Implosion by Caveman54
A black hole powerplant has gone awry. Use your cunning to control droids and get all the volatile power cells off the planet so they can explode at a safe distance.
Screenshots:


How to play:
-to move your character just click on it then click on an adjacent tile.
-when moving one droid all droids on lower layers will make the same move.
Tiles:
Bridge: The bridge can only be moved upon if you initiate the movement from a different layer 
Laser Grid: This kills you. 
Gate: You'll need a key to get past it 
Post-Jam Change Log:
Fixed a loading issue
Added html version
Removed bug where two players would spawn if the top layer was pressed while exiting a level
Changes to resolution scaling so game works not in fullscreen
| Link | https://caveman54.itch.io/implosion |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/implosion |
Ratings
| Overall | 667th | 3.655⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 551th | 3.586⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 83th | 4.138⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 663th | 3.828⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1415th | 3.15⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 500th | 3.638⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1035th | 3.411⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 40🗨️ |
Thank you all for the feedback. I will be getting right on the issue with screen resolution mentioned by @mads.
We are really glad you guys enjoyed the game and found the puzzles challenging. Thank you for the ratings!
It took me a while to figure out I can move droids on other floors, hah!
My mind got totally blown when I realized the music changes on each floor. That's an awesome touch!
For me the only issue is the slow animation speed, faster reaction times would probably improve the whole experience a little.
Very solid game!
I have saved the game to my bookmarks so I can finish all the levels later :). Overall well done :)
I especially loved the work done with the soundtrack! It was appealing to listen to, looped well, and fit excellently with the style of your game.
On the third level I believe I ended up in a space I wasn't able to get back from?

No matter where I clicked at that point, I couldn't move, so I'm assuming I quite likely clicked somewhere I shouldn't have during a scene transition.
Regardless, I love puzzle games, and enjoyed what I was able to play of your game! Thanks for making it, and great job overall with the jam~! ☆☆☆☆☆
I had to go back to the main LD page to re-read the instructions how to cross bridges.
Once i understood that i was ready to go and solved quiet some puzzles, loads of fun !
Great job making a fun and interesting game!
Thank you so much for bringing this game by my stream. Here's a link to the VOD:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1007852839?t=6h6m29s
Really neat puzzle design, great idea, and good execution, well done!
Is this how the 1st level suppose to look like?


Yay! I am going to give the game a try!
Anyway, I think I found out the bug that was causing me not to pass level 1 just now. If you move downwards or upwards into a wall or the edge of the box, the animation does not reset, causing the player to be off-centre and thus unable to move. Clicking on the layer resets the player and thus makes him able to move again.
As some feedback it would be nice if the droid remained highlighted after finishing the move, so that you don't have to click on it again when starting the next move.
Great job!
@escapade @tucan Thank you as well for giving us good descriptions of some bugs we will look into them.
PD: Level 13 scratched my head really hard :)
The controls felt pretty clunky at times, though. The robots moved pretty slowly, and having to watch all the layers move before you could make your next move got a bit old, especially when you knew what to do and just had to execute it. I think you also have some issues at the resolution you weren't developing at, which led to some strange animations.
Overall though, it's a really great concept and production! Great work!
I think level 5 and level 3 should have been swapped. Level 5 just teaches how you can move the blue layer without moving the red layer so well (because that's all you can do). The current level 3 doesn't do as good of a job because you have more options so you struggle with it a little bit, then get to level 5 and it's too easy because you already learned that.
A lot of the levels came down to just solving the lowest layer because it didn't affect any other layers. So I really appreciated the levels where you had to keep the lowest layer around a little longer (because there was a key across some cracked tiles that you needed a higher layer to allow you to move over there). But at the same time, it is nice when you can get a bot to an exit so you don't have to think about that layer anymore. I imagine that's a pretty tough line to walk when designing the levels and I do think you did an excellent job on level variety.
Others have said that the game is a bit too slow. Once you figure out you need to move right 3 squares, it still takes you like 30 secs just to input the solution and watch all the robots move. I found level 10 was really bad for that because you were just moving in long straight lines for much of it.
The game art was really well-polished with pretty much everything having a little animation. I do wish the walk animation was bit better. It's probably the animation you notice the most, but it didn't seem to live up to the quality of the other animations.
I think this was one of the most imaginative games from this theme and you executed it in a great way with smart puzzle designs and a lot of polish.
A lot of my concerns with the game has to do with the onboarding process: learning the controls, puzzle mechanic, recognizing what each tile does, etc. I found the "move lower-layered bots at once" animation to be not very intuitive: after moving a piece, I couldn't make out why the game would suddenly shift to a new level, and I had to watch another bot move. The gate tiles looks less like locked doors and more like lasers that would kill me, so that and the key graphic would have helped the player learn more quickly the purpose of these items and tiles. A tutorial on how to switch between different tiles would have helped as well.
I really did think the whole move bots at the same time mechanic was really cool, and think it's actually a matter of graphical design that could help improve the readability and the ease in which the player could use to make out a solution to each level. For example, since most layers aren't very large, I think showing all the layers at once would have greatly helped. Selecting layers in this way would be pretty intuitive, and you can probably flash a marker on all the bots that would move as a consequence of selecting that layer. I would have preferred arrow keys to move said bot instead of mouse. Also, death would have to be readily apparent and perhaps even a replay is warranted to inform the player why they messed up. I think for a game like this, an undo one step feature would be possible as well.
Great work, had a lot of fun!