PolyMancer

Hey your link isn't working :(

@hyan just fixed :)

I suck at drawing the shapes but the game is pretty fun!

Loved the idea and the art. Missed a soundtrack tho. Great game and great entry!

Amazing idea! Got 1173 score, but damn, it's hard. Drawing those purple crosses are just impossible for me HAHA. Great work, congratulations on your submition!

@markais cool game! Check out my game, I made pattern recognition too.

This might be my favorite game from this LD!

Finding the practical patterns to draw is tricky, but once you get them the game is really fun and skillful

@nestral gigachad

those crosses threw me for a loop. Couldn't figure out how to destroy them. Kept on trying to draw them crosses and it wasn't taking them down so I just tried to avoid the lasers best I could. Very fun game. Nice job!

@storeyware thanks for playing! I usually do crosses like this:

Also you can kill the lasers with a line!

@markais oh my gosh. You can kill the lasers? I would have done so much better! xD

What a game. Simply lovely!

Very heavy Geometry Wars vibes. And Geometry Wars was my fave game back on Xbox 360. This entry has a *very* rich gameplay core. Love it! Not what I usually say, because it sounds pressuring, but this one should be a full on game on Steam with all the fancy jazz around it. :smile:

@0x0961h Glad you enjoyed it! Yeah I'd definitely consider a full release if people like it :D

@markais I would maybe suggest to "spice" up the background and maybe add even more VFX, but that's just suggestions, maybe "the cleaner -- the better" is the way :laughing:

@0x0961h Yeah better background is definitely a good idea!

This was incredible. Even with such a minimalist art style, there is so much juice and polish - it feels like it's already a complete game. The gameplay is super creative, and I'm pretty sure it'd be amazing if I had a wacom tablet or something, but even just mouse and keyboard was a lot of fun. This is definitely going to be top 100.

@joeshanahan I didn't even think about a drawing tablet when developing! But now I've heard about it from multiple people :D

i've solved it

also, a recording of an 11k run: https://youtu.be/vQZ8FSi-Nss

This man trained a CNN just to make the best game in this jam. Finally a useful application for AI ;)

Thanks for the stream submission!

@parkuhrmd Thanks! Really enjoyed seeing you figuring it out :D

This was super addicting! I love the difficulty of trying to balance out which shapes are easier to draw vs. which enemies are more threatening and need to die first. It was also really cool that you can discover shapes before their corresponding enemies showed up. Would love to see more of this!

Very enjoyable game! Drawing the shapes was a lot of fun but some of the shapes were problematic at times, especially when there was a lot going on

Thanks for joining the stream and giving us a glimpse of your game!
A true art game with great mechanics!

Thrilling! I know you opted out of audio, but the drum & bass was a great choice. Gonna try with stylus later!

Reaaly good! the learning curve is steep, especially with the star shape. The square shape was sometimes not recognised correctly. You did a really good job combining the enemies too, circles that spawn triangles and such.

Awesome gameplay. I really like it and think it will be cool on the mobile.
Aswell I like the artstyle - clear and simple.
Greate work!

Really fun game! Although for the life of me I can't draw a star with a mouse while dodging, but that's just a skill issue on my part.

The game itself is really unique and very enjoyable.

@sariiger Yeah stars are definitely tough, I added some hints for the shapes :)

this game is REALLY clever! i've had a lot of fun playing it! it's really hard to focus on both moving and drawing shapes, but that's what's super cool actually! the art is minimalistic yet very pleasing (less is more), so great job!

i don't even know how i was able to get that score

i think this is one of the best games i've come across on this LD edition, so congrats!

@markais Ohhh, for whatever reason I wasn't thinking of drawing the star like that, neither the plus sign. I was trying to copy it the way the enemies are, which made it a lot harder. Thank you for the tips!

I uploaded my playthrough to YouTube, I hope it's useful for you!

Rather proud of a score like this. The version I played (post-jam) is so smooth and has such a good drawing mechanic, it works even better than ours. Very impressive! Well done and such a complete game!

Saw the post about playing with a drawing tablet and knew I had to try it. Definitely one of the most fun games I've played this jam. It's simple enough and has a good learning curve, and everything (at least in the post-jam version which is what I played) was so nice and smooth, it felt really good to play.

@enreh glad you enjoyed it! Did you do drawing tablet or mouse? :D

5/5 ^^ I love your games markais

@markais drawing tablet! It worked really well.

@rickylee average shape enjoyer

Got 12th with a score of 6252! This is a *really* cool game with an addicting gameplay loop. The art reminds me of windowkill a lot which is cool.

Wow, this was super fun! Loved needing to balance movement and mouse drawing along with finding ways of earning the most points (like keeping stars and circles alive to collect their bullets as points). Did a couple runs and made it to 4th on the leaderboards (score of 13072) - didn't see the hint guide until afterwards but it felt great to figure all of them out on my own! The only thing that I felt was holding me back was that my arm was getting tired - maybe I shouldn't have played on fullscreen... 😎

@typicalkin windowkill was definitely one of the biggest inspirations :D that game is goated

@yakkocmn that's an insane score for not looking at the hints :O

Came onto LD to play some games and this was the first I played - I'm still here hours later and completely addicted! Best game I've played this jam

It's so much fun to play, thanks for the excellent work! Not sure about the theme alignment, but the game turned out to be very engaging. I particularly appreciate the simple yet stylish graphics and effects.

After playing it on stream yesterday I tried to get a better score today, but sadly did not beat it by a few points. Probably gonna come back and play this game every now and then!

