Bit Golf

Innovative, interesting, a little bit tricky on the binary level :)

Makes me empathize with the tiny people inside the computer who do all the computations really fast... It's an interesting concept, I don't think I've seen something like this before. UI feels very smooth/clean, sounds/music are also very nice and chill. Well done!

Very cool concept, I don't think I've seen anything like this before. It took a few tries to understand the mechanics, but it wasn't punishing enough to force people away before they learned, I think. Having the above and below view of the text was good UI design as well.

Very cool take on the theme! It was a bit difficult to understand at first, but once I got it, it was very fun! Maybe it won't be so bad when AI takes over...?

Neat concept! I like the interpretation of the theme!

Really nice! But I didnt feel like I was enough work. I think the gameplay could be more manual Kappa

Tricky game, but a really cool concept.

This is my favorite game so far this jam. I really wanted to do a compression themed game too but I couldn't find a good idea. Wish I had thought of this.

I have a few nitpicks, like I think run-lenth encoding could be better explained, and it took me a little bit to realize that the order of "rules" matters, but on the other hand I did enjoy getting that "Aha!" moment.

I feel like the difficulty of levels is very uneven, in general the ones that are "real text" have more difficult to find patterns and you find yourself looking closely at each punctuation mark, which might be more realistic but is a bit less fun.

Overall though, absolutely love the concept and great execution. Fantastic game!

I'm WinRAR, wheeeee!!
Didn't manage to get all three stars, but I really liked the idea with colors and the overall game!

This is a really innovative submission, that filled me with an immense sense of dread -- and I mean that in a really good way! The atmosphere was incredibly well put together, and the puzzles creative and definitely unique. A really solid entry, great job!

Managed to beat the first level after a while, but I'm not sure I quite understand how to play this well (unless it's all about patterns and I just can't see them too well!) 😅

Love the concept and atmosphere though, and I can imagine it being a really fun ride if you 'get it'!

Watched this on stream! Pretty hard for someone not too well versed in compression technology like me, but I absolutely love the idea! And it fits the theme so well. And the aesthetics are great. Love this game!

It's 1am here, so I'll stop it at that for now, I'll try better scores later :) I feel something like this could be very useful for someone teaching about compression.

Innovative take on the theme, haven't seen anything remotely close to this. Some of the beginning puzzles were a little harder than I would have liked, but besides that really neat game. Congrats!

Just you wait, I'll get all of these levels to three stars!

Thanks for submitting the game to the stream!

If you wanted to watch it again in the future heres the vod timestamped to your game


Been playing it still and got to 2/3 of the levels 3 starred so far

It's addicted, good job!

Probably it's too hard for me but I appreciate the genius of the idea and execution. Everything from graphic style and narrative is great. Also it's a great take on the theme! Good job!

Couldn't get to the end, but it was a cool take on the theme. Really had to try hard to see what can be compressed. It does seem the dificulty of the levels is all over the place tho.

Very cool game :) I really enjoyed it, although I mostly got 1 or 2 stars in everything. I don't think I ever got 3.

How did you come up with the points needed for stars? I know there's like a lower limit for possible compression, but surely you can not reach that here - did you just try around and estimate or do you have some heuristic?

Anyways, lovely idea, great execution. The artstyle fits the game perfectly. If I had to nitpick something, it would be a lack of variety in music.

Hope you had a nice jam and maybe give my game a try, if you haven't yet :)

@im-not-a-robot for most of the levels, I just set the three stars quota to whatever I was able to get haha

Nice game, took a while to get the hang of it, but it is a really good idea well executed. Nice one!

Cool game, really original. Teased my brain hard.

Very addictive :D remind me of increpare 3byteenkoder. The audio is also very good for this gameplay pace !

I've seen this being made and I've seen BadCop rise up like a phoenix... The theme broke the man but he just got up and spun out this beauty :) Great entry, fits the theme perfectly and is innovative as can be. Thank you for making this !

10/10, would 1⭐ again.

I was hoping someone would take a nerdy approach to the theme like this, well executed! I've been dabbling in embedded development, so data compression has been on my mind a lot lately 😅

A minor complaint I do have is, as a colorblind person, some of the colors weren't all that helpful when trying to analyze the output. It would have been nice if the color-coded • markers were replaced with ① or ➊, or some other distinct symbols.

This is too big brain for me, but I have lots of friends that would nerd the hell out over this. Amazing idea, super well done

@Bytomancer that's a good idea! I was worried about colorblind accessibility, but i couldn't think of anything to solve it during the jam

Oh this game is soo cool. Super cool and unique puzzle game AND unique take on the theme! I could see myself spending time on the levels I didn't get 3 stars on when I'm avoiding work. Even if it makes me feel like I'm taking CS classes again. The UI is very clean and perfect for the game and the music created a great ambience that was somehow ominous yet relaxing. Thanks for making a great game!

Super innovative puzzle game; it would help a lot if I understand data compression. :) (i think i use to many collors)
Music is verry nice and relaxing.

