after several tries this was my best. It starts getting super hard! I like the music and little blips its super cute. I think it would be good to have some difficulty options so you can start fast and ramp up slower vs real slow and then INSANE SPEED haha.


@peterfiftyfour One of my goals was to provide kind of an arcade experience in terms of difficulty. I originally was going for a Tapper clone, but ended up with something pretty different. It definitely gets to inhuman levels of difficulty quite quickly though.

He he. Another game about servers, like mine :) But you process every bit by hands, what requires a fast reaction.
48 is my best for now, but I want to try more. I like this game.

I love pico8 Games!

@neithernathan It's actually not made in PICO-8. It's made in TIC-80, another fantasy console.

@drevilbrain Oooohh nice, didn't know there was another :O

This game is super fun!! I loved the increasing difficulty! At one time, my eyes were fixed on the screen! You made the assets inside TIC-80? :thinking:
Greato Jobu! :smile:

A very clean experience. I kept getting wrecked by the wrap-around (kept running into the danger symbols). Never got past 50 :( Great compo entry!

I really like the art style that comes with the TIC-80, a very retro looking game!

Game was good fun, difficult as well. The music was kind of annoying but definitely fit the scenario.

Overall: Fun!

Fun: Good! One of those games where I find myself thinking "Well, I think I've seen everything but I might just have _one_ more turn before I write my review". Many turns later, I managed to crack 100 packets. It's simple gameplay but the random element and the ease of starting again keeps the player coming back.

Innovation: Yes. I guess it conjures up memories of old arcade games, but definitely not a copy. (After writing this I see that you mentioned Tapper in a comment - that's exactly what I was thinking of.)

Theme: Yes

Graphics: Simple but they do the job and are nice and consistent.

Audio: I find the audio kind of grating. I think it's a TIC-80 thing.

Humor: Pretty funny concept, and yes I realise that the game name is an actual networking term, nerd :).

I think this is the most original game I've seem in this edition of the jam so far. Fits the theme so well and I don't even know where to start to describe about the concept - just that it is impressive.

Good work, interesting challenge to make an old school game in TIC80. The game is simple and good in the spirit of arcade game of 80 years the "golden arcade age". Very well executed, and the sound for a TIC-80 game is good! You captured the Ludum Dare Spirit in your entry, good job!

AAaaaa loved it! Simple and very cute! My score was 152 :)

Great concept!

I liked that the amount of packege dropped is a percentage of the packets received... It's not a problem losing some packages :wink:

I had some difficult to get use to moving from the first to the last line, but then I got the rithm!

Nice concept! Congrats!

Poor little servers, I never knew how hard you had to work! I'll stop using the internet from now on.

Really charming idea, cute music and minimalistic style. I liked the difficulty curve, at first i was like "oh, thats... easy" but when it came to around 120 packets it got so intense a was staring at the screen and pusing buttons like a madman. Sadly, i actually have no idea how to make this better aside from adding way bigger things or putting this into a wario ware-like collection of games.

Very simple and very addictive! The games speeds up in a really nice way which makes it balanced, but also a challenge. Overall it's a fun game and I also love the minimalistic visuals.

Speeding up over time and being capable of cycling through the top/bottom are features you included that made this game really good! Should you add some sort of progression and you could turn it into a cool mobile game, honestly.

Love the old style music and that it continues after receiving bits.

Reminded me the DOS games I played in my childhood.

Very polished game.

The only thing it was hard to figure out the moment to jump, sometimes it looks like I will not hit the malware but I was. I would say controls are too responsive.

That's a great concept man specially not restricting player going from top - bottom / bottom - top instantly gives it nice edge :thumbsup:

Unfortunately, the HTML5 didn't work for me. I couldn't download it for windows too.

reminds me game and watch

@slimbun, you can run it through browser here: https://tic.computer/play?cart=1182

or you can download cartridge (in page from link just above game) and run it through tic-80 itself: https://github.com/nesbox/tic.computer/releases/download/v0.70.6/tic80_0.70.6.zip

also tic-80 has other architectures builds: android, for example.

