Active Cell

by jonas-michael

co-authored: @bauerfb, @hanna-knop, @melonface, @odyze, @c42, @der-finski

Overall★★★★★★★★★★4.02

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.84

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.82

Theme★★★★★★★★★★4.17

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.88

Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.63

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.62

Deceptively simple. Infinitely complex.

Our teams' entry into this round of Ludum Dare's game jam is called Active Cell, a sci-fi-inspired puzzle game. The players goal is to solve increasingly complex levels by commanding a specific amount of moves, which are looped by the game. The game has a steep learning curve and later levels might require some trial and error to solve due to the number of iterations that would have to be computed by the player. However, the maximum amount of moves that need to be selected in a single level is seven, keeping the game accessible to the player.

Featuring 16 challenging levels with self-made graphics and sound, unique music on each level and a drive-by tutorial leading players through the game, we have poured all our creativity and most of our time into this project and are very proud and pleased of the outcome.

Thank you for playing!
@der-finski (Coding)
@jonas-michael (Coding and UI)
@hanna-knop (Art and Animations)
@odyze (Coding and UI)
@c42 (Level Design, Music and Sound)
@MelonFace (QA and Sound)

Stuck? You can find some tips for hard levels on the user page of @c42

Tags: #2d, #singleplayer

Genres: puzzle

Tools: Unity

Comments42

yellow-basti5 Oct 2020, 22:52

Wow.. this game is super polished. How did you do this? :D Love the sound and art!

CursedEmbassy5 Oct 2020, 22:53

good job! Impressive graphics!

ansoneh5 Oct 2020, 22:54

Love this game. Never played anything quite like it. Graphics are wonderful as well.

JoskerDu5 Oct 2020, 22:56

Very cool. Tests my patience. Great work team!

firetwoonenine5 Oct 2020, 22:59

This game has a level of polish matched by few others I've played in any LD (and I've been through too many to count...) :)

Very fun, with a nice difficulty curve as you go through levels. The music and sound design is also beautiful in its own right.

explodingcamera5 Oct 2020, 23:01

Really impressive what you came up with! Really nice concept and insanely polished

Sentynel5 Oct 2020, 23:04

This is really cool. The core mechanic is really interesting, and the UI and art is pretty polished.

Gabriel Dias Oliveira de Almeida5 Oct 2020, 23:04

man this is so different, but it's so good, I couldn't play a lot of it because it was to hard for me, but it's amazing, it's been a long time that I had seen a puzzle game like this

130N355 Oct 2020, 23:22

I love everything about this game, i couldn't even find any flaw. So much polished

GloomyFolken5 Oct 2020, 23:24

Really nice! We went with basically the same idea, and your game looks more challenging :)

HOOLOP5 Oct 2020, 23:38

I like the concept and it's very polished. Good job !

YoungBlade5 Oct 2020, 23:39

Very nicely done! An excellent concept for a puzzle game with a great aesthetic. I doubt I'll play anything else quite like this during Dare to Play. Thanks for making this!

Finn_Tr6 Oct 2020, 12:31

Fantastic Game!! The aesthetic is stunning and the mechanics is so well-executed! I really love the UI and the level of polish of this game, a very impressive entry! Great jobs!

Gevizz6 Oct 2020, 12:34

It's the most fun and hard puzzle game I have ever played. Great work!

fpoli6 Oct 2020, 12:44

Wow! This is really something different to what I've played so far. Loved the simplistic art and the puzzles are very smart. I would improve the audio aspect of the game, but apart from that, I liked it very much!

Adil6 Oct 2020, 12:51

Visual is relaxing, love this. Sounds good too, Idea and realisation are great, I like puzzles like this

Yulia_li6 Oct 2020, 12:55

This game is perfect!

m0dsat6 Oct 2020, 13:01

Very polished and nice. Basic idea but very nice execution. Especially liked the visuals. Thanks!

Cerins6 Oct 2020, 13:15

Fun game

toby16456 Oct 2020, 14:53

An extremely polished game with a great concept! The puzzles are also challenging and engaging. Great job!

Stefan Laimer6 Oct 2020, 17:01

Amazing game, and very challenging. I made it to level 8 so far but I'm definitely coming back to finish it!

The music is nice and fits the game perfectly, the visuals are great but the UI is just on another level. I don't think I have seen another Ludum Dare game with a UI that's as nice and clean as this one. I especially like the Tutorial arrows to the special nodes.

Great job!

