It's a Sliding Puzzle

Really cool that you made a GB game but it seems a little glitchy. Pieces kept moving from place to place on their own and then snapping back, it seemed like they were rotating on their own too. Is this the 10 second mechanic or just a bug? I'll hold off on rating until I actually finish the puzzle, just wanted to check to make sure I understand the game.

@chaseplays it is a ten-second mechanic. The "missing piece" of the sliding puzzle randomly switches. Thanks for the feedback! : )

@acdimalev Thanks for the reply, took some time but I finished the puzzle! Awesome job! The swap mechanic definitely makes you think and makes a good mix of frustrating and satisfying that I love in puzzle games

I love that you made a game boy rom. It ran great on visual boy advance. I liked the mechanics but I must admit I have a hard type solving these kinds of puzzles.
Out of curiosity, what tools did you use to develop this?

Ohhh, didn't expect the 10 second mechanic. I suggest you to write about it somewhere, or people will be confused!

@vidarn I used Gimp for graphics design, Pan Docs as reference material, RGBDS as an assembler. I wrote / am writing my own simulator (https://github.com/acdimalev/gb-sim) to help with actually writing assembly code; which I can now say is _way_ not ready for public use, but I included the simulator tests in the source code if you want to take a peek. And the image processing is a couple one-off programs, also included in the source code. Oh, and _heavy_ use of entr for interactive coding.

@Steffo yeah, Chaseplays gave me a pretty good idea how confusing that was. The game layout had a column for UI at one point, but I cut that during the last two hours of development. I'll probably add a note in the description sometime today.

@acdimalev wow, that's really cool! I've used RGBDS a bit in the past, so appreciate the amount of work you put into this. Your simulator looks really handy, I'll be sure to keep an eye on it.
I took a look at your source code. Great job man, there's a lot of work behind this entry.

Really cool! I threw it in a lightweight javascript emulator and it worked great, but I'm realizing as I'm scoring it that it wasn't playing sound. Does the game have sound? (Anyone have a video to save me downloading a better emulator and playing again to rate sound?) Correctly placed tiles disappearing was frustrating in a way that would get me to play faster, which would make things even worse, but that's not a bad thing, and helped with the "this is a gameboy game" feel a bit. I'd also mess up the controls because I'm mentally moving the tiles into the space, not the space itself, so it would be nice to have reverse controls as an option. Anyway, good work!

@monika thanks for the feedback! The game doesn't have sound. Didn't think to opt out of being rated on sound because I didn't use any borrowed / placeholder sounds.

@monika what emulator were you using by the way?

"Please do not load it onto a flash cart (yet)." You can't tell me what to do >:P . It worked fine. That being said it's, as you say, a sliding puzzle. just a sliding puzzle. made even more annoying by the 10 second refresh of where the empty bit is. 10/10 for coolness of making a .gb game, but other than that, it's a sliding puzzle

@infinitycore you beat me to trying it out on actual hardware! Mind, not sure when I would have gotten around to it. Just moved and most of my stuff is still in boxes. Actually happy to hear that nothing misbehaved; pretty sure that I've left out roughly half of the hardware initialization. What model did you play on?

@acdimalev EZFlash, on my original GBA (mind you it has been modded, but not in any way that would make it functionally different than a non-modded one, backlit screen and rechargeable battery is all)

Awesome take! It think it is really cool that people like you create exotic breeds of games like this. I can imagine that it is really chellanging to make a gameboy game in one weekend. Also, it is a bit risky, as people need to know how to use an emulator to execute your code. Maybe a link to some emulator would help you a bit getting more ratings ;-) ( I loved to find out how to execute your code, but I can imagine not everyone is that exploritory)

The game is fun to play, but sadly I suck at these kind of puzzles. Combining that with the board changing every 10 seconds made me give up very fast. That is not your fault though, I just suck at these games :P

Graphics are cute and the music.. Euh.. There wasn't any music for me, you have audio in the ratings enabled.. Did I miss something? For now I'll give music a neutral score :-)

@acdimalev I was using https://gb.alexaladren.net/

Wow, that is the most annoying sliding block puzzle ever! I just can't deal with the switching pieces =). Cool that you made a GB game, though! I would have liked to know what the image looks like... oh, I see it's on the description here, that probably would have made it _much_ less frustrating - I was almost kind of figuring out what pieces connected to which others (still having no idea what the total image was of) when they would swap and I'd lose my place =).

@jimbly about an hour after submission, it did occur to me that it would be nice to be able to hold a button to see what the puzzle should look like. Probably could have implemented it pretty easily using the window overlay. Such is Ludum Dare. : D

@wouter52 updated the submission to remove the audio rating. Monika also stumbled over that. Glad you got a kick out of running a Gameboy ROM! I may try to set up an in-browser emulator for future submissions.

It's really impressive that you managed to make a whole GBA game! I think everyone else has probably already said all of the feedback I could give, so I'll just say "nice job" instead!

not sure if this is solvable, but i get it. Super innovative for sure. That bouncing around every 10s made it really difficult. xD nice

This looks promising but I have no idea how to use a Gameboy emulator. Some instructions might be helpful.

@danvil many emulators are easy to use once you figure them out, but I didn't want to leave anyone in the weeds and didn't have anything prepared ahead of time. Monika linked to a pretty simple to use emulator though.

https://gb.alexaladren.net/

Just click "Add a ROM from your PC" to upload `its-a-sliding-puzzle.gb` and it will start.

@spex130 & @commanderstitch thanks for playing and rating! If you get a chance, please let me know which emulator you played on. : )

@acdimalev Thanks that helped! This is a really hard game, especially with the jump every 10 seconds.

@acdimalev - I played it on the mGBA core in RetroArch!

Sliding puzzles like this hurt my brain under normal circumstances, and the jump every 10 seconds doesn't help haha. Still super cool that you made a gameboy game for this. Well done!

Whoa, praise for making a proper gameboy game! I really appreciate this!