprised to learn the hook still causes problems. Maybe I just didn’t explain it well? In the latest beta version, the game now comes with a tutorial level that should explain it. An overlay would be nice indeed, I look into if this can be added.
The hook currently works like this: If you rightclick, you rotate the face clockwise. This should be already intuitive, I hope. The tricky part is the push: If you push (=punch), the block rotates towards the closest of the 4 edges of the face you clicked on. Think of the face being subdivided into 4 (virtual) triangles that meet in the center. Each triangle rotates it towards the edge where its hypotenuse is.
(Note the old reviews from 2021 don’t have anything to do with the current hook. It was a screwdriver back then and it worked completely different and it was very very bad.)
The game currently doesn’t have any lore. Just an excuse plot ("You're a pirate in search of treasure"). I have considered adding at least a minimal plot to glue the game more together. But I’ll think of this much later. I only plan a very minimal plot AT MOST, this game has become is quite complex already. High-quality levels are much more important for now. :D
I totally understand the style is not everyone’s cup of tea and I already suspected some people wouldn’t like the theme to begin with. But if the game made people feel uneasy, that’s kind of the point. If every game was 100% “friendly”, things would get boring. :P
The reason for this very dark theme is pretty much random. It started with the word "Eyeballs" and it all more or less developed to some weird surreal otherworld where it starts at a cult. In fact, I actually planned for it being more “gore”-like, where you would spawn inside a giant freakish creature but it was just too difficult to create the textures for that.
I’m probably going over all my thought process in detail in a post-mortem later. There’s so many things I still want to say.
What I’m not going to do is a “friendly” version because then the whole idea kind of falls apart and I don’t want that. But people can always make texture packs if they want them.
I openly admit the level with the suspended balls was pretty mean. At least I left two important hints and it turned out many people still solved it.
I technically classified it as "gore" because in level 3 there are two small streams of blood. I actually meant to make this game much more "gore-y" where you would spawn inside some arcane creature but it was too hard to create textures so I instead just went with the stone.
Yeah, the timer is intentionally short (1 second) because if I make it longer, the player could easily circumvent many of the level's puzzles because you're too safe when unseen.
My idea is to add new HUD indicators to show how close you're from being "unseen" or something.
It's true. In this year I indeed tried to "play it safe" and not attempt anything too daring, just come up with a simple concept and execute it as well as I could. I wonder if the level reset was too punishing. Maybe I should have set checkpoints or something?
Thank you! Thanks for including your game time. In my tests I took like 15 minutes for a full playthrough but obviously that was because I already knew the solution. xD
Perhaps I should have made it clearer that walking into darkness is a bad idea. The eyes can't see you when it's too dark, that's why.
For a future update (if I do it), I thought of improving the HUD display to show "how well" the eyes can see you so you know better when you're close to be out of sight. Also a "light crystal" to show how dark the spot you're in.
I have a different opinion. I have no problem with trying to reinvent the voxel sandbox genre if the concept is interesting enough or adds a new twist or is just well-executed and avoids design flaws of similar games. Even if a game is similar, I think we should be fair and rate a game on its own merits.
I feel flattered you name-dropped Repixture tho. :D
This survival game tries to be a little different and I appreciate the new art style.
2×2 textures? :-) It was interesting to explore the different biomes and the cute trees you built. I like the night sky. This simple glow effect in the clouds was nice to look at. I like when people use the simple tools of Luanti without any hacks to create a nice effect.
But I admit I didn't play with the highest graphics settings tho.
I disliked the vertical hotbar and quickly switched to the horizonal one. It's very hard to get used to the vertical one.
The downside is that the gameplay feels lacking. Unfortunately, I don't know how to proceed. I tried to make iron ingots but the instructions are just too confusing. After trying a few times, I gave up. I managed to make fire at least and light some trees on fire lol.
I wish this game had a crafting guide. Not even the README tells me a lot of information. Which is a bummer because I would have liked to see the other parts of the game. :-(
Overall, I have to give a thumbs down because of the confusing gameplay and the game help … well … doesn’t help me so I quickly became stuck in this game, not knowing what to do. :-(
But still thanks for posting this, it was still interesting to look at for a while.
