Active Cell by Jonas Michael

Deceptively simple. Infinitely complex.
Our teams' entry into this round of Ludum Dare's game jam is called Active Cell, a sci-fi-inspired puzzle game. The players goal is to solve increasingly complex levels by commanding a specific amount of moves, which are looped by the game. The game has a steep learning curve and later levels might require some trial and error to solve due to the number of iterations that would have to be computed by the player. However, the maximum amount of moves that need to be selected in a single level is seven, keeping the game accessible to the player.

Featuring 16 challenging levels with self-made graphics and sound, unique music on each level and a drive-by tutorial leading players through the game, we have poured all our creativity and most of our time into this project and are very proud and pleased of the outcome.
Thank you for playing!
@der-finski (Coding)
@jonas-michael (Coding and UI)
@hanna-knop (Art and Animations)
@odyze (Coding and UI)
@c42 (Level Design, Music and Sound)
@MelonFace (QA and Sound)
Stuck? You can find some tips for hard levels on the user page of @c42
| Youtube | https://ukuleleontrumpet.itch.io/active-cell |
| Youtube | https://ukuleleontrumpet.itch.io/active-cell |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/active-cell |
Ratings
| Overall | 174th | 4.019⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 252th | 3.84⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 274th | 3.821⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 186th | 4.17⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 515th | 3.877⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 410th | 3.63⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 558th | 3.62⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 84🗳️ | 94🗨️ |
Very fun, with a nice difficulty curve as you go through levels. The music and sound design is also beautiful in its own right.
The music is nice and fits the game perfectly, the visuals are great but the UI is just on another level. I don't think I have seen another Ludum Dare game with a UI that's as nice and clean as this one. I especially like the Tutorial arrows to the special nodes.
Great job!
And I finally managed to beat the game (thanks to the hints) :D

Amazing job!
The game is great !
The upside is that designing the levels is a pretty fast process, the downside being that it requires extensive playtesting to figure out which levels are actually hard (because of few other solutions or the solution being unintuitive). This is why I released hints for certain levels which we considered harder than the others. You have my twitter, feel free to message me if you have any more questions :-)
If you have other issues, can you give us a detailed description? We will then soon work on it!
We are happy that you enjoyed the game still :smile:
I think level 4 was my favourite though:
