RAMbot by lekkel124
Let us introduce you RAMbot, a friendly little robot who must escape an abandoned factory with a gloomy atmosphere. He’s a bit in the clouds, as he can only remember a few things in his limited RAM. He was wandering around, scanning items on the floor to store them in memory, when his RAM eventually got full and overwrote the items first stored… which morphed !
Quickly enough, RAMbot figured out that if an item is overwritten by another, it transforms into that item.
However, not completely writing over an item seems to corrupt it...
With his knewly-discovered abilities, will RAMbot be able to solve the puzzles on his path ?
Additional infos :
A lot of people found the game pretty hard to understand, but it was the same for us. So feel free to experience the mecanics a little bit, and ask for help if stuck. For the time being, we'll keep adding useful infos here based on comments, that you can refer to anytime.
However, the game can be beaten while discovering all of the following by yourself, which we highly encourage doing first.
Spoiler-free zone passed, here are those additional infos, including how the RAM works, how you can interact with various elements, and a detailed walkthrough of level 1 : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jYvsWNX4pOnlaTfkXe-8dWOLQMKNIfcaevoFvgdjOpU/edit?usp=sharing
By the way, you can open doors by matching the color of the pedestal with the color of the ball on top.
Controls :
Guide RAMbot with the WASD or arrow keys.
Press Space to store objects in RAM.
Press R anytime to reset the level.
Press Escape to exit.
NB : There are currently only seven levels in the game. Extra points if you solve the last one !!
Ratings
| Overall | 402th | 3.563⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 259th | 3.593⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 33th | 4.074⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 321th | 3.806⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 833th | 3.065⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 359th | 3.314⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 602th | 2.58⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 394th | 3.343⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 68🗳️ | 44🗨️ |
(couldn't finish the last puzzle, maybe i'll try again some other time haha)
Good luck🍀
These are only small nitpicks, but I really think this game is great. Good job! :smile:
Ways to improve the mechanics in my opinion would be:
1. Make it more obvious how much space an object takes (since there's no undo or memory wipe)
2. Allow for 2nd changes like maybe undoing the current memory bank (wipe everything to revert to the last known state). By this I mean something like, if I scan 3 items, I can wipe all 3 items, but if I scan a fourth, that begins a new list only that new item will be wiped.
3. I did not get passed level one to see if this is already implemented but perhaps add more purpose to the individual objects being scanned that makes their state change once they are scanned or combined. Like a light bulb turning off which powers down a door which makes a room accessible to get the last piece required to open the door or something like that.
Sorry I did not get passed level one but I really like the idea of this and look forward to a more defined/polished version
@prodigalson We'll polish the game after the jam as ended. At some point of the making of RAMbot, we wondered about that mecanic, which we thought would go against the core gameplay. However, the game sure does lack an undo button. And we had planned onto adding a lot of other features, but you know... first jam, no time !
@zuhairghias I agree but only partially, because we could find some ways to better introduce the key mecanics. Still without a written tutorial, but maybe by building levels differently. Sure, it has to be challenging, and it will remain challenging throughout future iterations, but it should be challenging because of the mecanics and the puzzles you solve, not because you don't understand how the game works. Thanks though ;)
The idea of cloning object according to their size in memory ! A direct reference to stack overflowing ! Simple puzzles only with one action, sizes, colors and switches. Wow !
It's unsettling the first two level but damn it's good !
Graphics are ok, audios are a blast, puzzles are amazing.
Thanks for the jam entry and really good work here !
TLDR : I loved it. Did I say it before? Once more : Loved it.
On second thoughts, movements on a grid would have suited the game better, so much so slownes wouldn't have been such a problem.
The "corrupt" ram mechanic is a little punishing, and I feel like if the mechanics of this game were structured a little differently, it could be a real good puzzler!
But as it stands, it has some great groundwork for a cool puzzle game! Keep it up!
The movement could be a little smoother; e.g., the collision box for the robot could be a smaller capsule to better navigate through doors.
The graphics are nice, music as well and the levels are interesting and fun to solve. Good job!
Pretty difficult as well, or I'm just bad ^^
It's anyway a good game, great job !!! :)
Level 2 was hard but after that I got already the idea.
Congrats!
@adrisj7 The corruption mechanic (yep, I just figured out it was spelled with a "h") has a double purpose : it serves as a way to be careful with the weight of the items stored, but you can also pass through glitched item and unlock paths. As such, one should juggle between corrupting items or having to keep them unglitched in order to solve the puzzle.
I think an "undo last move" button may help making it less punishing though.
@pavel-smejkal Collisions are an issue I didn't really had the time to address. Do you think I am allowed to change them for the ludum dare build, or should I do a post-jam version ?
If you don't bother take a look at our game when we focused on Graphics and visuals and see the results that we got:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/spacelab-42
also i like the soundtrack
This game is super hard but I really enjoyed it and played all the way to the end!
Check out the VOD on my channel if you want to me playing and rating your game! Thanks for submitting this to my queue, it might've been hard (and pissed me off at times) but I really enjoyed it!!