Reboot

The game is super, I was not familiar with the "Cursor10" game before. I liked the implementation and dynamics of the game)

@bangthewall Thanks so much! And that's such a good suggestion, I might have time to add a reset button in before the deadline.

@developer-on-trip OOPS! I've added the Desktop build to the downloads now!

@bassilij thank you so much! Yeah cursor10 was just something I randomly came across back in the good ole StumbleUpon.com days. I've always really like timeloops and groundhog day.

@bangthewall viola! Restart button added in. Great suggestion. Also I loved Cup Half Full, I played you submission to the last jam.

@zl17 Thanks for the play through! I did manage to add in a restart button.

@Vilmantas there is indeed a victory screen. There's a little virus boi on the top floor that is making a break for the reboot button (he's the cause of the reboot loop) popping him will beat the game and show the Victory screen.

@theslate if you check the spoiler section in the description the solution to that floor is there. Thank you so much for playing!

This game is so interesting! It gets very tricky to get past the fourth level (at least it did for me) or so but I really like it.

It's a masterpiece!

@turegrappa Thanks! I chose the art style because well I'm not an artist and minimalism is all I can pull off lol XD.

Jokes aside I followed a guide similar to this one (can't locate the right one) tutorial last year for Affinity Designer (fantastic software thats far cheaper than adobe tools) and it's actually super easy to make passable graphics for non-artist devs with affinity designer. The isometric tools make it so simple.

@leorid Difficulty tuning in this type of game was actually a lot less intuitive than it seemed. I cut like 4 or 5 floors I had designed, added extra lives, and reduced the hit points on the hit point box. To my surprise, doing all these things actually did very little to change the difficulty (measured by how much time remained in an optimal run). I didn't want to cut further floors as the final result is the minimum required floors to have the 3 puzzles that made the cut. I came to realize its important to have enough floor real-estate to see the compounding effects of good player optimization actually pay off.

The hit point box serves as an additive flow gate, where the first cursor gets through the slowest and all future cursors get through slightly faster than the last. The issue with this is even though the gate is additive, there's a second bottleneck as the first cursor through the gate performs an essential role of holding down one of the buttons and still remains the weakest link holding back the effectiveness of all future cursors.

While the hit point change had quite an impact on only the first cursor that made it through it did little to affect the overall difficultly of the whole game.

At the end of the day the best thing I could do to change the difficulty without losing any of the remaining puzzles would be to adjust the time for each live (which exponentially reduces difficulty as just adding a single second adds a total of 12 seconds, 1 for each life, and in turn each subsequent cursor gets to build upon the extra time the previous cursor had with increasing efficiency). But I wanted to keep the game inline with the 10 second theme.

I did want to change the size of the main cursor to stick out more wants the chaos swarm of cursor starts to set in. Even I was having a hard time keeping track of my Active Cursor in development. If I keep building the project now that I have less of a time constraint this will probably be the first feature I add.

I really appreciate the feedback and thank you so much for taking the time to play.

@nash Thanks so much for the play! I wanted to add a floor counter but ended up running out of time. The choice to make the floors have colors was actually just to provide better anchoring for the player. When all the floors were the same color it was actually hard to tell if you went up or down or rebooted to the first floor. After adding the shake effect and reboot soundfx it was a little more noticeable.

In the first version this was quite an issue. I was unable to have any delay in the gameplay loop whatsoever or the replays would break. Once a cursor "dies" the next live MUST start immediately. This is even causing a bug with the very first life due to the delay the opening dialogue creates. This is a pretty heavy design limitation I hope to be able to fix in future updates.

@leorid there were puzzles that had you going back down that ended up getting cut, they are left in to go back down to collect extra points for a high score since you really only need to hold a button for maybe a second or two, just enough time for future cursor to go up stairs.

I really like the point you make designing the puzzles to where future cursor don't actually need to visit other floors. That would have been MUCH better design. I'll take you up on that for future updates!

Very nice entry, very polished 😊👍

I really enjoyed this game. Super cool idea, well done!

@kimau Lives force you to optimize to solve all the puzzles. Puzzle design variations start to fall apart when the player has infinite lives. There were other puzzles I had that highlighted this a bit better but ended up getting cut for the time frame.

Wow this was an intense experience! I like how it almost felt like multiplayer just watching my past mice(?) do all the different tasks, and every replay just got me more and more exciting to optimize my climb! The minimalistic art style really keeps the focus on the gameplay as well, loved it a lot!

I checked this game out on my stream! Here's a link to the VOD

@roroto-sic You're supposed to pop the virus that is pressing the reboot button every 10 seconds to solve the reboot loop.

@jag from what I've gathered, Extra games dont get scored.