It's cool. Confusing, but cool. Unfortunately the game itself is a bit tedious but I like what you can do in it.

Stacking boxes is really cool, there are a lot of ways you could use this to make good use of the space available.

Maybe if there was a way to stack into certain combos, there would be more depth to the gameplay.

Thank you, @meatpudding! Yeah, it was pretty late for playtesting when I was finishing, and honestly speaking, I didn't manage to play it to the end. =)

It is a bit of polish, but the idea looks nice. I am still missing the goal though. Hope there could be a tutorial (which might be impossible within 48h).

@guardhei, it's possible to make a tutorial when you know where you're going. =) According to the first design draft the goal was to score maximum points in a fixed time, but then it was changed to "don't get buried in crates". Thank you for playing!

Hey there,

I think the idea could be greatly improved with some humor. It will destroy the reasoning sense ("why am I doing this?") and make the work of the robot more relatable.

I also agree that the control is hard to get used to. Have you considered a more traditional approach? (face box and press Z to pick up, press Z again to put down). If you dont' have the arts to visualize "facing", you can use an overlay box (similar to harvest moon-types tool hit overlay)

@avavt, thank you!

Yeah, we have spent too much time on a physics-driven version of the game dealing with collisions and all the other stuff that are difficult to maintain. So we suddenly ran out of time for thinking about the mood.

As for controls, I guess, I should stop using vim all the time. =) We thought about facing stuff, but didn't reach the overlay box idea. Thanks for a suggestion, it's really helpful.

This is a fun game, but stressful ! "So... Ok, A0 goes... OH SHIT, two more boxes !" :)

Physics is always longer to develop than it looks, but so rewarding... Good Job !

@deformhead, pro tip: there is a pause button. =) But yeah, it can be considered cheating.

Maybe, if you're actually developing physics. We just tried to make a built in thing work, that was a mistake.

Thank you for playing!

I did almost exactly the same game for LD 37 (one room), just to give up and start over :)


I needed a minute to adapt to the controls, but after that I could control the robot without any problem, and was mashing the keyboard to organise shelves etc. I also needed a minute to understand what I had to do, even if it was quite obvious ^^' But I really had fun once I understood everything! It didn't feel tedious "like work" for me because it was fun to try and memorize where I put every box, so when the marker pops I knew where to go (not everytime). At the end I had everything well organized but one box never showed up...


Final Score 155

So I had to wait and it never came. It killed the flow for me. Maybe a simple trick would have been to only request crates that are on map, or least will arrive soon.

Other than that, it's really well made and FUN! Audio would be awesome for next time. Maybe next time we could team up for audio?

Oh, it's always sucks to be a robot!

Cool to see one of few entries made on it's own game engine.

The game itself is not very immersive, if you wish, but clearly conveys the spirit of robotic, repetitive labor.

@boltkey, there are almost no unique ideas in this world. =)

@spacemonkey, yay, I knew there are some people who enjoy this kind of games! Thank you, it's impossible to overestimate my appreciation now! =D I'm so sorry about the bug you ran into, I'll find and fix it ASAP. As for music, it sounds like a plan! =) If I won't decide to go compo for the next time.

@alex-lutay, well, to be honest, this game uses Phaser. So if by a "game engine" you mean a library that makes game development easier (this particular one does not =( ), then no, it's not my own. But it definitely not a Unity-like monster. =)

It was confusing at the beginning but is good to see is not related to a room getting smaller or something related to the outer space. Nice to see fresh ideas!

@rido, well, I don't think it's a bad thing to see many games sharing the same idea because they all have their unique approaches and you actually can compare games to each other. However, it may be boring _to develop_ one that uses an obvious idea. Anyway, thank you for playing! =)

I found myself coming up with new organization schemes, great use of color, number, and letter to let the user design their own way of remembering what boxes they put where. I think if I spent more time playing this game, I could do well like @spacemonkey :) Great work!

