Cycloop by Erlioniel
Hi Everyone!
This is a small puzzle game for Ludum Dare #47 done in 72 hours by two people: Vladimir Kryukov & Roman Danylenko.

We want to thank everyone who helped us with this game.
Also we need to thank these guys for the awesome tools: - Font Questgiver by JosephKnight.com - Signals lib by PixeyeHQ - Aseprite-Importer for Unity by Martin Hodler - Project sfxr by Tomas Pettersson
And we need to thank YOU for playing!
Hope you like this small game. We will be happy to hear your opinion, so please share it with us!
You can follow our next activities in twitter: - https://twitter.com/erlioniel - https://twitter.com/roman_danylenko
After release changelog:
- 05.10.2020 00:30 EEST - Removed exit button
- 06.10.2020 10:30 EEST - Added arrows keys support
- 07.10.2020 10:05 EEST - Added "Next Loop" click by keyboard
| Youtube | https://roman-danylenko.itch.io/cycloop |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/cycloop |
Ratings
| Overall | 400th | 3.788⭐ | 82🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 592th | 3.519⭐ | 82🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 752th | 3.381⭐ | 82🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 384th | 3.969⭐ | 82🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 99th | 4.419⭐ | 82🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 892th | 2.949⭐ | 81🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 981th | 2.435⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 781th | 3.414⭐ | 78🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 87🗳️ | 102🗨️ |
+the presentation when you move from one puzzle to the next is superb. Also the itch.io implementation is great.
+loop theme is done cleverly.
+puzzles and gameplay work well, but I got a little bored at the "walking"
- add some ambiance or music to make the mood more powerful.
Great epic work!
Thank you for being so positive, guys!
@patsui ye, we are not musicians and didn't find time to experiment with music :) Maybe we have to find someone next time to help with sound design & music.
@jamesor we noticed that as well, but we decided that it's is actually super minor and just left it as is. Don't think it's fair to polish the game after the publication, so it is as it is :)
@pichuscute0 did you finish it? We tried to add some special thing for every level, but for sure we are not the best from level-designing point of view. Will try to improve that side till the next jam!
I liked the website, its very pleasant for the eyes.
And the graphics are nicely done. Great job on that. The slightly damaged environment gave me a nice feeling, somehow like this place was abandoned and the little robot kind of thing was left behind booting up years later.
For the actual gameplay, I enjoyed the idea of getting back from where you came from by solving puzzles throughout looping around. I have a computer science background so I liked the binary kind of logic puzzles a lot.
Now for the improvements:
As some already mentioned, it could use music. Even a really basic track would be nice. I know it's not easy for everyone especially with limited time and people. But music is such a important aspect a lot of jammers underestimate. But I was happy with the effect sounds (and youtube playing music in the back :D)
One little thing:
It would be nice to have the ability to go to the next loop by pressing a key like enter instead of using the mouse (just something little, because at the beginning I thought it would be keyboard only and I think it breaks the flow a bit but thats just personal flavor :D).I also noticed after hovering the mouse away from the gameview, the focus occasionally went outside the game, so inputs would be ignored until I moved back my mouse (not sure if it might be a browser type of thing, I used firefox)
All in all a very nice little game to play, feels very polished (despite the missing music)
Great first attempt
And for sure we will try to find out how to create background music the next time and will reserve more time to work with game sound overall.
Super picky, and I know there is never enough time - but another nice touch would be to have the shadow stay on the ground when the player jumps -- or even just fade out when they're in the air.
Thank you very much, we happy that you did like the result :)
@redunca ye, sound design for sure not our strongest part :<
congrats dude!
if U can, see my game too :D
I saw your post on how you used randomness to make the scenery and was curious to see how it looked. I thought it worked really well!
The gameplay is interesting and has a nice mechanic tied to the jam's theme!
On the other hand, I'm not even sure this needs music, it has it's charm thanks to the nice design you're going for.
One small complaint is the fact that I managed to get myself stuck in lvl 7, even though I saw that in most levels you made sure the player could solve it without the need of a restart button.
Solid work!
I only wish there was some setup to the game - so I would know who the little cyclops robot is and why is he stuck in this strange facility :smiley:
The design is good. It would feel better to have a little music, but it is not that important in that kind of game.
The theme is well respected. Good job.
Really great art style ! Simple mechanic done well with neat presentation. Great job !
Thanks for the "aseprite-importer" tip, I didn't know about that thing :p
@jnkdog Yes, that's probably the only level that might be failed completely, and for sure in production-ready game this level should be polished to be possible to pass somehow without any possibility to be stuck. But since we have a 'restart loop' btn I hope you didn't have hard feelings about it :)
@forgeronstudio I highly recommend to use such practices, since they are really efficient from time/result balance.
I love puzzles but I'm stack ><
As some others have mentioned; a bit of music, even just something ambient in the background, would go a long way to enhance the mood, but the art is great, effects and animations are nice and overall just a great entry. Well done!
