Gene Cycle

Great game! The only trouble I had was figuring out where the sequences are cut and rejoined.

Yep. I think you should show how to do stuff at the begining of the game, step by step.
I did not like the music.

i love this concept! the music and gameplay is relaxing although the interface gets muddled pretty quickly.

This is a unique idea and I'd love to try it if you port it to mac or web!

I like that the nucleotide chains make some effort to untangle in a natural-looking way, even if it doesn't always work perfectly. I think the music is pretty decent and you have provided a mute button if people don't enjoy it which is nice.

I kind of expected to start with that I had to make a loop with the four listed nucleotides rather than just have them be read once in that order, but the way you have set it up is also good. I definitely enjoyed playing this. Well done :)

It's a fun concept, but could use something built on top of it. Otherwise it just becomes a little tired. I like the vibe though.

If you got the little blobs to untangle themselves better this would be really fun. As is it quickly becomes impossible to see what's going on. The look and atmosphere were on-point though.

I love puzzle games and I really liked the idea.

@snowinn Thanks I intend to port to web soon.

@aquanim Thanks a lot, the "Natural" untangling was a pain to figure out, and even as it is now, is kind of an approximation. Though I think it works alright except for pairs. You can always use right click for manual moving of nucleotides.

@sean-holloway I'll admit, its rather simple. But I think, it gets more stimulating when actively trying to high score. You can really start to have, to play rapidly when you know which sequence comes next, pulling streaks and "saving" steps. Open to suggestions though.

@tree3 You can manually move and untangle blobs with right click & drag. I added that specifically because yeah, sometimes stuff just overlaps.

Thanks All!

@joh I hope my original comment didn't sound harsh, I suppose I just meant that this could be built out into a larger secondary loop, outside of the context of a 72 hour jam

Neat idea! Took me a while to figure out that the order of pecking mattered! lol Swapping the nucleotides to match the order was a bit more iffy though but that's probably down to me rather than anything wrong with the mechanism. I think there is potential for a fun mobile game here if you can polish it up a bit and tweak the feedback loop to have some more puzzle elements. Good luck!

I liked the concept, but it took me a while to figure out what exactly I had to do! Maybe posting a tutorial video would be helpful!

Science rocks

:sob: after many attempts, I got 2 points :sweat_smile: nice game, but a bit hard to understand. Good job! :)

Simplistic, but vibey!

Kinda difficult for me, but still really good

Pretty innovative take on the theme! I managed to get to 5 points after a bit of learning curve!
I wish the circle moved a tad slower, and the max points being hard-capped by the number of moves that the circle gets is kinda off putting because you'll never get a score more than the max allowed. Despite this, it was a lot of messy fun!

Idea is indeed unique, game looks nice, has clear rules. But when it comes to gameplay physics based movement of the nucleotides makes it difficult to understand what is actually happening.

Nice game! The loop editing mechanics take a bit to get used to but still a very unique idea. The bounciness of the genes feels nice, well done.

@sean-holloway Not at all, I took it as feedback, appreciated and noted. I was genuinely asking if you had ideas of secondary loops because I was curious.

@reallyqbert Thanks! The challenge of grasping the core rule is a comment that has come up a lot. Its unfortunate, I really thought it was straight forward, but I guess that was Dev Bias. I'll see what I can do.

@nsadie Yep get that a lot, sorry. I took your suggestion to heart and make a (long) gif explaining the game, but then It wouldn't fit in the game. (browser version) Maybe i'll post it out of the game instead. Thank you!

@everedx Indeed :smirk:

@guimoliveira No need to feel bummed, it is challenging and on top of that, its true that it isnt easy to understand. For what its worth the gameplay gif shows exactly how to reach a score of 3, if you want to try to take it up from there! :laughing:

@michaelaranda @ellladee Thank you

@pranjalbisht Pretty good! Funny I increased the circle speed because otherwise it felt too slow & unexciting. With 99 steps, it in a way sets a hard Game time and I didn't want it to be too long.
And yes, the score is capped, but I doubt anyone would ever get the ceiling. There is no perfect solution, and even fully understanding my game, my score of 8 (Which is NOT the ceiling at all, I just mess up a lot) shows that there's a lot of room for score improvement and optimization.

@szkocka @shadowhaxz0r Thank you and yes the physics was a bit wonky, its actually all fake & hand made though. I'm proud of the untangling and nice wobblyness, but I understand Its not perfect, and the independant loops overlapping is a challenge I unfortunately did not have time to tackle.

Thanks everyone!

Nice game, I always like when puzzle games take inspiration from molecular biology, it seems like such a nice fit. I only got 4 on my first try, but I made a big mess of the chain of nucleotides and it wasn't clear what the order was until it disentagled itself, which I'm surprised worked as well as it did. Overall it looks nice, was fun to play, and the music was pretty relaxing.

Nice concept ! I really like that you have done a tutorial in few time. Good job !


**This game went from being confusing to being my favourite entry of the jam yet.** For some reason, it took me a few tries to fully wrap my head around the mechanics and realize how the connections between nucleotides worked. However, when it clicked that it was pretty much just about queuing sequences, and that changing the order of things broke connections, it became a real joy and fun to play. :clap:

From the previous comments, I think the learning curve is the only real game design issue here, although I can't really say why it was so confusing at first, since when you get it, it becomes pretty obvious. Even with the tutorial screens from the fixed version, it still took me two/three retries until I felt I had a full grasp of what I was supposed to be doing. Don't know if I was just heavy-minded but still, worth pointing out.

