There's like a bunch of houses running out of power from their generators or something, so you need to connect them to the grid in the cheapest way possible ( so lower scores at the end are better. ) Levels are randomly generated

Controls:

Use your mouse to click on any of the three wire cards in your hand, then place that card somewhere on the grid.

Strategy:

• Try to make short path's through the good areas while avoiding the red bad areas. You get negative points at the end for wasted tiles that don't connect to anything, but sometimes you just have to get rid of tiles if you get 3 bad ones.
• Per usual the real pro strategy is just to go into the config file in the assets folder and make up your own values for everything.

Dev notes and takeaways:

• The usual lesson of being an adult sucks when it comes to having time for Game Jams, Only got about 2 half days to do something. I guess it's "done enough" to submit, and I wanted to check out the new LD site, just wish it were I theme I was more inspired by.
• My main reason for doing gamejams is to try to learn new tools I don't use in my day job. So I got in a time machine and went back 10 years and decided to use SDL alone for this project ( hence no sounds and bitmap font.) Didn't have time to change the font so that's just a direct rip from lazyfoo's SDL setup tutorials. It was pretty interesting going back to basics and having to think about every little detail. Ah... Manually making spritesheets, setting up my own pathfinding, texture management being the first thing you have to do before even prototyping, giant message polling to parse out events, nothing like a trip through the good old days to make you appreciate what you have. Except I still spent like 2 hours trying to get xcode to build/link properly some things are eternal.
• I'm done designing puzzle games where you can't display the score as the game is in progress. It's too confusing. Score here is derived by the total pieces used in the SHORTEST paths to each house, with a different cost for each node ( 1 for green squares, 5 for normal, 30 for red ) and a penalty x3 times the number of pieces wasted. Since we can't know what's wasted until the entire grid is complete it's hard to explain. Also since the levels are random ( if I had more time I probably would have just picked some rand seeds I liked ) it's hard to tell people what a "good" score is, probably at < 150 or so on most levels I saw.
• Another thing I had to cut was originally green squares were worth negative points. Meaning you could actually end up with a better than 0 costs, as if someone had paid you to lay out the tiles. It didn't really work with the fiction so it confused 100% of playtesters ( all one of them and I kind of agreed. ) Disappointing because one of the cool things about video game A* is that nodes can have negative costs, which isn't allowed in the real world.
• Speaking of A* shortest paths, I didn't think of this until I was done but it's really confusing when all path's don't highlight and only the shorest ones do. I find I'm often confused that the long paths don't work if there was a shortcut already found. I should have just followed all tiles and not done real pathfinding.

Tools: - SDL2 - MSPaint ( RIP )