Surprisingly enjoyable puzzle game. Great take on the theme!

amazing concept and well executed! congrats : )

Great game! Love how it interpreted the theme, and despite being a puzzle game I actually didn't do too bad. (Chat helped too.) I also learned about RLE so that's cool.

Great idea, very well executed! The control scheme was intuitive: literally the first I tried did what I expected. I don't remember how RLE was introduced (or if I discovered it by accident) but it was timely.
And I love such tiny games with a coherent, funny lore :)
The one improvement I see would be having more of the levels' text have meaning, rather than a pure compression exercise. (Obviously that would have been harder to make!)
Good job, congrats!! Definitely one of my highlights of this jam.

i loved this game! i've seen it played on stream and i wanted to try it just after and WOW! the idea is super original and innovative, the minimalist UI is cool. this is sometimes hard when you try to go for the 3 stars (honestly i was with a friend and we could only get like 50% of levels with 3 stars) but believe me i can feel my brain has been improved after playing your game!

i wish there was the optimal solution written after you finish a level because i'm really curious what the best compressions are!

iirc was able to lower level 9's record by 1 byte :') The rest were ties or a few above

Awesome game! I've tinkered with compression algorithms before, and it's super neat doing it manually as a puzzle game (for the AI overlords, of course). I'm not nearly as good at it as some of the users above though :)

Congratulations, such a nice game and a nice idea, could play it for a long time !

You know your audience! This is the kind of thing that developers go WILD for. The colors are pleasing, the ui lovely, the sfx calm and nice, and the puzzles are varied enough to keep things interesting all the way through. All in all a very lovely entry!

Really cool concept and executed really well. There's some clear thought in how the levels are designed to interact with the mechanics and the concept is fun.

Not much to say really, it's simple, fun and well executed. Can't really ask for more.

Interesting concept! Fits the theme really well.

Audio is top notch. That music is just so relaxing.

I got lost playing this game for so long! What a unique and fun game. Great job!

This was a great game!

Fantastic game, the music is really nice without interrupting your thoughts. Hard to get 3 stars!

What a really cool idea. I really liked how this was educational and interesting. Something to help the difficulty curve could have been what color was reducing how many bytes or something like that, some reductions are not intuitive so I felt like I spent a lot of time doing trial and error. Was super clean and well done as well as extremely creative. Excellent entry!

Insanely addictive, polished and well-thought game. Amazing, astonishing work!

I've spent lot of time on this game. Interesting mechanic, and well-detailed (quite realistic) gameplay in terms of data compression :)

Very cool! Probably the most innovative submission I've seen so far in this jam. The UI was very nicely polished, and the audio was pleasant. I'd say that my only significant concern was some sudden jumps in difficulty level; an early level or two set some expectations that were not met in a later stage, and it left me looking for solutions in the wrong places. Overall, though, this is some really cool stuff that you should be proud of.

Really liked the audio on this one, really matched the aesthetic. For me, I didn't have too much fun as I don't think I'm very good at it. The most fun I had was with the wood chuck example, as it was a lot easier for me to try find optimisations and include trailing or leading spaces etc. I wasn't fully understanding what the max length of characters we could encode into a colour was either. Was helpful it showed a line under the top to show what the colour represented though. Cool idea, just the pattern recognition wasn't something that hooked me - I wouldnt survive in the future clearly :D

I might be not too smart to play this game well, but it's very impressive!

u too smart for us badcop, this is just clever as heck. love the minimal presentation hehe

Thanks for submitting your game to stream!

Definitely plan to come back to this one to see if I can 3-star all of the levels. Sorry the Rudds don't seem to understand compression algorithms. :stuck_out_tongue:

One of the most original ideas! I like your concept and in your jam version it's really good, really I don't feel you need more than that, can be a really fun minigame to play out of a jam!

Well done! Take a candy! :candy:

Very unique puzzle game, great work!

Crazy to see the stuff I learned in CS class applied in an actual game. Really fun to toy around with and a great fit for the theme. :robot:

Love this game! Quite challenging, original and definitely limited space! Well done!

While I was making my game I sometimes had you on my second monitor for company. The first day I felt kinda stressed (it is my first jam) and seeing you reading wikipedia on some random oversophisticated math instead of already working on code was soothing ^^ (I felt I was fine with my progress). I loved the creative concept behind your game, so I'm here now.

And you managed to implement the concept fantastically! It was super fun! Even though I'm a bit mad that I couldn't get 3 stars on the last level :sweat_smile: I love that you later added histograms and community levels, it added a lot to the experience. And to give you some actual feedback - I think you should add a way to exit the level back to the menu (or if it is there already, make it more obvious). Thanks for the jam!

Really cool, and nice to see another score-chasing optimization puzzle, if a bit more approachable than mine =).

I'll never look at 7-zip the same way anymore!! :laughing:

À wonderful ideawe ll executed, right on point with the theme!
À great entry.