The only other smaller issues I felt like were the 'physics' with the connections. I certainly liked dragging un-used sequences around to clear the board as to focus on the nucleoids I was currently working with. However, when trying to get a sequence done ASAP as the game speeds-up, the connections would most of the times twirl with each other, and move around a bit erratic. That made it a bit hard to connect nucleoids in time before the sequence looped again.

I also think it'd be a great QOL addition if pressing the right mouse button when you accidentally select a nucleoid would cancel the connection mode for that node, rather than having you click the already selected node, which sometimes moves around/takes some extra precious seconds. Just a suggestion, since everything else works pretty great!


The graphics and audio choices worked great for a puzzle game too and really helped get that hyped/zen mentality afterwards. **My final highscore ended up being 12. Not to shabby, eh? Thanks a lot for making this game, and it ended up really being a real surprise. Kudos!** :whale:

@reef Yes, the tangling can become a bit of a mess. sorry bout that, 4 is still a good score though good job. Thank you

@mrbamboo Thank you!

@jorgegamedev Omg, this is super impressive! I understand the learning curve, because as noted, a lot of people didn"t grasp it and I'm not even sure the added tutorial succeeds at that. Its a bit unfortunate, because like you said, when it "clicks" its super obvious. (since it had always clicked for me, I was blindsided by the confusion).
Thanks for the insight actually.

And yeah untangling is not quite perfect, I tried to improvise it because without it (forcing circles) things would become an even bigger mess. But increasing the force instead creates super wobbly/unstable cycles (as currently happens sometimes for pairs) so it was really trial error, trying to find to most stable parameters. I<m sure a better way exists, and I might look for it if I expand this.

Right click to cancel would work well, thanks for the suggestion. In addition to clicking on the selected node, clicking on nothing also cancels selection. (but it can backfire when you "miss" the second nucleotide)

One suggestion I got was adding multiple target sequences at the same time, it might make things a bit more complex, but it also help with the "wasted" time until the sequence is reached (multi-tasking).

**And yeah, your score is amazing**, I don't think I could reach that :laughing: Super well done!

Thanks for the the feedback, it was super uplifiting and insightful!

@joh Help, I keep coming back to it.


Flippin' @jorgegamedev wouldn't stop pestering to check it out. So I did, and I had a goooood time.


I gotta say, the game was very cool. The instructions seemed very complicated and overwhelming, but after a round or two, I understood it a lot better. I must say, it's one of the most inventive puzzle games I've played in the jam. A bit finnicky with the controllers, but otherwise, a fantastic experience. If this were a phone game, I can see me getting addicted to it.

I liked it a lot. Jorge pretty much already mentioned that this is a masterclass for jam games. So yeah, keep it up, it was fantastic! Kudos! 🐳

Very interesting game. I would say the hardest part is when the chains start overlapping each other. I wish I could click and drag in order to "pull" a node to try to clear up some of the visual clutter myself! Also, sometimes I would forget if I had one currently selected, so I would make a link by accident when I thought I was making the first selection. But I think that one's more of a me problem.

I couldn't get more than a score of 4, but I still had fun.

The graphics were nice and clean. I liked the timer circle on each node, and I thought the link/arrow that you drew looked cool.

@jorgegamedev This is amazing, unbelievable really, you must have pretty much memorized the full sequence and planned stuff ahead? Just my hypothesis for how such a thing is possible. It is intended, but I'm not there yet xD.

@moski NICE a recommendation! Thanks again, @jorgegamedev! (Probably wanted to flex that score, but thats legit)
Thank you! I truly get the instructions being overwhelming, even I feel like "Damn, this is too much, especially for a game that boils down to clicking circles to link them", But it is hard to grasp and I still don't feel ive captured how to best convey it. I can certainly see some mobile potential, although as some others have pointed out, I feel it misses a larger purpose; a sense of progression (and the cap is a limitation). Self improvement is intended, but its always the same level/game. If I make it random, then its hard to improve. Might need some adjustments but I feel its a nice core.

@jamison Thank you! You can drag the nucleotides with Right click! Feature exactly for that, but not that clear.
And yes, forgetting my selection happens to me too. I made a full white circle to emphasis on the faact that a node is selected but even that is not enough I feel. I want to make it so a preview always aim at you mouse to make it clearer, but that might had to the arrow mess/confusion. 4 is good, seems to be the median score.
And thanks for the kind words on graphics. It's a bit funny that I had that aesthetic vision from the start, but was so confident of the "how I would achieve it" I left it for the end, and almost didn't have time to do it. (Arrows would have been ugly straight lines) Glad I did, night and day I feel.

Thanks all, all this responding has totally put me in a postmortem vibe. Interesting to look back at the game and what went right, wrong and where things could go!

@joh Ah, I'll have to try it out again knowing about right click now :) Nice work overall, it's a solid package for a game jam game.

Looking at the screenshots, there might be an issue with your webGL build - The viewport is way smaller than the screenshots suggest, so elements are overlapping, and you have almost no space to move your nucleotides around :( This made it very hard to play, because all of my nucleotides were constantly bouncing around off of each other, and you couldn't clearly see the connections.

Aside from that, it's a really interesting puzzle concept, one that I've never seen before! I managed to get a high score of 7, even with the small viewport, and I had fun while doing it!

Nice game! The tutorial is a bit overcomplicated maybe it could be shorter? Once I got a hang of the gameplay, it was quite fun to form sequences. It'd be neat if a correct sequence would add extra steps, so you could play longer :). Good job, yall!

Overall I liked it but think it is a bit hard to understand. Mostly I just kept clicking until I got the pattern to work. I like the sound/music personally. With a bit more work I think you'd have something pretty fun and maybe a good learning tool (I have no idea if it was scientifically sound).