I almost feel like I played this game before in previous game jams which also featured space stations. Sure, it's not exactly the same, but not very innovative. :-(
The story, sorry, just feels lackluster. You wake up in a space station and try to figure out what happened. You basically run from area to area to do some thing in a simple quest system. The graphics are okayish. The audio is … ugh. The heavy breathing makes me nervous. I know the breathing is intentional but still.
I did not really have fun playing it, playing it once was more than enough.
I think the reason is the game just failed to set the right mood/atmosphere to me, there is not really a sense of danger. And the story was not really capturing to me. Sorry. :-(
This game is technically a complete game but extremely simple. You just throw dice in the hope to get only the number 2-6 but not 1 so you add to your score. Sorry, but I don't think this is enough to justify a full
entry in the ContentDB, frankly. I would have expected at least a couple of dice games, and not just one.
Also, for such a simple game concept, I think polishing is absolutely crucial. A simple but well-polished game can make a world of a difference. Sadly, this game is not polished at all.
It's just a mishmash of existing mod code, including the dice (this is literally my own dice2 mod btw), are just copied into the. While this is not forbidden (I'm not arguing from a copyright / game jam rules standpoint), it kind of misses the point of a game jam if you couldn't even be bothered to make the key aspects of the game yourself.
And the core game mechanic is very unpolished. Using the chat to show the game status is an absolute no-go for me. At least the game itself works but that's not enough to create a fun game. :-(
The concept (explore different star systens and planets) sounds exciting on paper but in practice I get bored very fast. I'm really sorry, that's just how it is. :-(
OK, sure, this game has a large number of worlds and star systems to choose from but … I don't really have a reason to explore. Sure, I get different metals and plants and stuff but I don't really know what do to with it. And sadly, most planets feel the same.
Maybe I'm just too arrogant to find the fun part of the game but the game doesn't show me where the fun is.
I think the reason is the game suffers from the "Big Empty Sandbox" problem as described by Jim-Stephanie Sterling. The game advertises how "big" it is and that may be true but the problem is, there aren't many interesting things you can do in the big sandbox, the big worlds quickly repeat themselves. The sandbox may
be big, but it also feels empty. Which is poison for any sandbox game. Good sandbox games allow you to do stuff. Lots of stuff.
Unfortunately, it looks like this game was left in a very early stage. It's like a pre-alpha? You spawn in some kind of room of metal and all you can do is go through the exit and then you see a large empty world.
The puzzle idea is not that innovative (It's mostly a Bloxorz clone), but it's OK.
I appreciate the author has put thought into the push/color mechanic.
Especially the puzzles get hard fast. It seems the author took their time to put it all together.
Unfortunately, they're hard not in an engaging way. It feels very punishing early on.
The game mechanics take time to get used to and the early levels do not do a great job introducing them. You have to memorize the help page (that is only shown once and then gone forever. Not great).
What is especially confusing is the meaning of color. You might think the colored side of the block must touch the colored floor tile but no. It only counts if the matching color is on the opposite site. Very confusing. Oh, and also not friendly to colorblind people.
The biggest downside of this game is the complete lack of polishing. There is no level selection. There is no music. The sounds are the most generic sounds ever. The block you're moving is not visibly animated, instead it takes steps instantly. Even Bloxorz, a simple old Flash game, featured such animations. The lack of animations makes it hard to follow what is going on. The active block looks identical to the passive blocks you can push around, making it easy to forget which one is "your" block. There is no "undo" or "restart level" feature. The background is literally the default sky. The textures also don't look that great.
The lack of polishing is such a shame because I think the game does have potential but if the game looks like default.
Neutral rating because the puzzle idea is nice, but the generic look and feel ruins the experience for me, sadly. :-(
I liked the dark blue gloomy atmosphere. The game comes with cut scenes which was a neat surprise, but it was somewhat hacky because Luanti doesn't allow you to lock the camera yet.
