Knotty Network
The internet may just be a series of tubes, but someone has to make sure the tubes go to the right place! Spin and swap the pieces on the board to build connections from the messages at the bottom of the board to the recipients waiting at the top.
Controls:
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Cursor: Arrow Keys
Spin Piece: X / Z
Swap Piece: Shift/Space + Move Cursor
Comments
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The inclusion of empty spaces and overpasses severely limits the possibilities. I feel i spend the most time ruling out the impossible shapes by working backwards because starting from the bottom is rarely fruitful.
Edit: apparently I can move tiles, this obviously changes a lot.
I still feel the pacing is slower than intended but I'm able to pick any bottom piece to start, which definitely cuts out a bunch of time spent staring at the game without making progress.
I would remove the sound that plays when connecting the wrong symbols, it happens so often, there's no real penalty and often it plays when make a valid connection or just making good progress, and thats confusing.
would be nice if connecting a symbol would remove all adjacent symbol of that type, like in bust-a-move, which would allow more long-term strategy than removing each individual tile.
the pathing code here must be complex
does the color mixing provide any mechanical advantage, it's really hard to see what happens when i connect with mixed colors from 2 symbols
Edit: I mixed red and yelllow to an orange and it didn't work, so I guess not
Thanks for all the candid feedback! We didn’t have time to get a proper tutorial in, so the game definitely starts all at once. It didn’t occur to us to be more explicit about being able to swap pieces outside of just listing the controls on the page (relying on things outside the game is obviously not ideal).
I completely agree about the ‘wrong connection’ sound effect. It was one of those things that we thought would be helpful before playtesting, and we never got around to cleaning that up. You are correct about the pathing logic being complicated. We had some bugs that took up whole last day of the jam, which is why some of the other stuff didn’t get polished/balanced as much as we would have liked.
Color mixing doesn’t have any mechanical purpose, but we found in early prototyping that without some indication of what the pipes are connected to, it was very hard for the player to keep track of the board. We had some other ideas on how to represent connections, but Color was the easiest to implement. Mixing the colors was the only way we had during the jam to make it obvious that multiple shapes connected to it. Any shape/color connected to the pipe should succeed when connected to a matching output regardless of how many colors feed into the pipe.
I plan on making another pass to clean up a good handful of things, but specifically want to tackle: how the connections are visualized and cleaned up, how points work, and pacing/piece distribution. This is our team’s first attempt at a puzzler like this, and we underestimated how much effort it takes to balance the gameplay itself once the actual ‘game’ is built underneath it. I’m quite happy with how it came out, though.
Took a couple of rounds, but once I got the hang of it, it was super addicting. Really fun until the pieces start shaking on the bottom and I am frantically turning random pieces hoping for the best lol
Enjoyed it. When I clear a section it might be nice for it to flash the color that was cleared. Because sometimes I honestly wasn’t sure what I did. Also, not sure if sometimes I was clearing more than one color at a time, or if it just clears everything that is the same color. Is my score based on number of tubes cleared, or just number of messages sent? Once I got a blank block at the top. Does that mean that recipient could not receive a message? I liked the effect of mixing colors when more than one message is in a tube. I wasn’t sure if that meant I could deliver both or neither. I dig the music. Finally, I wasn’t sure if game time was wall-clock time or just number of moves. Seems like it was wall clock time, but might be nice if there was a mode for number of moves.
Thanks for playing! We got a bit hung up on some of the logic (which ended up more complex than we anticipated) and lost some time we could have spent on the conveyance of how the message scoring happened. Some better indication of why you are receiving points is some post-jam polish we’ll try to put in. Once you mix pipes, you are still able to deliver messages of any color within the pipe.
Scoring is based on number of messages delivered at the same time. The more things you connect, the more points you receive. Almost all blocks can be swapped if you have swaps remaining to help build pipes to the receivers. The unmovable tiles should spawn in the first or last column.
Lastly, I’m not sure what your question about “game time” is exactly aimed at. New pieces are generated based on clock time. Basing that on number of moves might be interesting – that thought honestly didn’t cross our minds.
lol oh I didn’t use any swaps! I see now. I was only rotating. lol also I just noticed the lady on the right getting more disappointed in me.
re: Game Time… You answered my question. That question was really about “how do I lose?” I see messages are slowly building up down below, and as you said it is based on clock time. Yeah it might be interesting to do it based on moves. I don’t know which would be more fun tbh.