@mgoadric, you see, we're pretty lazy, so we let player design their own schemes, levels and even problems. =D

Jokes apart, thank you for a comment. I'm glad to read this kind of things. =)

This was a fun game that used the theme perfectly. The first one I played was getting the hang of the controls and what to do, managed to get 30 points. The second one I played I decided to start trying to organize/sort them while waiting for the right boxes to come up. I ended up getting buried before ever seeing the correct boxes, so that was a 0 that run :joy: Good entry, I could see this being a fun little time passer/puzzle game if you continued

@frozenfire92, thank you, glad to see you're having fun. =) I'm definitely going to create a post-jam version of this thing.

During this jam I've rated few of this kind of warehouse management games, but I like this the best. The tempo is just right(for me at least), the variety of different boxes is great.

I'm a sucker for arranging stuff, so this game is triggering my OCD in a good way. "Hmm... Green boxes that are waiting for correct order number to pop up, are arranged top in alphabetic order.." "Pink boxes similar shall go in the middle in similar fashion and blue ones go bottom". Nice!

Graphics are functional and clear. I wish there would be sound effects. I leave humor unrated, as there are none. Overall nice entry that fits the theme well.

@keppu, thank you, I like to read it! Yeah, I should probably opt-out of Humor category because the game isn't meant to be funny.

The gameplay is pretty fun however as you said, it could use more play testing to make the gameplay more challenging and engaging. The idea is pretty good and managing boxes in the warehouse is a great fit for the theme. Making sure that you have easy access to the boxes as the area is getting more and more filled is a fun thing to do. Graphics are simple but easy to read and clean. In overall it is a pretty solid game!

@yngvarr I think being able to opt-out of humor category is good implementation on LD part. This way everyone isn't forced to make humorous games.

@zeriver, well, not being able to draw properly (seriously, look at this crap of a robot!) I tried to let things be simple. =) Thanks for playing!

@keppu, it's a shame I can't do it during play&rate. =( Or is it just a site's glitch? Hmm...

Oh, my bad, I actually can! And there actually is an another glitch on the site, now it doesn't count my ratings right. -_- I guess, I will change it back.

@yngvarr Sometimes there is a bug where the info doesn't always update after saving. It can be quite annoying at times. :slight_smile:

Hey man! Glad to see that you participated this time also!
I really like the game mechanic, I think it'd be nice to have a button to force add a new crate. Sometimes crates that appeared didn't couldn't be used.

But you can be entertained by unstacking and seeing what's down there.

Congrats on the entry!

Nice work, a fun organizational game with a great take on the theme!

Hey, nice game.
I would suggest you to add the id of the crates on their side (they are small thought...), so you can find them more easily later in your play.

If I have to vary the game-play:
You currently have tree basic attributes to your crate:
- a color
- an id that starts with a letter
- an id that ends with a number

You could create plenty of separate rules and combine them together to end up with (for example) unloading zone that'll accept:
- a purple crate
- a green crate with a specific letter
- a blue crate with any letter but a number over 4
- a crate with a letter "A" and a number factor of 3
- a crate not blue and with a letter before "E"
- go crazy ;)

This should solve the problem of searching for a specific crate in the warehouse.

Anyway, I enjoyed your game, good job on you entry.

It may be open-game-art, but it still looks coherent, despite being from different artists. That's a skill as well!

Like the other players, I found the input a bit awkward.
Maybe you could have the robot hang overneath, on rails, so that only one action would have to be possible on each square,
but then you loose the 'move around stacks of boxes that are in the way' part of the game.
(What doesn't help is that you have to find out by experimentation that the max. stack height is 3 boxes.)
But for me, too, if you got the hang of it, it becomes doable.

Also, possible bug; it seems that each out-box beneath (south?) of the one you deliver a parcel to also gets a new request.
Meaning, if I put one in the top-left corner, all out-boxes will get updated, but if I put one in the bottom-left corner, only that one will update.

Since my short term memory is pretty garbage, I couldn't reach anything resembling a 'second wave'.
But maybe I was close? I have no idea!
I'd have liked to have some sort of progress-bar, timer, or even just a score.

For sound-effects, there is [a very useful site](https://www.bfxr.net/) (you need Flash... yeah I know) that can generate SFX on the fly.
When I was in a hurry a few LD's ago, I generated some and put them in my game within half an hour or so.
Takes very little effort, and spices up your game immensely.