Please not that WinRar is not free software. After a 40 ~~day trial~~ year period you must either ~~buy a license~~ submit to your new AI overlords, or ~~remove it from your computer~~ be removed. Great concept, love the puzzles. Some of them can really make you think.

Quite challenging and addictive, nice entry!

I thought the concept was interesting but it was pretty tricky figuring out the mechanics - particularly how the right clicking affected things.

This game is legendary.
I don't know why it's so addictive.
So straightforward, but very challenging.
I played it all afternoon.

Very clever! I'm not super great at it but everything works pretty well. It's very easy to experiment and see if a given move is worth it, and understand why or why not. Like you, I felt that the theme wasn't very good, but I'm glad it inspired this gem :)

Spent like 10 minutes on the first level making different colors for every repeating word instead of just painting the sentence lol, very unique idea

Really cool take on the theme. I never though I would get to play an algorithm but you made it work! And it's surprisingly fun to find repeated substrings to compress.

The story was also well done and expressed really well through the gameplay.

Also, I recognize that color theme! I also used Monokai in my game as well.

Overall an excellent entry.

very impressive :-O

and the web build that lets you choose your game version in-app

and the community-made levels!!?

honestly respect

it's really fresh and surprisingly tricky yet addictive

all about pattern recognition, fascinating

I really like the examples you give in the 1st levels as well, a bit of everything

I'd say an option to go back to the main menu to select a different level would be nice

but beyond that well done --- surprising and fresh --- what a wonderful example of what a Ludum Dare can bring along :grinning: :sparkles:

Very original. I had a lot of difficulties in the beginning, but after I understood I was able to carry on in peace.

Congratulations for the game.

This was a very neat idea, I feel like I actually learned a bit about how compression works from playing! The execution is really polished between the level select screen, high scores, and ability to share custom levels. Definitely a bit more of a tutorial would be helpful, and I was really hoping there would be some kind of overarching storyline or twist revealed by the text snippets (especially since the first couple levels seemed to be hinting in that direction), but given the time constraints this was still really impressive. Awesome work!

So clever, and fits the theme perfectly.

Enjoyed it very much, missing only a couple UX improvements - like having undo and menu accessible with mouse aside from key bindings. I've also sometimes marked text for the wrong color, though I'm not sure what my confusion stemmed from exactly (undo helped very much here). I felt like the level progression could be improved a little bit and it could use some more onboarding - hints were helpful, but the text-based nature of the game would allow for more explanation built into the levels themselves. On the other hand - there was a lot of aha moments while discovering mechanics and solutions, and that was pretty satisfying. I got that the palette takes space by itself, but the exact numbers weren't clear for me and I was just clicking around trying different approaches - though that's not a bad thing tbh.

Overall though - the game is so well put together, and also quite stylish - both in its minimalism and the little touches like particles for the score stars. What's also impressive is the number of features, network functionality, high scores, custom levels with likes etc.

Great idea and well executed, good job

This is SO BRILLIANT!!!! I'm literally begging you to continue developing this and make lots more puzzles because I'm super picky with puzzle games and I LOOOOOOOOVE this one. Like I keep playing it, and then dove into the post-LD version so I could play the user-submitted ones too.

Seriously, you've made a new big fan here, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, especially from all of these comments (and pics of people with way better scores than mine lol).

Very good game. been playing it for like 30 minutes. Extremely impressive how much depth it has with such few mechanics. Also extremely impressive how entertaining it can be doing levels that are literally just long random strings of characters. Well done.

Really great, love the idea, please make more levels :smile:

This is super cool and neat, I wish I was better at the game lol

Whoa! What a creative (read: nerdy) game! I honestly don't know where you came up with this, but I had a really fun time getting into it. The difficulty was maybe a little high at first, and I think a gentler tutorial would have helped quite a bit, given how unfamiliar the concept of compression algorithms might be to those unfamiliar.

Great entry, looking forward to playing your future games.

cool concept, though i felt the second level was much harder than the few that came after

You managed to teach me RLE through trial and error!
I couldn't get super far but that's definitely a me thing.
The narrative told through the levels backed by the simple yet endearing art-style is deserving of high-praise!
Had a ton of fun with this steam-worthy game c:
Thank you for making games for us Sarah. You are changing the world for the better~✨

I'm always impressed when someone manages to create a game that really feels complete and whole in those 48h. 😊 The UI and style is super pretty, the music is nice, the backstory and level texts are funny. I finished all 15 levels and enjoyed the gameplay. It is fascinating how fast you get a feel for certain tricks (like selecting 2 characters for RLE can often be better because it leaves single characters in the text unchanged). I would love to see some additional mechanisms to spice things up in the later levels (e.g. a certain address range is broken and you have to compress as much as possible without loosing more than x% of data). Great entry! 💜

Came back to see how my favourite games from the jam did in ratings. Congrats on the nice score! :)

I saw this on stream, what a head scratcher. The creating your own levels and playing other levels is especially impressive.