In this logic-based puzzle game, place elemental cards—Fire, Water, and Air—onto the nodes of a graph. Each card may have constraints: it can require or forbid connections to certain elements, or demand placement on nodes with a specific shape (square or circle). If a card does not staisfy a constraint it will turn gray.

Published 8 days ago
StatusIn development
PlatformsHTML5
Authorditiem.games
GenrePuzzle
Made withGodot
Tags2D, Casual, Indie

Comments

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(+1)

Some quick feedback after playing all ~7 levels...

Bugs + points of improvement:

  • Music and sound settings are broken, they don't stop the audio at all
  • The initial "tutorial screen" is more confusing than helpful;  I recommend just removing it and letting the player figure out the rules in the first level.  The rules are very simple, after all.
  • It would be good to visually mark constraint clashes when you hover a card over a bad location, even before you place it.  For example, if I have a fire element on the left and I grab a "water, no fire neighbor" card, I'd appreciate seeing the nodes adjacent to the left node all turn grey/red, and if I move the held card over such a bad node position I'd like to see the connecting edge to the water turn grey/red too.

General opinion:

  • The music is too repetitive and too short, at this point I'd rather just play my own music
  • I don't like the constraints that are like "place this on top of a square node".  The nodes put underneath the cards are no longer visible once you place them (unlike everything else), and also they really confused me at first, because their rule occupies the same space as the "neighbors" rule (both are at the bottom of the card).  Plus, they're already completely unused for half of the levels.  So I recommend just removing them from the game.
  • The puzzle aspect of the game is okay, but a little bit too arbitrary and abstract.  This makes it feel less satisfying and more annoying, once you get to the later levels (which have lots of cards with 1-2 constraints).  It reminds me of the game mechanics of another upcoming game, "Is This Seat Taken?".  The difference is that, in ITST, the constraints are intuitive to the human mind and easier to immediately respond to or recognize (e.g. don't place a noisy person next to someone who wants to sleep).  Here the constraints are all abstract and repetitive, making it feel like a chore.  I can also compare this to the game Dino Sort, where there are few types of dinosaurs each with a consistent constraint, making it much more intuitive.
  • Even though the theme is "three elements", they're just three colors/shapes with no actual purpose or difference, so the aesthetics are very thin.
  • If you develop this further and want to focus on themes more, I'd like to see stuff like... constraints based on the rules of the world, rather than based on what's on the cards.  Like:  "If you put Fire next to Water, it will always release bad steam, but steam can be neutralized by putting Air anywhere adjacent.", or "Three Waters touching each other is always bad, it creates an Ocean, so you must separate them out."
  • Why 3 elements?  Using 4 elements (add Earth) or using 5 elements (remove Air, add Earth+Metal+Wood) would be more "standard", and will also increase the complexity ceiling.

Thank you a lot for the review! I agree with all the points except with the one that you say "If you put Fire next to Water". That is a total different game, closer to ITST or Dino Sort. I have some ideas for that kind of mechanics, but I will leave them for another game. The first "bug" is a real bug in Godot and so far I dont know how to fix it.

This is a small teaser where I would like to get more broadview than the people that is close to me. As an spoiler, yes, there are more elements (and curiously it does not increase complexity). There are more constraints, and the node types are more heavily used in harder levels. My current concern is whether I should go for hard puzzles or easy ones. I lean more towards hard puzzles, but surprisingly the levels 6 and 7 have been reported to be easy. 

Thanks again for the detailed feedback! I really appreciate it, it really helps a lot.