Cute art, interesting idea. Would be better if there's some audio!

Loved the game mechanic, but the controls could be better or maybe the numbers should fall slower.

Such a great idea! Simple but addictive, awesome stuff!

I totally loved the idea and the fact that you're competing against someone else. The animations are also great, and I love that it applies to the theme. Some audio would've been great, even just some sound effects. Overall I liked it a lot!

Clever and original. Making order of operations into a game...

Cool idea! At first, I didn't feel very much in control over what was happening, but maybe that fits the unstable theme. ;) I think I got better at the game after playing a few rounds, but I only got till round 9 after a few tries. I would have liked to replay a single level in stead of starting at the first one again.

I found myself thinking "Noooh, not the minus! Not the 0! Not there!" several times.

I was hoping that dividing by zero would give me infinity, but it gave me 0... :wink:

The "asynchronous multiplayer" aspect is cool, but I can also see this game as a fun synchronous multi-player game with all the players fighting over the +'s and x's!

@papaver lol great catch! After getting a nullpointer from divide-by-zero, I made it do 9999 damage, then -9999, then finally settled on just 0 so people wouldn't think it's a bug. And yea, there's nothing I found more devastating than getting a multiplication operator, but then accidentally getting a 0 right after D:

I'm actually really interested in multiplayer experiences, but with LD it's always so hard to find people on at the same time. I might keep pushing async game designs and seeing how I can make things feel more interactive.

Neat concept! Platforming and math at the same time definitely strains my brain. :) Clever implementation of multiplayer.

really cool idea!! but it's a bit hard to catch the numbers I want.

Woooof that was tough!!! Math is hard! I got as far as round 9 :)

I thought the way the level design evolved was really clever, and captured "unstable" very well! But towards the end, maybe after like 3 numbers and 2 operators, I just felt like I had very little control over what numbers/operators I was picking up. I wish there was something that kept the chaos but gave me a little more control. I'm not sure what that would look like - maybe like only 3 blocks at a time are ever "changeable" and you can cycle through which 3 blocks it is? Anyway that's my main complaint - it went a little too far where the very original and interesting mechanic became just too unwieldy and uncontrollable. But I did have a fun and mathematical time :)

Alos I appreciate the theming and the pun name. Very good....

Cool

Nice game!Im so like it!

Followed you and waiting for your new games~Wish you can try my game too~

@wedgiebee very good points, and I too realized that too late in the final balancing hours. I probably could've just kept the equation slots shorter and focused more on the level design so that players would have a bit more control over their fate in the final stages. Thanks for the feedback!

I love math games, but i think it's pretty hard to make them look like a "not educational game" and make them really fun. You have achieved it. Your game is really cool to play. Good work

Actually fun for a maths game! I lost on round 7 because I ended up on -16 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Still though, there's really no strategy other than avoid minuses and divides. Maybe lowest number wins round could be interesting? (Apart from the platforms, it didn't really match the theme, though...)

Very cool idea. Those :heavy_minus_sign: got really scary! I've never been as afraid of the :heavy_division_sign:. At least not since 2nd grade (or whenever that was introduced). :laughing:

I feel, I got some really strong opponents so I didn't manage to get to the final round. Very ambitious though to attempt a multiplayer game and in a way that actually would work well here being asynchronous.

It was obvious that the water was bad, but it wasn't really clear how bad. Could I forfeit a round by ignoring the game say to me I should avoid it? It would have been nice with a bit clearer feedback what that mechanic was.

The battle after was a bit random, well extra so since you didn't have time to implement actual results of the opponents. But even so, I think it would make the game feel fairer if I had some idea what I was up against throughout the level. So ideally, I think it would make sense to show the current recorded live standing of my selected opponent. If the game shows their sum, the player has to continuously compare that to their own (which the game shouldn't provide) and you'd have even more educational value there.

I agree with @wedgiebee that having 3 number slots and 2 operators was a bit much in making it feel like I had control over my destiny. I think there's enough challenge in 2 numbers and 1 operator. Perhaps allow numbers to be negative too so one can outsmart those pesky negative operators with a double negative?!

Another way to make the game progressively harder would be to require the player to rank above a certain position in a larger group of enemies.

And again, really cool math game idea!

This is really cool! As a math nerd, this is right up my alley.

Ditto what other people have said about how you got new emotions out of us. "Nooo not the 0, not there!" etc. That was great. And it felt good to stare down "Mathman" knowing I'm about to knock him out.

It totally makes sense how you had to make the controls tough with tilting platforms to feel unstable, but it did make it feel like I couldn't always do what I wanted.

I have a few ideas if you want to continue with the game.
- If you want to keep instability in the game, perhaps the numbers could change as they're falling? (with some animation so that players will know that they're about to change).
- The strategy does feel "solved" where you just want to get a :heavy_multiplication_x: in every operation slot and then the biggest numbers you can find. Perhaps it could be more interesting if short equations were falling instead, and collecting them added that number to your cumulative score? Players would then have to evaluate the equations on the fly instead of always just searching for the same things.
- You could even tie those 2 ideas together, make equations fall and they slowly shift around as they fall which keeps their value unstable.

And a whole new world opens up if you want to add sound effects. Nice entry!

@robonaut121 now there's a good spark of a thought. The different rounds could have a random condition, like make sure you're an even number, or be a number between 10 and 20. To make it not nightmarish it could be a little map like Slay the Spire where you have some control over which challenge you want. Thanks for the idea!