Basically this is a dungeon explorer/puzzle game. You have to explore the dungeon and solve simple puzzles by moving some kind of electricity (?) with a wand. I like the mix of "ancient mystery dungeon" and "electronics". The story is simple but I kind of wanted to know how it ends. It seems you cannot die, so it's entirely a puzzle game. It's nice to explore dungeons without deadly danger behind every corner. :D
There are not many types of blocks, but the level design I have seen so far is nice. It feels like the dungeon is absolutely HUGE for a game jam game. The sliding doors were a nice touch that sets this dungeon apart. And they work absolutely perfect, with no flickering, seams or other visual oddities.
Overall, I liked the mood of this game, even if there wasn't music.
Unfortunately I was unable to complete the game because I was stuck at the part after you free the prisoner. I was unable to find a way across the abyss. Maybe I will be able to finish it later.
But I think for this simple concept the game was very-well executed. Thumbs up from me.
Yeah, I kinda agree, it has become somewhat dated due to the variety of games available now, games that break with many expectations (even the controls). At least the tutorial is not wrong or broken, so I keep it public for now. For MTG and MTG-like games, I think it is still relevant. But yeah, I don’t think this will be my main focus of maintenance. I guess I keep basic life support (=no crashes), but that’s probably it.
I’ve toyed with the thought of maybe making a reboot of this called “Luanti Academy” which acts less of a tutorial and more as a showcase both for players and devs alike. Would be more open about the things it shows, and exposing some of the more obscure things. Some kind of interactive experience. Not sure how it would work in practice.
Useful tool if you need a quick visualization of 2D noise, I think I'll keep it.
Although I believe it could use a few more convenience features, to make it more useful to actually use the noise parameters in stuff like mapgens, or decorations. For 2D noises in mapgens, we frequently check if the noise value is within a particular min/max bounds, so customizing the min/max bounds of the rendered pixel color would be very useful.
The information could use some work as well. To make it more "scientific", it should have a gradient showing the meaning of the pixel values, as well as the axis directions (X, Z). Tooltips would also go a long way.
Very strange this is a game and not a mod. I would like it more as a mod. Anyway, this is an overall thumbs up from me.
Btw, have you heard of Perlin Explorer? It's the same, but in 3D.
(This review is for version 6-7-2023)
In this game, your task is to fly over the world of lakes, grasslands, deserts and mountains to extract resources by placing buildings like collectors (to collect ore and more), power plants (to make your buildings work), towns and markets (to earn $$$) and connect them with rails. You can start anywhere you like on the map, which, as usual for Luanti games, extends very very far away.
You start out small but get to increase your industrial empire one building at a time.
At least in theory. In this current stage I cannot recommend this game as it appears to be in an early alpha stage: incomplete, buggy and unpolished. The rails and trains are confusing, the UI is too much Minetest-Game-like (rather than more fitting to an economy game) and sometimes some buildings appear to just not work, or I don't understand them.
The mechanics of the game are often confusing as it seems there are hidden mechanics at play. The behavior of the trains is a great mystery and you don't know or control when they will pick up or drop items.
There are many ways in which your economy can come to a screeching halt and you have no idea why: Is it because the power plant ran out of coal? Is it because a train got stuck or took the wrong turn? Is it because you forgot to tell the workshop what it should do?
The graphics are also disappointing: It literally uses textures from Development Test, for example.
Well, ContentDB suggests to flag outdated reviews at the top of each review. *shrug*
Yes, I gave up on maintaining it. It's MTG-related, so not exactly my priority.
You ask what I am doing? I'm doing the right thing.
LGBTQ+ youth, just like LGBTQ+ adults still face oppression and difficulties due to bigotry and misunderstanding. If you are interested in details, here is a report from 2018 about the situation in the United States (spoiler: it's not great): https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/2018-YouthReport-NoVid.pdf Granted, this is just one country, but in other countries, the struggles are similar.