When I saw the title, I was hoping for a network setting, and the game delivered :grin: Probably the most interesting interpretation of the theme I've seen so far. Difficulty curve is good, I feel like some love was put into it. I'm not a fan of the graphic style, but I guess it's a limitation of the TIC-80, which by the way, I have no idea what goes into making a game for TIC-80, but mad props for that. Music is top notch and very fitting for the game.
Good job! :slight_smile:

really nice! Here's my high score :D
I didn't get the theme implementation, but I always appreciate a fun game ;)

OOooooo!! A TIC-80 game! A network themed one too. I gave it a shot. Not bad! Polished for one, too as a TIC-80 game. Definitely addicting, I might add but I have my restraints to go for that long.

Here's a few critical things for it:
* This is one of the games that you shouldn't have hold to move. This has lead to frustrating movement where you go to one lane and accidentally hit malware through simply holding.
* Being not bound and looping back up or down is a good thing though! I really like it~
* You conveyed information wrong here for "Packets Dropped". I know the 2nd number there is the malware you've avoided. But, to any other person without getting any context this means that I've dropped "0 out of 50".
* It conveys that "oh hey I can avoid more than 5 packets now, neat!"
* Other than for bragging rights, that 2nd number doesn't have to be there at all. It's better to show a "0 out of 5" than the number of malware packets you've avoided, this is to make sure that it says you can only drop 5 packets.
* I could say it's a TIC-80 thing but that high-pitch repeating part of the music diminishes the experience. It's the part that some people find grating. Could've been a more subtle thing but it's pretty much blaring despite even as a cover.

Other than that, all of the other parts of the game is well made and considered and difficulty scales proper. I got to 96 and I think it's a good enough length to give proper feedback. Great work~ You did well!

Nice little game!

@fiakaiera Thanks for the extensive feedback.

* I wanted holding to move because its far less straining to move quickly by holding. This was partially inspired by the Delayed Auto Shift and Auto Repeat Rate mechanics in Tetris (https://harddrop.com/wiki/DAS). This allows you to quickly and precisely move a certain amount of lanes/columns over in a consistent manner. In retrospect, I wish I spent the time on adding configurable DAS and ARR instead of polishing other things that weren't all too important. I configured the DAS and ARR settings to be comfortable for me, but it's not going to be comfortable for everyone, allowing you to overshoot or undershoot depending on what you prefer.
* I'm not really sure why I never mentioned the packets dropped counter in the tutorial. To be honest, I only put the malware there because I thought it would be easy enough to figure it out after a run or two, and it's another way to calculate some kind of score since I don't really have a score in this game. The UI was supposed to be like a firewall log file that just shows your stats for post-game rather than a UI you would actually look at in-game.
* A lot of TIC-80 games have it far worse in that department. I think a lot of it comes down to how you create SFX samples in it for use in the tracker. It probably also sounds a bit blaring because it's a really high pitched chord across 4 channels, but I found that removing the highest pitched channels made it sound too unlike CANYON.MID.

I agree with the points @fiakaiera made. DAS/ARR is familiar to me but if it is there, I would like it to be configurable :D

For the first two games I didn't realise I could move sideways, it seemed clear to me that I am bound to the rails. Looking at the LD page now (I got to the game via itch), I see there is a gif of the game with the player in the middle of the rail, so I guess it's my bad. But, the left/right movement is not very useful when the game speeds up, since I can't catch up to packets! The left/right movement speed should scale with the game speed.

@aurel300 The difficulty scaling was intentionally made to make it so packets would move faster than you at a certain point. I wanted difficulty to ramp up to literally impossible levels of packet speed and throughput to make games last at most 90 to 120 seconds at the absolute most. At the slower speeds it's a lot easier to move horizontally in reaction to oncoming packets. In fact, it's optimal to do so. However, later on I wanted people to end up having to position themselves far in advance to optimize the time they have to react to an immediately coming packet and any future ones.