For something more positive, I think the introduction-text is funny and well-written.

Hey, @rombus! Yeah, Ludum Dare was quick to become an essential part of my life! =) Thank you for feedback!

@redhermit, glad you found it fun, thank you!

@eptwalabha, I had an idea to make a little part of a label visible for a player, so he always could observe a color of the crate. But I didn't manage to implement it due to code complexity and lack of time. As for your gameplay enhancement, it is great, but if parcel delivery worked like this, it would be a disaster! =) Still, I can implement it as a separate game mode, I think it would be a great fun. Thank you for feedback!

@remco, what you have found is not quite a bug but a piece of inaccurate design, that I didn't manage to improve in time. I will be happy to explain it in details if you want. As for waves, if you didn't quit before the game was over, tell me your score and I will take the exact wave you reached. =) I know this is what UI is meant for, I'll do my best to make it clear in a post-jam version.
I'm so happy to read someone actually reads my introductions and even find it funny. :') Thank you for a great feedback!

I can't believe how bad I was doing when looking at @spacemonkey’s screenshot ;) If anyone wants to see me curse and fail, I got you covered:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yDyS27Iams

I like the idea, but stopped at 130 points, not because I got surrounded by crates, but because the prospect of looking through all of my piles to see if I had already received the packages which were being requested was too daunting. With my lack of organization, I guess I am my own worst enemy!

I then saw @spacemonkey 's screenshot and was inspired to come up with a better filing system: pink 0 through 9, green 0 through 9, then blue 0 through 9. That didn't work out either, this time I gave up at 110 points once it was clear that the boxes were piling up faster than I could sort them into my filing system, that the three target boxes were probably buried deep under the incoming boxes, and that I would never get to them.

So... I tried again. This time my strategy was to never stack any boxes, so that I could easily see if I had received the target boxes already. That worked better, as I only gave up at 190 points this time. Once again, the boxes were coming in faster than I could file them, so I switched to maxing out all my piles in the hope of getting through the incoming boxes... but I quickly gave up once I saw that three boxes were appearing by the time I had placed one.

So I'd say that the real enemy in this game is not running out of space... it's the rate at which the boxes appear. It did not feel like it was my fault for not being fast enough, it felt like the rate of incoming boxes was way higher than it would be humanly (or should I say-- robotly?) possible to handle them. Under such circumstances, I think it would have been better to pick a win condition after a humanly-possible number of waves than to offer a high score to whoever is the most super-human. I've never been a fan of score-based games though, so maybe that's just me.

You're absolutely right, @gelisam, this game is so not designed to be human-friendly. Not because it is about robot, but because "aagh, we need a game over condition a half an hour ago!!1!" This time I didn't manage to balance the game properly, my bad. Will do it better next time. =) Thank you for a detailed feedback!

@yngvarr So much passion in your comments haha, you must have done something right here :D I don't know how I became the point of reference in the player base but I'm glad I inspired others to make higher scores.

@gelisam I think you are very right in your analysis. The best strategy seems to spread those crates as much as possible so you can see all of them, while still being able to move in between and pick the one you need. But in the end you always need that one crate that just popped at the bottom of the spawner pile and you're just stuck and helpless.

The source code is available so if somebody wants to fix it... I would probably just give the player 3 "jokers" that reset the requested crates. Almost no programming needed, and almost no art (just a "reset" icon). I know I would play again to test it and beat my score.

@philstrahl Really funny that you played this game too! I'm watching part 2 of Phil Plays Ludum Dare tonight and encourage everyone to check it out : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLytdAQ0Ig4

@spacemonkey, he-he, I just love talking even when nobody is listening. =) As for source code, I doubt it's worth digging, it's so jam-quality (say, "bloody mess" describes it better than "source code"), it's full of hacks, strange design decisions and various unrelated artifacts. The very best thing one can do with the source is to exercise foreign code navigation and try to find the core model behind this mess.

Actually, it gives me an idea of creating a post explaining the very mechanics, analyzing the mistakes and possibly finding solutions. It could be an interesting research that will be done anyway for a post-jam version. =)

Neat game! I included it in my compilation video series of the Ludum Dare 42 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/VePoszPJyYA