Among Stars and Robots by jaoel

Cubot needs to navigate the tricky terrain with his (somewhat limited) processing power. Use the commands at your disposal to design a loop of instructions that will help him find his way to the exit.
Good luck!
If you want to know more about the development of this game you can read our post-mortem!
| Youtube | https://jaoel.itch.io/amongstarsandrobots |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/among-stars-and-robots |
Ratings
| Overall | 148th | 4.056⭐ | 74🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 294th | 3.792⭐ | 74🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 499th | 3.611⭐ | 74🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 327th | 4.021⭐ | 73🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 229th | 4.215⭐ | 74🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 761th | 2.759⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 252th | 3.919⭐ | 70🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 82🗳️ | 79🗨️ |

Really polished for a jam game imo!
Note: Possible bug, you can swap commands when the action is playing (it doesnt stop the time) and new commands are not taken into consideration, robot is still repeating the old ones. Stop and play works thought :]
seen many games with this "looping instructions"-idea; but yours is by far the most polished one. Good Job!
Also thanks to everyone for your lovely feedback!
If I had any feedback, it'd be that it feels almost backwards putting the instructions in the top corner and the time controls in the bottom. Swap those around, and I think it'd be golden! Also, I think changing an instruction should reset the time setting, as on my first play it took me a while to work out I had to pause and press play again to get it to go.
Phenomenal job guys, really impressive for a team of 2!
And above you have left the code for us to learn. Thank you very much for so much.
Good job!
The visuals, animations and audio are great and fit together really well. The tutorial was a nice addition, it's so much better to learn the controls in the game instead of having to read text.
The only other thing I would've liked is to be able to replace commands by dragging new ones over them.
Great job!
I will have to go back and solve the last few levels I'm still missing, but I'm actually quite hyped to do that.
Now that said, while everything works amazingly well, the gameplay itself could use some more interesting level design and/or progression mechanics.
With such few elements and no limit it was a matter of randomly trying and ended up feeling boring. And that's so bad because everything works so well and the concept is pretty solid!
Again congrats on putting together something so technically polished, respect!
All I can really critique is that it's not obvious you can't change the loop once Cubot is running, as the tiles are still easily swappable yet Cubot will not follow the new commands. Maybe that's a bug though?
Regardless, incredible work for only 2 people!

Gameplay is fun and simple.
Parts that I felt *weren't* presented as clearly include behavior of stop-sign bots, and the behavior of the sensor tile that I felt the tutorial did not do a good job of explaining its purpose. I don't think I've managed to grasp (or admittedly, bothered to care) how the stop-sign bots behave. As others have mentioned, noting the limit on the number of moves, as well as adding a hint that the same move can be plopped twice, could have helped. Perhaps a one-cycle guidelines indicating what the trajectory of the bot would look like may have helped the player better understand some of the behavior of certain game elements.
And small nitpick, but it would have been nice if the sound volume slider actually played a test sound to contrast with the music.
I really like the intro, the instructions were minimal but really intuitive. First 2 levels held my hands dearly with their small and simple designs, and then the 3rd level went **BOOM** :joy: but I did solve it after all. The music is still mind-taking.
Level 4 was kinda trolley because of how many there were (I thought I had to get all :sweat_smile:) so I was surprised that I couldn't make sequences for all 16 combinations chronologically since it ran out of space and there was no scroll; maybe I had to work backwards, so I'd just try one way first and...oh I only needed to hit one portal :laughing:
One minor thing I'd say is to put the amount of sequences allowed as a number so we won't have to figure it out. But it's really minor. It was 2 once, 16 once, and the rest are either 4 or 3, easily discoverable.
Some levels witht eh wifi router icon were really easy to pass since I just put a "move forward; router/check; rotate" and put it on x3 speed and the robot'll navigate its way around chaotically until alas it arrived.
The difficulties in these puzzles really escalated but the sound effects and calming music kept me at em.
I don't think there was an end to it, but I completed all levels, and greatly enjoyed!