UglySwedishFish6 Oct 2020, 18:39

AMAZING concept, and fantastically polished results! I am especially fond of the visual style of it (feels very no mans sky-like). Also, the audio is really good. :thumbsup:

saurterrs6 Oct 2020, 19:17

Nice and pleasant puzzle game. Good work!

Vivien Fargette6 Oct 2020, 21:30

I love these kind of games, got stuck level 7 but will definitively come back to finish it :p

rhoff956 Oct 2020, 21:58

Great game! Time between figuring out the solution in my head vs being able to complete it on screen was way too long for me. Would have liked a smoother interface for setting up the sequence, and faster movement! Seeing the plan carried out is the cool part about this game, so I would like to see that done in a cool way that does not feel like waiting for the game to catch up to me.

Stefan Laimer6 Oct 2020, 23:12

I have a quick question about the level design: When building the levels, did you start with the sequence and built the level around it, or did you first build the level and looked if you can find a fitting sequence?

And I finally managed to beat the game (thanks to the hints) :D

joh7 Oct 2020, 03:40

Wow, this is a great game! A bit challenging... not done yet. But I can already see this is a good one. Well polished, clever puzzles, diverse mechanics (already more than I expected). This is great!

Amazing job!

etrealjunior7 Oct 2020, 09:45

I liked your game my congratulations, I also did one if you want to know, and give me your feedback I am very grateful, this is the link https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/resurrection

TheWustache7 Oct 2020, 17:36

Really nice puzzler! It's impressive to see how many levels you managed to pack into this game in such a short time. The explanations look surprisingly cute in my opinion :)

Nodli7 Oct 2020, 17:51

We had the same idea ! Our game has different mechanics than you do but the concept is the same. Very nice to see another interpretation of the same idea.
The game is great !

Marinee7 Oct 2020, 18:51

Interesting clever mechanics! And i'm really loved the graphics and gameplay! Thank you for your game!

Sophiablabla7 Oct 2020, 20:32

I really enjoyed this one, super polished. The art was lovely and worked well with the calming audio. great job! Fantastic level design too. You make a great team, well done!

der_finski7 Oct 2020, 20:52

@stefan-laimer To answer your question: we first had the sequence, then designed the level around that and finally added gimmicks like enemies and teleporters

c428 Oct 2020, 08:57

@stefan-laimer My exact strategy was setting the level boundaries, a start and finish point and a sequence I found interesting. Then I first made the level beatable with the sequence using environment tiles (such as portals, walls, inverters and reversers) and subsequently filling pretty much the rest of the map with enemies in such a way that few other solutions are possible, however our solution still works.
The upside is that designing the levels is a pretty fast process, the downside being that it requires extensive playtesting to figure out which levels are actually hard (because of few other solutions or the solution being unintuitive). This is why I released hints for certain levels which we considered harder than the others. You have my twitter, feel free to message me if you have any more questions :-)

yangying8 Oct 2020, 10:26

Cool games! I am astonished by the graphics! It is not like a game jam work! The mechanism is pretty funny and really need a long time to solve it. However I found problems when try to type in the direction so I just wondered is that my keyboard problem or game's bug?

Jonas Michaelauthor8 Oct 2020, 10:32

@yangying well, that depends on the problems. After each key press you have a small time window (I think it was 0.9s) to press the next direction. If you dont make it in time, you will change the first movement again.
If you have other issues, can you give us a detailed description? We will then soon work on it!
We are happy that you enjoyed the game still :smile:

Tomate_Salat8 Oct 2020, 11:00

I like the graphics and title-animation very much! You already got me with the main menu - it made me click around :-). Everything fits very well and I like the "contextual tutorial". Very nice game =)

James Clark8 Oct 2020, 13:24

Great polished game guys! Well done. There is a lot of play time in this little gem you've developed

Arthurds8 Oct 2020, 13:32

Cursed be german game design.

Eugenik9 Oct 2020, 02:11

Really fun, thanks for making it :)

Demuss18 Oct 2020, 12:14

Neat game! Puzzles make good use of game mechanic but damn they hard. Visuals and audio work well with everything else. Good entry : )

AnniH626 Oct 2020, 22:03

Wow I love this game! I can be pretty bad at puzzle games but I love how this is constructed. It can be pretty hard to beat the levels but damn is it rewarding to solve a level. I also really like the graphics and how the music changes every few levels. Also, thank you for implementing a save file because that means I can always come back to this game :> :pray:

I think level 4 was my favourite though:

Other games by @jonas-michael

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★2.93