Gene Graph Garden

I honestly have no idea what to do about the orange cells. They show as empty, so even if I check in front, I always grow into them. I can't see a way to avoid them.

Can't play :
error: could not open progress.txt
could not open solutions/level0.sol, using default solution instead

Very cool! I like the core gameplay mechanics of this game. Super interesting! The controls work really well, but the UI could use some polish to make it feel a bit more cohesive and related to the theme of the game (I'm mostly referring to the arrows that connect the nodes here). But that's a pretty minor suggestion in light of how much depth and interesting stuff you have going on.

I'm definitely going to come back to this and play around when I have more time to spend figuring out the puzzles. Dumping all the available growth functions on the player all at once in the opening level is a bit intense. If you introduced one function at all time with a stage that leverages that ability, I'd probably still be playing right now instead of putting the game down until I have more time to invest in getting to know how it all works.

This is a great game. I love the programming system. It's really challenging. The nodes could use some description though. The straight one does more than the description, for example, and it took some time to discover it.

Are the puzzles all solvable? Levels 4 and 5 don't seem to have enough reachable tiles to solve them.

It's nice that the progress is saved. My computer crashed when I was writing up the feedback the first time, and I was able to continue where I left off. That's just above and beyond, and it saved me time.

@Justin_C The orange cells are supposed to be lava, they show up as empty since they are part of the ground layer. Hint: try to avoid the lava using predefined turns. I could definitely have made the visuals and wording more clear, thanks for the feedback!

@matimat Hmm, those messages are intended when you have not solved any levels or made a solution yet. If there is nothing else in your log.txt there must be an unlogged error or crash somewhere. Sorry about that.

@3rdHunter Thanks for the feedback! If I ever get around to doing a post jam update I will definitely add more early levels to teach the individual mechanics.

@Pincushion You have 217 fruits in your screenshot, there was a bug in the counting code where it would skip some cells in certain situations. It should be fixed now.

This is a great idea! I can't say I got super far with it, but that's probably more my fault than yours 😅 Like you mentioned, the UI could use a little bit of work, I had some text elements overlapping, especially during the tutorial, which made things tough to read. But otherwise it all worked great.

Very cool little puzzle game, incredible depth for such a short development period. The problem solving was quite engaging. I agree with @pincushion that the role of the secondary arrow on the grow gene was not clear from the instructions - and is very important for solving the later levels.

Very nice "algorithm" puzzle, quite hard at the beginning
A few more examples to better understand the nodes would be great!

I really enjoyed this! The puzzles were fun and the interface for managing the states was intuitive and easy to use! Really well done!

I have the same problem as @matimat . After I put all those files there manually from source, I get this in log:
`error:assert(hr == S_OK) in code/win32_gl_main.cpp (1114): `
I have a relatively Old PC (no Vulcan, no OpenGL 3).

Very cool puzzle game. Quite hard at the beginning. Nice one !

This looks very cool and interesting, and waaay too scientific and complicated for my mind! I like your sprites and UI design!

the puzzles were really fun and challenging, especially for something made in 2 days. this reminds me of one of the games in last call bbs.

I think this is a clever programming system, the way you can kind of create loops out of anything, very cool.

Very interesting programming game. I like the programming automata very much. It's a great challenge to beat the last two levels, hope for more levels!

Amazing game! I loved the mechanic - I never thought graphs could be this fun :) The levels were really good too - I spent over an hour playing this game, and eventually managed to beat it! It took me a long time to realize I had to generate a new fruit every cycle (I failed a lot when I just spawned everything with a fruit and didn't know why), but other than that, incredible entry!

One minor thing regarding level 6 - maybe I'm just stupid, but while I managed to find a (relatively) nice solution for 110 fruit, getting that last 1 was really annoying, and basically required me to add a special case for the last stretch, nearly doubling the amount of genes required (I've attached both solutions below). Again, maybe it's just me missing the obvious simple solution, but it felt a bit disheartening that my original algorithm which I spent time perfecting didn't work just because of that 1 missing fruit...

First I was about to give up on the first level because I didn't understand how to start the simulation, then it also felt a bit odd that I had to go back and forth between the levels to be able to reset them. I also made some sort of spinning monster where all tiles had rotating white arrows on the first real level and the animation happened so fast that there was no way of learning much from its progression. Maybe that was because when I couldn't get the simulations to start I increased the speed to max... :thinking:

Interesting concept though!

You have an interesting game, but the first level difficulty is much too high. It has obstacles and requires me to fill the board when I don't yet fully understand the basic mechanics. Give me some more straight lines or open fields.

I was surprised at one point to realize that the plant can branch when it loops back on itself but I'm still not really understanding my own plants.

I eventually got the first level with this spinny fruit but I don't really understand it.

I guess the idea is that it branches after every grow action and in my tree I tell it to restart after every branch. I can kind of reason about that but it would definitely be nice to have some more easy levels to figure things out.

Some examples of possible simple levels would be a plant with 4 fruit, and a plant that branches once and then grows in two straight lines.

The UI for placing and connecting nodes was pretty intuitive, so that is nice.

I think the complexity gap for the first level is too hard. Some feedback on the execution would have help undestand each node. For a game jam the game mechanics are really impressive. Congrats !

Wow! This is exactly the type of game I could sink my teeth into! I loved coming to new understandings about the game's mechanics. I have beaten up to level five right now, but I plan to come back later and finish the rest.

I liked how you even included a little debugger system where you can see which node a section of plant is currently on while stepping through the frames one by one. Great touch!

Here are my (minor) nitpicks:
- The growing fruit mechanic just seemed like platespinning. I would figure out the solution to the puzzle, remember "oh yeah, I have to stick a 'grow fruit' node before each 'grow forward' node", do that, and *then* I would win the level. It's an extra step that doesn't make the game any more difficult, but delays the level win.
- The "Grow Forward" node mentions a green arrow in its explanation text. I know now that this refers to the connection arrow. But at first, I thoight it referred to the green arrow on the node's icon, so I was kinda confused to what it meant.
- I think a separate "Start" node would have been a better choice instead of a Start label next to one of the nodes. It's more elegant, I think.
- A few more levels in between to get the user used to the mechanics wouldn't be a bad idea. I have some previous experience with state machines, so this was a lot easier for me.
- I wish you could set a numerical value for the "wait" node. My solution for level five involved a chain of 20 or so wait nodes and hooking those together was a bit tedious.

But those didn't do too much to damper my experience. Fantastic work!