This image shows the final chaos:

@jorbits nice attempt, I'll be updating the post jam version later today so you can try it out :)

I would be honest. I am embarrassed how good you nailed this game mechanic in comparsion with our game. It is so satisfying and so natural to play. Even those "triangle to play" and "rectangle to restart". Top notch, really

This.
Is.
Insane.

We're a little bit ashamed about how we handled tutorials and mechanics in our version of (almost) this mechanic. Yours is so crystal clear and so simple and elegant and juicy. The way simple shapes gradually get more features, start shooting at you, flock together, combine in different structures, then just as soon as you're comfortable a wild star appears and it's going on and on and on, just a party for my eyes and ears and my hand (holding a tablet pen because i"m a filthy cheater).

"Draw square to start" is genius.

I'll study this game for a while and learn from it. Thank you :)

That is great! so much stress :smile: Here is my playtest:

@yogurtthehorse @13x666 I appreciate it haha! I was amazed by your pixel art especially the spell animations :D

@icxon Great attempt! I see you struggled with the cross. The hint image might be helpful :)

You saw me play the gme yesterday but came to leave a comment anyway!

Loved the whole shape drawing mechanic!

As an aside you should do a writeup or something on how you got the shape detection working, fun fact, my game was supposed to have this kind of shape drawing mechanic but couldn't figure out how to do it on the first day so axed it for a circular menu and then drawing lines between connections because it'd be easier XD

Anyway! Love the game!

Wow moving while drawing complex shapes is surprisingly hard. I've always been a huge Geometry Wars fan and this gives off similar vibes even though it's a completely different concept.

Really fun game and I enjoyed playing it a whole lot. Every once in a while the shape recognition wouldn't pick up what I was trying to draw but I think that's more of a me problem than anything.

Great job!

@rickylee @jorbits @typicalkin @yakkocmn @javid-ladhani @broccolly @typicalkin calling all top players!
New post-jam boss rush with 5 boss fights in increasing difficulty!
And a new boss leaderboard!

Addictive!

Simple and fun.

Nothing more to say

@markais Dude, these boss fights are so fun - awesome work! I did run into a bug (not sure if this was from accidentally clicking out once or twice in non-fullscreen mode) but in addition to the leaderboards not showing up at the end, my drawings stopped inputting (mostly when i was drawing circles in the middle of the screen?). They'd just kinda get stuck and remain there - you can see it in the background of this photo.

Absolutely loved this game - Thanks for submitting it to the stream! I had such a hard time talking and playing, but it was incredible

Really impressive. The most original and creative enemy design I have seen. Amazing idea! I wish there was bgm to fit, and I felt like it was really hard to draw squares. They were often interpreted as circles. But incredible entry.

Ahhh how it all came together in the end~✨ thank you for letting me play this!!

Thanks for submitting your game to the stream! If you wanted to watch it again in the future heres the vod of the stream (with a chapter for your game)

Very well done. The drawing felt very accurate and responsive. Great balance.

Really, really cool game! From what I have played it looked very polished as well. I feel like people can compete against each others for hours trying to get the highscore. Don't think I have anything to say other than well done :)

If you want to rewatch my playthrough, you can find it here on YT:

love the aesthetics and super simple and effective tutorial! i was really struggling at first with the crosses and rq when i got messed up by 3 of them all at once and then i scrolled down and saw u can just do a few lines instead of the full shape. so i opened it up for a few more runs xD being able to do incomplete circles and triangles was huge help too

my main tip is play in browser and not fullscreen mode. in browser you can continue to draw offscreen to complete your shapes. also i have ultrawide monitor which makes enemies spawn too far apart in fullscreen mode so you have to make larger shapes and you cant get from one side of the screen to the other before the orbs disappear

Simply amazing

I believe thaat everything has been said already, but really good job done

A well-executed entry! wonderful vibes and chill game, this gesture inputs reminds me of the Arx Fatalis game.

@dalloner Haha that game came out before I was born, the casting mechanic does look really nice tho! :D

Hey! Congrats on making it to 7th place :)

@yogurtthehorse wtf thats crazy :D

@markais well you did a good job. Totally deserve it :)

@nestral @trux @0x0961h @joeshanahan @parkuhrmd @dreamscale @digitaliliad @amarokczukay @mantsje @enreh @rickylee @typicalkin @yakkocmn @broccolly @konstantinreed @jorbits @yogurtthehorse @13x666 @snowdrama @braktheman @euler-moises @koolruz @amberfall92 @jerem-watts @ategon @thebooksnail @jvdwijk @itsboats @thunderchief @dalloner

Thank you everyone so much for playing and giving amazing feedback.
I have decided to continue the development for a full release - more drawing tools, upgrades, bosses and... pain-t.
Now with a new name!

If you're interested, join Discord for development updates, playtests and suggestions :)

Again thank you so much and keep pain-ting!!!

Woooahh i wonder how the drawings are parsed! Is it some ML recognition?

Hey @avi !

I used a custom solution for recognition, which is based of a video/code by Sebastian Lague - "How to Create a Neural Network".


I do the following:
1. The user draws a shape which is made out of points connected with lines.
2. Then after the drawing is done, I normalize the point positions: scale all the points to fit in a 1x1 square.
3. I rasterize the points and lines into a 28x28 black and white image.
*This is done by running a pixel to line distance algorithm for each pixel & line of the drawing and mapping that to a color.
This is best done using Compute Shaders but had to use CPU for WebGL version :/*
4. I then use the image as inputs to a Convolutional Neural Network (from the above example).

*There was a special case with lines as if you draw a line along the horizontal/vertical axis, when normalized the horizontal/vertical imperfections will be very exaggerated and can look like another shape. If small width/height of the drawing is detected it assumes it's a line an no further classification is done.*

I got a FAQ with more technical questions on the discord if you're interested :)