Suit Yourself by cassowary
Hi! I am super time constrained this weekend (I'm on a road trip and was only able to work on this on and off), so I wasn't able to put together my full usual thing. However, I was able to make this little project in about 12 hours. It's a bit different from what I normally make, and it might be a little rough around the edges, but I hope people will be able to enjoy regardless. :)
Also, this doesn't have much to do with "signal". My initial idea was that it's like sending a signal from one matching tile to another, via the tiles that are similar in between... but it kind of got away from the theme in the end. Ah, well.
edit: Sorry that I wasn't able to provide very many ratings this round. I've been out of town for most of the rating period and haven't had time to play through submissions. I feel bad that I got enough ratings to qualify anyway. :( Next time!!
| Link | https://github.com/cassowarii/ld59 |
| itch.io | https://cassowary.itch.io/suit-yourself |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/suit-yourself |
Ratings
| Overall | 54th | 3.87⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 28th | 3.913⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 128th | 3.457⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 285th | 1.841⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 154th | 3.457⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 55th | 3.739⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 200th | 1.929⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 188th | 3.239⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 1🗳️ | 1🗨️ |
very polished (beautifull visually and audibly) !
Truly impressive for such a short period of time.
my hs :

My best score is 00157400 so far. I swear I tried my best xD
Also, my brain is still mushy after finishing up my own compo game late into the night so maybe I have misunderstood something, but sometimes matching diff colours (of same suit) works and sometimes it doesn't. I physically can't hit screenshot while selecting tiles but I've circled the examples where it did NOT work in SAI:


... and here's something decent!
You are amazing, you know that?!

But it was fun playing it.
One funny thing is my first try has the highest score despite not knowing how X and ? works.

Was actually quite fun, didn't expect that!


Honestly, this is a really great game. Yes, it may not be the strongest match for the theme 😄 but! you created something genuinely fun and enjoyable to play, with a nice balance between stress and relaxation.
I can totally see this working well as a mobile game. Great job!!!
Solid game! I played for a while. Made it to 4.6M points. I noticed the timer stopped when I started dragging, which meant I basically had infinite time, so just let the timer run out when I got bored. Stopping the timer was probably a good choice, despite that, as the game'd probably just be more frustrating if time ran out mid-swiped (I guess maybe just slowing it down / not letting it run out, as long as you managed to make a swipe would be a reasonable compromise). I seemed to get _way_ more points per second at the beginning (when there were just 2 colors) than later - so though that felt like a good difficulty ramp, it discouraged me realizing it was very difficult to keep getting lots of points. I spent all of my lighting bolts at the end to build up a couple really big combos to make up the difference though, and that was fun (but I'm not sure I would have spent them except that I'd decided I was going to let the timer run out...).

So I had a whole review written up about how much of a hard time I was having, but then I realized I missed the part that you could build your chains across colors (via connected suits), and immediately beat my high score. I guess it helps to read the directions!
This was a nice twist on the Match-3 genre, and I liked how puzzly it was with the optimal routing while still being an arcade game and not a puzzle game. I think the one thing that feels missing is the satisfying automatic daisy-chain of combos you sometimes get in Match-3, since you have to clear all the tiles yourself (with the exception of the black ones when they hit the bottom). But there was enough satisfaction to be had with the connecting mechanic.
I've crunched the numbers and decided to award you this *Smoothest Transition From Gameplay To Game Over Music Award*. It really just kind of blended right together. Congratulations!