Pride flags symbolize minorities and the fight for liberation and acceptance. The real danger to youth is bigotry. And I will stand against bigotry any day of the week. This mod is just a very small symbolic gesture towards the greater movement (of which I'm also a part of). Nothing more, nothing less.
Remember that LGBTQ+ does not just mean sexuality. It may also refer to minority romantic orientations, genders, intersex people, just to name 3 examples.
Yes, the game is now very different from its original game jam release, it's almost a different game now. I plan to officially report all or most old reviews as outdated once version 2.0.0 drops.
You just posted cringe. Pride is awesome and based AS FUCK. Pride is a movement for liberation, it is about queer people being themselves and fighting back against bigotry and bullshit sexual, romantic and gender norms that only NPCs believe in. Pride flags celebrate diversity and liberation, both fundamentally good things. Queer oppression is on the rise again (read the news FFS), so Pride is more relevant than ever. And I choose to be on the side of liberty, not oppression.
There is no “controversy”, just endless whining by bullshitters who all have the SAME debunked talking points. It’s boring and cringe.
Yeah, this incompatibility is to be expected because both mods do something with statbars and don't communicate with each other. HUD Bars is the more general framework because it manages the correct positioning of the bars, provided the mod actually uses the HUD Bars mod. I suppose the stamina mod doesn’t do that and instead just adds the statbar directly.
This is of course valid as long you use the stamina mod in isolation but once things get more complex (more mods want to add statbars), that's when problems begin. This is the main reason why the HUD Bars mod exists.
The stamina mod can fix this problem on its side by optionally depending on the HUD Bars mod, if the maintainer wants to do it. If the maintainer does not want to use HUD Bars (a valid choice), at least the incompatiblity should be made "official" IMO.
It is unfair to put the blame on HUD Bars, however. HUD Bars is the more general framework so it is technically nonsense to alter this mod to "please" a more specialized mod.
Fun fact: I wasn't even involved in this discussion or was even aware that it happened (I’ve stepped down years ago), but I’m OK with the new name.
Fun fact 2: The name “MineClone 2” was only for historical reasons, basically. It was a fork of MineClone, made by davedevils who did very very early (and very basic) work on a simple MC clone. You can still find their commits at the very beginning of the commit history. I admit my initial name choice was not creative at all, but back then when I was still the main developer, I didn’t really care.
The ContentDB claims the game license is GPLv3 only, but in reality is is GPLv3 "or later". The "or later" is important.
Moreover, this game has a media license that differs from the GPL. It's a mixture of licenses, but overall could be indicated as CC BY-SA 4.0.
https://git.minetest.land/VoxeLibre/VoxeLibre/src/branch/master/LEGAL.md
Because I have stepped down as the main developer from this project years ago, and I haven’t followed the development closely in the last years, I'm not aware of any debates or discussions on new media stuff, which is why I will NOT edit this package directly, just to make sure no information is missed.
For reference, here is the readme for the old game version 0.66.2 just before I stepped down:
https://git.minetest.land/VoxeLibre/VoxeLibre/src/tag/0.66.2
As you can see, the license information on that version was:
Please reply to this thread if you are aware of any relevant additions of media that would affect the license. And if everything looks OK, please fix the license info of the ContentDB page. Thank you.
The 1st levels are trivial; it’s intentional. I want to be sure the player has understood the game, so they had to be fool-proof. I plan to shake up the level order so the teaching levels aren’t all at once at the start.
You’re not the first one to complain about the spiral level. Maybe I need to make it much shorter or delete it, but then I intergrate the idea somewhere else. This game MUST have at least one level with a laser spiral because otherwise it doesn’t count as a laser game. :D
I'm a bit surprised you like that you can’t save in-level; that could be seen as a missing feature. But yeah, that one wasn’t on my TODO list anyway, most levels are short enough for it to not matter so much.
As for no bugs: I’m also not aware of any bugs, I can’t believe it myself. I started priotizing stability after I left MineClone 2 due to (among other reasons) frustration with the ever-increasing bug counter.