@local-minimum that's a really good idea and should be possible to save off timestamps so that it can playback a live recording, that would make it feel very intense. And omg at negative numbers. Not only is that easy to implement, but if I reduced the slot count, it would give some needed complexity to make up for that in a fun way. Brilliant :)

@mhorth oh man, I love the meta-layer of evaluating equations to place into your equation. That sounds super hectic so I think the idea is great. Couple that with some of the ideas I wrote for robonaut and that could put your math skills to a real test. Thanks for playing!

Hah, I've not been as audible by myself in my room for any other entry so far. *"No! No! Nooo!"*

It wasn't until after the second round I played that I realized there were operators. I was just trying to catch big numbers and caught something like a 7-9 assuming it was 7 *and* 9, but it came down to -2. But that lesson came quick enough.

Balancing trying to keep what I had and going for a big number coming down nearly always resulted in some form of tragedy, given the surface area of the sum (more so in later rounds), the precariousness of moving somewhere and the amount of numbers and operators falling down. I never really felt like I could get what I wanted, and that there were always random side-effects to my actions.

As I'd say for any game without audio, I do wish there were some audio cues. ;)

All in all a terrific concept that I absolutely think you could keep working on with success.

Reading some of those other comments, I see another idea forming that I really want to support:

Another way to get past the "solved" state of game play is that rather than trying to get the highest number, you give the players a target number for each round. And the winner is whoever got closest? That immediately breaks the strategy of "just get :heavy_multiplication_x: and big numbers without a care!"

I love the concept, and I really have fun playing it. I think Maybe you can add a countdown to each level to let players know how much time they have left.

@mhorth Love it. Another variant could be Price Is Right style where you try to go up to a number but not over it, giving you some intense moments where you're not entirely positive if you should grab that last number :)

This was really cool, very neat idea. I like how strategic and hectic it gets once multiplication and division are introduced. I think something was lost from the strategy once there were enough number/sign places above your head, since it just became too hard to avoid things well enough to strategize anything.

I had fun :D Maybe a bit too random but I like the overall gameplay.

Really funny concept. It's a bit hard to calculate at the the same to pick up the right number. So finally I just pick up the higher with the plus to be sure ^^'

It was more fun than I expected! I couldn't stop and was trying to get a really high number before surrendering, but I kept messing up. The game really has that “one more time” thing going on.

Would have really loved to hear *any* music or sound effects, without them the experience was just incomplete, and it's the easiest way to make the game even better.

Superb themeing! What an Idea!

I found myself damage boosting to get better movement. I wonder if this mechanic was intentional?

@jerem-watts I was trying to figure out simple ways to code in "unstable" elements to the stages and remembered Samus' stage from Smash. I ended up implementing the mechanic but not bothering to hurt the player out of time constraints, so it was half intentional lol. Indeed I ended up using that technique as well.

Fun game! The concept is neat! I really like the idea of trying to get a certain number or even different goals for each round that others are suggesting. I could see like maybe one round the goal is to get largest number, another smallest number, the next could be closest to 0 etc. That'd be challenging to sync asynchronous though unless it was a set pattern of rounds people did.

I really like how you implemented the theme on this one. The level being unstable worked amazingly and it felt really unstable too. Even your current equation is unstable because one slip into the water means you're thrown into the air, scooping up all the symbols you don't want.
The async multiplayer component was cool because it wasn't just a faceless AI that would show up with a higher number. It still did feel a bit faceless but definitely better than just an AI. Even though the numbers are just random, the illusion of it is better than nothing. So even though it's multiplayer in the loosest of terms, I feel like it's better than not having it.
Simple and effective game, great work!!

Once word: INNOVATIVE. This really is the future of society! The way each level is different in multiple ways keeps each level nice and fresh.

I did have some cases where I would go for an X but there was a ÷ hidden behind it.... (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ The beauty of combat with numbers, always unpredictable.

@nobongo Thanks for the shoutout on the multiplayer portion. Indeed I wanted to have quite a bit more stuff to show off between the players but couldn't connect the dots in time. I'm glad it at least gave off some perception that you were facing against the LD community since those are true input names after all. Next time around I'll figure out how to keep fleshing that out so I'm glad you gave me some hints as to what the feeling of it was.

@peace-of-cake-games haha it was a chaotic world back in caveman times! This was merely an accurate portrayal.

Cool concept, and great execution! The chaotic and unstable gameplay is very fun, and I also liked the art. Good job!

Thanks for the game!

Nice game
+ Interesting idea, good visuals
- Lack of music or sound effects

This chaos is beautiful. I'm trying to protect my lovely equation. The platform is sliding and I don't want to hit the lava. But as I edge away from the precipice I see that two sweet sixes I hold will be replaced by a 1 and a 2, and I cannot allow that. One ill-advised jump later and I watch in complete horror as my two multiplication signs are replaced by minuses. Woe.

The whole idea is nuts in a wonderful way, I love the story of cavemen competing for the best number, it's just great! I definitely picked up what you were shooting for with the async thing. There's this awesome gambling, push your luck, competitive feel that could really be awesome against live humans. And the shame.... oh, the shame.

Loved it!!


whoops, i messed that one up! At first i thought i should balance the numbers because i didn't read anything beforehand, but it got cleared quickly. What hooked me really was the multiplayer aspect, that was genius - suddenly, instead of just meddling around with some numbers, i had people to beat! That was fun and really engaging, and there is a little exciting moment when you don't know yet if it was enough. It was also fun to see some people i know up there. Very cool, definitely gotta copy the async Multiplayer at some point :D

Oh, and the pun is great!

It was definitely a fun time.

It was definitely a fun time.

It was definitely a fun time.

It was definitely a fun time.

I wasn't expecting a math puzzle game, but here we are! A really cute entry that's well done. Understandable mechanics with a very cute art style - nice job!