Man, I like those games where you just stare in disbelief as your "perfect" plan crumbles before your eyes. Sadly no audio :confused:

Great work! Would be nice to have some thinking music!

This is a good idea well implemented. The mechanic is solid and the presentation, while simple, is actually really easy on the eye. One criticism I have is that it's a bit tricky to tell in what direction each taxi is facing. A couple of times I've written my perfect "script" and pressed "Play", only to realise that the taxi, I thought would go up, actually went down and crashed into another taxi.

Also the choice of instructions syntax is interesting. I think that one could find a more conveniently placed triplet of characters than "<", ">" and "^" (such as "W", "A", "D", for example), but on the other hand, typing in something like ">>^<>^" does feel more "programmer-ey".

Overall I really enjoyed this game and will probably come back to play more.

Multithreading programming as a game is a really nice idea. The same chaos you face in the real thing...

@grey @skipyC Indeed, a definitive will-have if i do continue to work on it afterwards!

@TerraPass Ah yes, the problem of directions is something even I had problems with during development (and others have mentioned the same) so should I continue dev, it will definitely be addressed by making it enoxably clear which direction the taxi is *actually* pointing at any given time (arrows, maybe even?)

(the syntax was originally not intended to exist, but it was supposed to be based around drag and drop and images of the instructions you could rearrange, but alas.. time)

Thanks for your feedback! :D

This is brilliant. I wanted to play many games, now i am hooked.

Great work.

A few little things: The green numbers are a little hard to distinguish, they could use a little more contrast.
And the zoom is a little off, it is very hard to control. Maybe add some WASD to move the view as well.

Awosome game! I really like programing games and have never seen a game, where you program taxis :) The graphcs look good and the game is fun to play. Only thing I didn't like is the forward comand, because I need to type it twice to appear in the textbox and therefore have to delete one of them most of the time.
All in all great work!

Very interesting concept!

Just one sugestion: make it clear where the front of the car is.
In a certain way, it is similar to my game (I had to plan trafic and turns to make my game)

Great job!

@eric-florio similar to your game? huh.. hm (*runs off to try your game*)

Indeed, that does need to be sorted somehow cause even I was having problems distinguishing at times ^^

Thanks!

Really sad there were only five levels! After figuring out the way it works, I was really enjoying the challenge. What everyone else has said about the front of the car is kinda an issue, but I just 'played' the level once to check, it wasn't a big deal.

I like me a nice little puzzle programmer game, shame about the length though. With these games it's really the more the merrier.

I really enjoyed playing this and would have loved more levels. Very satisfying making cards delay by circling around a loop multiple times.

@nardandas @Drury @nanolotl I definitely think I will have a go at making at least enough levels to fill up the 12 boxes that are there (the original goal was 24), but I will shoot for at least 12 as soon as LD40 is over :)

Glad to hear more would be nice :D

The system is interesting & unusual but the scenario is mundane, the graphics utilitarian. Still, good job.

It was a little difficult to understand the instructions but yeah the more cars I had, the more brain gymnastics it was. Thank you for this game, it was fun!

Adorkable taxis, and the game.

I love puzzle games like this! Well done, hopefully you continue this and we get to play an updated version with more levels! This was great!

Great idea! something I'd love to work through when I have a 2 hour train journey and no internet haha! Challenging, and elements of logical instructions like the old win-logo. Lots to keep in mind while playing, good work.

Nice game dude, I like puzzle game, thats a good level design, good job !

Good and fun game, I very much like the idea. The direction of cars is a bit confusing, as other have said. One thing you should know: on a Swedish keyboard (and some other designs) the "^" symbol is a [dead key](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key) and the "<" and ">" are the same key, so it's not very convenient to type out the programs. There should probably at least be some options for that. See [this for reference](https://forums.crackberry.com/attachments/blackberry-keyone-f445/419377d1489488747t-keyone-swedish-keyboard-layout-2000px-kb_sweden.svg.jpg).

@Shimmen ironically, I'm on a Swedish keyboard too (well.. I'm Swedish) but I will definitely overhaul the instruction input method in the post-jam phase, running it by people in the process (the instructions were picked out of hmm.. eccentricity? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck to be precise) it just felt right, even if they're hard to type even for me!)

It would actually be interesting to have some sort of international chart over what keys might be problematic in what countries.. but remapping is definitely optimal, if keyboard input has to be the way.

Thanks! :D

@Krassenstein @honest-dan absolutely, work on a level editor is underway so will be making more levels for the post-jam times :)

There are only 2 complaints I have: 1. it's hard to tell in which direction taxi is going to go 2. Using <^> sybmols wasn't that convinient. Well, and of course there could be more content, but it's Ludum Dare, so it's obvious you just didn't have time.

Other than that it's a great game, one of the best I've played this LD actually! If you are planning to make a full game out of it I think you should add more variety though, I liked level design (last one seemed so simple at first but it actually required some thinking) but there isn't that much you can do with just junctions and turns.

@Lamossus Indeed, the variation thing is something I also plan to address and have thought about, something that I've been thinking about is the introduction of environmental elements, vehicles such as trams that would move across the map in certain patterns or single cars that are by themselves just crossing the level :)...

Not to mention, as you can see in the UI, you have an interface element showing how many taxis are still alive, so the introduction of levels where you can not have all your taxis survive but must reach a certain % at the minimum is another thing. We'll see in time!

Thanks for playing and the feedback!(the direction thing is clearly a problem, so when I do put out a post-jam build, hopefully it'll be clearer already!) :D

I like the idea, it's a really nice puzzle game.