As for dead ends: Most levels should be solvable in all situations, but not always. In Inside the Box (the server), dead ends are forbidden. But in Lazarr!, I’m less strict to allow more puzzles. The existence of bombs implies dead ends anyway, but it creates a new layer of complexity where the player must think before exploding things. I’m still careful to avoid all annoying level fails, like when you fall into a hole you can’t get out of, etc. (please report any unfair dead ends as bug, thank you)
Lazarr! won’t have graphics like The Talos Principle, I’m simply not good enough for that yet, plus, the Luanti engine makes it hard anyway. But even if I’d switch engines, the blocky design would stay, as the whole game was designed around it, it is 100% intended. But Luanti’s recent releases offer more and more fancy shaders and light effects but must be enabled first, like volumetric lighting (which Lazarr! allows). I assume future Luanti releases will improve shaders and lighting more.
Thank you for the kind words. There is no sprint feature in the game, nor do I plan one. But I do plan some upgrade/equipment system that upgrades your passive capabilities, and walking faster is one of them.
I don't understand your problem with mob hitboxes. I just reviewed them all again, and they seem OK, except for maybe the mese monster, which has a larger hitbox. (I should probably remove the mese monster anyway.) But no hitboxes are too small for missing the mob IMO. Do you have a specific mob in mind? The mobs are probably going to change in a future release anyway.
Thank you for the kind words. I use that tool myself frequently as well, by the way.
Thanks! Yes, this game aims to have easy, medium and very hard puzzles. I'm also looking forward for the big 2.0.0 release. ;-) But building good levels is hard …
With the setting being added, this review no longer applies. I have converted this into a thread.
converted review into a thread
Thanks. I look if I can consider your review for the big update, for version 2.0.0.
Yeah, probably the help manual shouldn’t give the whole game away from the start. At least I moved these books to the lower floor. I think about progressive unlocking of pages, but I’m not sure about that. Because this game is not truly about keeping its mechanics a secret but about learning how to use it all together to solve puzzles. In the levels you rarely need to search for hidden clue. Basically, you start with all (or most) the information and need to work from there. That’s the current game philosophy. On the other hand, progressive unlocking of pages can help to not overwhelm the player with info initially. Hmmmm …
I'm surprised to learn the hook still causes problems. Maybe I just didn’t explain it well? In the latest beta version, the game now comes with a tutorial level that should explain it. An overlay would be nice indeed, I look into if this can be added. The hook currently works like this: If you rightclick, you rotate the face clockwise. This should be already intuitive, I hope. The tricky part is the push: If you push (=punch), the block rotates towards the closest of the 4 edges of the face you clicked on. Think of the face being subdivided into 4 (virtual) triangles that meet in the center. Each triangle rotates it towards the edge where its hypotenuse is.
(Note the old reviews from 2021 don’t have anything to do with the current hook. It was a screwdriver back then and it worked completely different and it was very very bad.)
The game currently doesn’t have any lore. Just an excuse plot ("You're a pirate in search of treasure"). I have considered adding at least a minimal plot to glue the game more together. But I’ll think of this much later. I only plan a very minimal plot AT MOST, this game has become is quite complex already. High-quality levels are much more important for now. :D
There is just something magical about this particular style of music. This music is nice to listen to even if you're not playing.
The non-rotating eyes are intentional. And a bit of Trial and error is part of this game.
But I agree it would have been better if they looked different. I’ve added “make non-rotating eyeballs look different” on the TODO list.
OOOOhhh. The game was just incomplete. Okay, I’ll see how future versions turn out.
Sorry, I can't see the white dot. But I tried something …
Can you please take a look here?: https://codeberg.org/Wuzzy/Eyeballs/issues/17
Thank you! I’m glad to hear I apparently have a “style” now. :-)
Well, you can’t claim you weren’t warned. ;-)
I totally understand the style is not everyone’s cup of tea and I already suspected some people wouldn’t like the theme to begin with. But if the game made people feel uneasy, that’s kind of the point. If every game was 100% “friendly”, things would get boring. :P
The reason for this very dark theme is pretty much random. It started with the word "Eyeballs" and it all more or less developed to some weird surreal otherworld where it starts at a cult. In fact, I actually planned for it being more “gore”-like, where you would spawn inside a giant freakish creature but it was just too difficult to create the textures for that.
