leaky robotic arm

Ahhh, I actually had a lot of fun playing this. Very cool concept of playing as a robotic arm, it's actually pretty sad when you finally, inevitably, lose. I'd rate this especially high for it's use of the theme. As for the actual gameplay, I found it quite fun. It took me a minute to get the hang of it, but after that I was hastily pressing keys to make the robot hand go where I needed it. Good times. Good game.

Interesting concept and great take on the theme. I enjoyed it, well done!

@circle Thank you for your comment. I got this idea from this art installation by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS4Bpr2BgnE
I would have liked to include the frantic machine sound effects, but I did not have time to learn the sound API of the framework.

Interesting! The ui / controls were a bit tiny and hard to read, but I liked it.

Haha nice inspiration video!

It was an interesting idea to have a complex control of a robot. Maybe it would have added something if you could explore a world and go pickup stuff with your arms. Like it deep sea or on the moon.

Having a time limitation felt a bit stressful given the controls are hard.

Having the robot leak is a creative idea but I'm not sure how much of a "game" it is suck up your own oil instead of fulfilling a mission, haha.

Nice try with Heaps, I used that too!

It took me a little bit to fully understand things, even with the explanations on screen. I kept forgetting the keys I needed to use. :upside_down: But after a while things came a little more naturally.

It feels like it's a solid minigame, I can picture it being used in some bigger context.

Art-wise I wish the oil wasn't so pixelated, or that the arm was more pixelated. Theyr'e not in scale with each other.

Clever mechanical entry!

I actually got to the point where there is so much oil out that by just holding "s" all the time i would never run out of it.

Maybe an interesting programming challenge would be to keep the oil volume in line with how much there really is.

I would see it as an interesting tech demo!

Nice idea. I just could not manage with the key assignment.
Maybe I'm too stupid for that.
Still nice idea - well done!

My score is 181461

I love these types of games when the challenge is the controller itself, very well executed game, congrats

@inert-aesthetic Okay, that video is just super cool. Thanks for sharing.

This is a fantastic idea and the execution was done very well. Great job! I love it

@willoxs Thank you for the feedback -- I was hoping that wasn't possible. Initially I had it perfectly in-line, but it seemed like I could never suck up enough oil to make it worthwhile, so I fudged it such that you leak 150% of the oil you lose. I guess that was too much!

Woulda been nice to have a moment to read and understand the controls before the terror of the oil leak began!

I struggled just to remember which button controlled which arm. If it were my choice, I'd have one button to change which arm I'm controlling, and then arrows/AD to move the active arm section.

Interesting and confusing at the same time. Nice work :)

Good and interesting concept, I would polish more artistic details and especially the UI, everything was too small and not very friendly for the eyes and the gameplay. I think it has a lot of potential to continue improving it, good job!!

Hello Aesthetic,

The concept for this game was really neat. Very cool how you took inspiration off of the video you posted. It's so important to be consistently innovating and pushing the bounds of what games can be and I love this concept I think it does that well.

The hardest part about this game for me is the controls, I know it was meant for controller as you mentioned but it's very important to make sure it feels good every way it can be played. Also I think maybe more reward/challenges or incentives might have been nice.

Really great work overall, good job :D

Actually really enjoyed this. Was a little hard to figure out what the controls were at first (maybe could have been communicated a bit better) but once I figured them out, the control scheme actually felt really good and intuitive. Played this for quite a while considering how simple the mechanics are.

A few things that I found could have been improved:

1) The game got too easy after some time. Once you've been playing for a while the entire floor is covered in fluid and it's super easy to stay topped up. I ended up getting bored with full fuel and just waiting for a breaker to trip. I think the total amount of fuel in the game (on the ground + in your tank) increases over time. Making there actually be an invariant amount of total fuel would naturally make the game harder as it goes on (same amount of fuel that gets spread more evenly over a larger and larger area means it's harder to keep up).

2) There doesn't seem to be any urgency to flip the breakers. If you're low on fluid when a breaker goes, you can just suck up fluid until you have enough and can comfortably flip the breaker. If you lost fluid faster for each tripped breaker, I think it would bring some urgency to the game and force the player to choose between fluid intake and preventing fluid loss.

3) Having only three breakers at set locations allow you to figure out an arm configuration that allows you to hit all three by only moving two of the arm segments. If the breakers were randomly moved to different locations, the player would have to be a bit more creative and dynamic and move all of the arm segments.

Overall really well done, fit the theme perfectly (apart from the fact that it seems like you can actually survive forever if you have the patience).

The controls were harder, but after some time you feel like a person operating a mechanic.
I think that this is a hard game to achieve all its goals.
And nice reference, you definitely achieved the inspiration here :)

Congrats :) And its nice to see someone making games without popular engines o/ good work

I have a lot of respect for any game that isn't afraid to implement complex, arcane controls like this one does. Managing the joints is therapeutic in a way; it reminds me of the philosophy that drove the development of games like QWOP many years ago. It feels like this game essentially accomplished what it set out to do; there isn't much to it, but I can't help but enjoy it.