I didn't play a lot of levels yet, because a bug in the web version forces me to reload the page after every time I tried to move the map around - after moving the map, I can't click anywhere else (it doesn't react to clicks anywhere outside the map), so I can't input any instructions and have to reload the page.

Does anyone else have this problem, too?

@flauschzelle Indeed this is a known problem of the current web build, I absolutely recommend trying the desktop build as it has doesn't have that problem at all :) .. however if you do insist on trying to move on with the web build, you can exit to the level select screen with Escape (and then use arrow keys + enter to navigate the popup that shows up) which can get you out of that situation sometimes :)

This is great, really like the game idea. Will try to finish all levels later. One issue I have is that it's hard to see which side of the car is front, also the numbers a bit hard to read (sometimes hidden). But that's just details, the game works well and the levels I played so far were well designed. Really good job.

Maybe there could be another way of inputing the instructions, but I got used to it.

This game is really interesting. It reminded me of a similar programming game we played at school, where you had to program a little robot. I'm pretty sure this game could also be used as a learning tool for kids. The only problem was the controls. Since I'm also using a different keyboard I had a bit of trouble typing out these characters too. Other than that it's a cool little game! Good job.

I like the game. Fun to play with nice puzzles. Only real problem I have is that it's quite hard to see which is the front of the car.

Enjoyed the 5 levels, was disappointed there are no more. Fullscreen support and a couple of sounds here and there would be great as well!

Awesome game! Really well made, love the concept and the UI is great. Can't see any flaw in this, only the fact that there are only 5 levels :p Also the starting direction of the cars, but that you already know.

Amazing job overall!

Neat idea and solving the 'puzzles' is kind of fun, but there are number of obvious issues.

One very noticeable one is the lack of background music, feedback noises (like passed an intersection with no further instruction -- it's sort of noticeable with the step marker...), or and sound effect for car crashes.

Another is that you have to zoom in a fair bit to see what direction the car is going (need to see yellow and red dots). It would be simple to add an arrow to the car art so we can see which way that car is going.

Also, the little dashed squares (destinations) sometimes confuse me as to the car number when I am glancing back and forth because they are sometimes right around the car and very close to the little black squares. White and green dashes/text are a little hard to see as well since they blend in with the road edges/markings or the grass respectively (insufficient contrast).

P.S.
There's also some UI weirdness regarding tabs and backspaces and if you hit escape you can't click on the buttons. The UI pulldown for copy, paste, select, etc is more a PITA than it's worth. Regular keyboard shortcuts work fine. You can't click play while the stupid pulldown is visible and closing it is non-intuitive. Sometimes when you press backspace to delete a step it instead pulls the selection back to the car number every time which makes it hard to delete multiple steps.

Using W,A,S,D or UP,LEFT,RIGHT,DOWN with some simply square images w/arrows to show in the box would be much more intuitive and less irritating to type out. Even S(traight),L(eft),R(right) would be preferable.

P.P.S.
It would be nice if it kept your solutions while you go on to further steps in case you want to go back and refine them. Tangential to that some scoring would be nice, perhaps for number steps AND timing.

@jnharton Haha wow, thanks for the exhaustive feedback, it would be great if everyone put as much of their experience into words as you did here!

Indeed the issue of destinations is something that has been thought about as well (and was clearly an issue even during development but decided to delay adressing it to postjam as the deadline quickly rampaged closer)!

I'd definitely be interested in what you mentioned of the UI weirdness (also it should be noted, I completely didn't even realise there was the UI pulldown for copy/paste/select! ... but apparently Godot supplies that too for the text editing fields, nice catch) (.. also, you played the desktop version, I assume?)

I'm definitely going to aim for a logographic approach to the instructions + some kind of drag/drop approach + keyboard shortcuts for creating them.

Saving solutions (and scoreboards for both number of steps and timing) is also in the plans!

Thanks! (oh and contact me on whatever medium you desire if you have the time and energy later and i'll look into the UI stuff specifically :D)

I love these types of games, really cool to see this sort of programming puzzle game in a LD. Three simple rules can create complex behaviour. I would love to see an AI try to solve this puzzle for many more taxis. How many taxis could the AI handle?

It was a lot of fun coming up with and optimizing solutions and the levels had a nice difficulty progression.

The ^, < and > keys made sense in a way but they are not as friendly to type as A, S and D or Q, W and E for example. I would have mapped the ASD or QWE keys to <>^ for easier typing. It would have made for a better user experience.

Destinations could also have been visually presented by using colours. So different taxis would have had different colours and the same colour for the destination.

Overall, super fun game and awesome job!

That was preeeetty interesting! A simple idea, but it makes for a surprisingly complex puzzle game where you have to map out where the cars would go and if they'd run into each other! The front and back of a taxi COULD be clearer, but I suppose you can learn by trial and error.... I see a couple of people complaining about having to type out the directions in a weird way, but personally I wasn't too bothered by it. I always have respect for puzzle designers, so well done!

Thanks for submitting your game to the TVGS stream! I enjoyed playing it very much!

Just an idea -- this could be a good game for programming/algorithms introduction. Especially if you expand it with something like 'loops', 'conditions' and 'traffic lights'. [Google had one recently](https://www.google.com/doodles/celebrating-50-years-of-kids-coding), but it's more 'visual'.

I'd prefer 'L', 'R', 'F' keys as well, so no need to hold shift.

Here is my playthrough, first three levels:

https://youtu.be/OcEATBX6nNY

<>^<<<<><! :smile:

Cool, it reminds me of the google coding one. Very lovely!

Very well made game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 40 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWC1pkAxfVs