I’m probably going over all my thought process in detail in a post-mortem later. There’s so many things I still want to say.
What I’m not going to do is a “friendly” version because then the whole idea kind of falls apart and I don’t want that. But people can always make texture packs if they want them.
I openly admit the level with the suspended balls was pretty mean. At least I left two important hints and it turned out many people still solved it.
Eye like this review. Thank you! :-)
I technically classified it as "gore" because in level 3 there are two small streams of blood. I actually meant to make this game much more "gore-y" where you would spawn inside some arcane creature but it was too hard to create textures so I instead just went with the stone.
Yeah, the timer is intentionally short (1 second) because if I make it longer, the player could easily circumvent many of the level's puzzles because you're too safe when unseen.
My idea is to add new HUD indicators to show how close you're from being "unseen" or something.
That bug never occured to me, no idea what caused it. :-( I want to fix it when the reason is found out.
It's true. In this year I indeed tried to "play it safe" and not attempt anything too daring, just come up with a simple concept and execute it as well as I could. I wonder if the level reset was too punishing. Maybe I should have set checkpoints or something?
Thank you! Thanks for including your game time. In my tests I took like 15 minutes for a full playthrough but obviously that was because I already knew the solution. xD
Haha, I knew the hanging balls level was hard. There's a reason I left the hints. ;-)
May I ask you what the "visual bugs" and the "soft lock" were because bugs should be fixed.
Perhaps I should have made it clearer that walking into darkness is a bad idea. The eyes can't see you when it's too dark, that's why.
For a future update (if I do it), I thought of improving the HUD display to show "how well" the eyes can see you so you know better when you're close to be out of sight. Also a "light crystal" to show how dark the spot you're in.
I have a different opinion. I have no problem with trying to reinvent the voxel sandbox genre if the concept is interesting enough or adds a new twist or is just well-executed and avoids design flaws of similar games. Even if a game is similar, I think we should be fair and rate a game on its own merits.
I feel flattered you name-dropped Repixture tho. :D
This survival game tries to be a little different and I appreciate the new art style. 2×2 textures? :-) It was interesting to explore the different biomes and the cute trees you built. I like the night sky. This simple glow effect in the clouds was nice to look at. I like when people use the simple tools of Luanti without any hacks to create a nice effect.
But I admit I didn't play with the highest graphics settings tho.
I disliked the vertical hotbar and quickly switched to the horizonal one. It's very hard to get used to the vertical one.
The downside is that the gameplay feels lacking. Unfortunately, I don't know how to proceed. I tried to make iron ingots but the instructions are just too confusing. After trying a few times, I gave up. I managed to make fire at least and light some trees on fire lol.
I wish this game had a crafting guide. Not even the README tells me a lot of information. Which is a bummer because I would have liked to see the other parts of the game. :-(
Overall, I have to give a thumbs down because of the confusing gameplay and the game help … well … doesn’t help me so I quickly became stuck in this game, not knowing what to do. :-(
But still thanks for posting this, it was still interesting to look at for a while.
I almost feel like I played this game before in previous game jams which also featured space stations. Sure, it's not exactly the same, but not very innovative. :-(
The story, sorry, just feels lackluster. You wake up in a space station and try to figure out what happened. You basically run from area to area to do some thing in a simple quest system. The graphics are okayish. The audio is … ugh. The heavy breathing makes me nervous. I know the breathing is intentional but still.
I did not really have fun playing it, playing it once was more than enough.
I think the reason is the game just failed to set the right mood/atmosphere to me, there is not really a sense of danger. And the story was not really capturing to me. Sorry. :-(
This game is technically a complete game but extremely simple. You just throw dice in the hope to get only the number 2-6 but not 1 so you add to your score. Sorry, but I don't think this is enough to justify a full entry in the ContentDB, frankly. I would have expected at least a couple of dice games, and not just one.