I got to level 3 before I even realized what was happening and how the puzzles worked, and even from then it sometimes felt that just trying to use the switches more or less randomly was the easiest way to make progress. It really is kind of peculiar to play a puzzle game where understanding the puzzle mechanics make not that much of a difference. :D Sure, in the end I understood (mostly?) what all the elements did, but since the puzzles went over multiple screen lengths and you can never see everything at once, I kept running into situations where I was just too lazy to try to memorize everything and think through what I needed to do, and just went with trial and error instead.
It's a very innovative game though, and I really like the visuals and perfectly smooth looping of the levels. Great work!
@andygates01 The sound design & music is a next big thing for us to learn probably. We'll challenge ourselves with that next time.
@very-dark-lord That's very fair comment. Yes, level design is very complicated, even tho we tried to simplify it as much as possible. Maybe it should be done slightly another way, to allow user somehow to see all elements together. Or maybe just a minimap of the level. Anyway since the game is small and puzzles aren't so complex I guess it is not so hard to beat.
Thank you again for such a big feedback.
The gameplay is nice, it's a puzzle platformer but I like the mechanic of the loop, it force the player to think differently about space. And it's quite tricky!
Good job!
I commend you on the graphics and the puzzles themselves though. Great job!
@kushimoto @roofloorwall @junebug Yes, level & mechanic design is for sure the next thing we will take in account. We had quite a lot of ideas how to make another mechanics (for example one-way switchable door), but time constrains were against us.
@no-grapes-games Thank you, that's for sure our first game jam, but I was participating in hackatons before (it's like game jams, but about some app prototypes), so more or less aware about how it's going and what team should be focused on. But anyway that was absolutely new experience
@gorrgolem thank you :)
~~How exactly is the player's character activating these hand scanners?~~
I don't know if it was a problem of mine, but when moving the background moves with a bit of lag/clunkyness like 3-4 pixel smooth and then a lag.
I loved how u used a sort of spatial sound to specify which doors open/close and where, it's a necessary addition to help exploration, and also help immersion by a lot. It's incredible how a little detail can change so much.
Connection with the theme is there, but not that much to be honest, the only thing I can see is the looping level.
The gameplay itself is nice, the idea of the puzzle is good and I managed to reach the end without being bored.
That said, the wire thing is a bit too confusing, it's hard to think what will happen when you change something, especially for the long wire (more than the screen you can see), and the game, instead of making you plan what to do, lead you do a more trial and error approach that makes it seems not that deep as a mechanic, but just a matter of attempts.
It's true that when you're close to the solution you must look closer to avoid switching for 10 minutes and that a that point is also easier to know what to do since you've explored a bit (but also reduced the complexity/variables since some switches are active now), the issues is that the first part of every level is more about switching randomly and see how close I've become to the solution. I don't know which suggestion to give, maybe being able to see the whole map or something like that.
One thing that was not too clear is the single circle box, that I think is a sort of NOT operator, or like only one can be active, it's ok but my suggestion is to change the shape to not confuse it with the other multi circle boxes. At first, I thought that u decided that for one circle only you made a separate sprite, but later on I saw that you have also one circle only boxes (with the other 3 circles disabled).
For the boxes, wire that goes into it does not have something on the sprite and therefore it seems that the wire is passing behind them, i think that just adding a bit of pixel to specify that would solve the issue.
Those are just suggestions that I think would improve the game, to be honest I really liked it, it was fun enough and very polished, with just a background music missing to complete the package!
Edit: i don't know why but the first time I needed to wait a bit for the game to start and thought it was not loading! After clicking run game the screen went total blue like the background of the page for more or less 30 seconds maybe.
The only excuse I have for us that we had time constraint plus it was a very first time for our team. We got our take away from the event and looking forward to blow people mind on the next LD :)
@mikoziq we had some idea of minimap, but decided that player will be able to find out the level by exploring. But ye, maybe that's a mistake.
@tjm we didn't manage to tell the story (I personally feels especially bad about it). By idea that was a recovery unit to resurrect station to live. And it is kinda connected to it, so it can scan the panel to activate. But since the station is a human-made one it has panels for human first of all. For the unit it's just an access point to station circuits.
@tricky-fat-cat @flying-cat-of-the-pepes @mcovert @sophiemae0 @aimainiac @matootsy Thank you for such warm words, guys!
Still, a good first jam entry! Especially the polish in the art department was well done!
Obviously you chose a great artstyle for this game! The gameplay was way less brainy than I anticipated, which was also pretty cool, as it was thus very "intuitive" and "trial and error" for me :D
Absolutely impressive for a first jam entry! Well done!
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/772381107?t=2h29m51s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
However, I still have some thoughts! I think this game is downright adorable, and I love the aesthetic of it. I do wish that the mechanics were a bit more clearly defined. I got a sense of the fact that I needed to turn certain buttons on and off in order to open the exit door, but I never got a good grasp on what a button would do before I pressed it. The red and green lines were decent indicators, but I still had trouble figuring some things out.
I think with a little more polish, this game could turn into something really neat. :slight_smile: Overall, well done!
Very well done