Also, for such a simple game concept, I think polishing is absolutely crucial. A simple but well-polished game can make a world of a difference. Sadly, this game is not polished at all.
It's just a mishmash of existing mod code, including the dice (this is literally my own dice2 mod btw), are just copied into the. While this is not forbidden (I'm not arguing from a copyright / game jam rules standpoint), it kind of misses the point of a game jam if you couldn't even be bothered to make the key aspects of the game yourself.
And the core game mechanic is very unpolished. Using the chat to show the game status is an absolute no-go for me. At least the game itself works but that's not enough to create a fun game. :-(
The concept (explore different star systens and planets) sounds exciting on paper but in practice I get bored very fast. I'm really sorry, that's just how it is. :-(
OK, sure, this game has a large number of worlds and star systems to choose from but … I don't really have a reason to explore. Sure, I get different metals and plants and stuff but I don't really know what do to with it. And sadly, most planets feel the same.
Maybe I'm just too arrogant to find the fun part of the game but the game doesn't show me where the fun is.
I think the reason is the game suffers from the "Big Empty Sandbox" problem as described by Jim-Stephanie Sterling. The game advertises how "big" it is and that may be true but the problem is, there aren't many interesting things you can do in the big sandbox, the big worlds quickly repeat themselves. The sandbox may be big, but it also feels empty. Which is poison for any sandbox game. Good sandbox games allow you to do stuff. Lots of stuff.
Unfortunately, it looks like this game was left in a very early stage. It's like a pre-alpha? You spawn in some kind of room of metal and all you can do is go through the exit and then you see a large empty world.
That's it. That's the whole game. :-(
The puzzle idea is not that innovative (It's mostly a Bloxorz clone), but it's OK. I appreciate the author has put thought into the push/color mechanic.
Especially the puzzles get hard fast. It seems the author took their time to put it all together.
Unfortunately, they're hard not in an engaging way. It feels very punishing early on. The game mechanics take time to get used to and the early levels do not do a great job introducing them. You have to memorize the help page (that is only shown once and then gone forever. Not great).
What is especially confusing is the meaning of color. You might think the colored side of the block must touch the colored floor tile but no. It only counts if the matching color is on the opposite site. Very confusing. Oh, and also not friendly to colorblind people.
The biggest downside of this game is the complete lack of polishing. There is no level selection. There is no music. The sounds are the most generic sounds ever. The block you're moving is not visibly animated, instead it takes steps instantly. Even Bloxorz, a simple old Flash game, featured such animations. The lack of animations makes it hard to follow what is going on. The active block looks identical to the passive blocks you can push around, making it easy to forget which one is "your" block. There is no "undo" or "restart level" feature. The background is literally the default sky. The textures also don't look that great.
The lack of polishing is such a shame because I think the game does have potential but if the game looks like default.
Neutral rating because the puzzle idea is nice, but the generic look and feel ruins the experience for me, sadly. :-(
I liked the dark blue gloomy atmosphere. The game comes with cut scenes which was a neat surprise, but it was somewhat hacky because Luanti doesn't allow you to lock the camera yet.
Basically this is a dungeon explorer/puzzle game. You have to explore the dungeon and solve simple puzzles by moving some kind of electricity (?) with a wand. I like the mix of "ancient mystery dungeon" and "electronics". The story is simple but I kind of wanted to know how it ends. It seems you cannot die, so it's entirely a puzzle game. It's nice to explore dungeons without deadly danger behind every corner. :D
There are not many types of blocks, but the level design I have seen so far is nice. It feels like the dungeon is absolutely HUGE for a game jam game. The sliding doors were a nice touch that sets this dungeon apart. And they work absolutely perfect, with no flickering, seams or other visual oddities.
Overall, I liked the mood of this game, even if there wasn't music.
Unfortunately I was unable to complete the game because I was stuck at the part after you free the prisoner. I was unable to find a way across the abyss. Maybe I will be able to finish it later.
But I think for this simple concept the game was very-well executed. Thumbs up from me.