Pipes All the Way Down by kroltan
You are given 3 cards at a time which you can place on any open slot on the board.
Each card opens different slots around where it is placed.
The board is narrow, and placing cards near the edges is profitable!
Game ends when your score is negative (if you discard cards carelessly) or if there are no more open spaces on the board.
Yeah there are no pipes because I ran out of time to draw them.
Made in the last 10 hours of the Compo because I was busy before. I did it entirely in a single HTML file, but didn't bother too much with portability, so if you face any issues try Mozilla Firefox.
| Link | https://github.com/kroltan/pipes-all-the-way-down |
| Web-first | https://kroltan.itch.io/pipes-all-the-way-down |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/pipes-all-the-way-down |
Ratings
| Overall | 338th | 3.593⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 172th | 3.778⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 108th | 3.907⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 578th | 3.37⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 749th | 2.788⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 780th | 2.54⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 33🗨️ |

Also at some point one of the slots got scrolled above the viewport. This resulted in game soft-locking. There were no slots wisible, but the game would still register that there is a slot up there somewhere, and waited for me to pu a card there, which I for obvious reasons could not do.
But the game has nice replay potential and might work as a nise timekiller.
Yeah @vitor-figueredo I can see where you are coming from, Zug also uses the "3 cards at a time" design choice, and is about laying paths toward somewhere!
@hilvon Thanks for the extended comment!
My original idea (which you can still see a reference in the final game) was to have vaguely-regular "goal blocks" that are pre-placed, and generate the random cards such that they fit the path from one of the current open slots, ensuring it is always possible to proceed.
In addition, reaching a goal would give you a choice of extra card that you could keep separately from the 3 that are dealt for you.
I didn't have time to do that sadly, so I just put the Goal card as a 3-way splitter and went for full random card deals.
That being said, I think that if you play risky in the beginning and get some score for discards, you can go basically forever. But I agree that the design is a bit flawed.
You did it well, and this card-puzzle-game would be interesting to see with further development!
One nit-pick; I would continually find myself trying to drop the cards when the icon on the card overlapped with the slot, when of course you actually have to drop them when the *cursor* overlaps the slot. I'm sure other people would find the current way more intuitive, but maybe a compromise could be to have the card snap so the icon lines up with the cursor when you pick the card up?
Thanks!

Initially I had so you could scroll up and continue from anywhere on the board, but due to a bug on itch.io I couldn't get scrolling to work, but I thought it was interesting accidental game design, the player would have to be mindful of leaving paths open. But I forgot that I would have to change the code to properly support that, hence the bug. Sorry!
@lereveur I feel ya! Though usually when I don't like the theme I don't participate. Congrats on expressing something in your entry! The gameplay was apropriately grueling :smile:
@sode Thank you! And yeah I agree a tutorial would be very important, but 10 hours was a bit of a tall order already. Hope the description here and on itch helped a bit, though!
@tjm You're right, the card logic isn't ideal at the moment, but I don't have much control over it since I'm using the builtin drag-and-drop features for browsers, which is also why you only move the "ghost" of the card, not the card itself. (Try dropping a card on a text editor! Silly bit of polish if you do)
A full implementation would certainly at least replace the default graphic and control the card a bit better, which would allow me to write such kind of logic. But for right now it's just the basics.
@ulisses Thank you! That's an impressive score, let's see if someone else is up for the challenge...
Audio and nontrivial animations are always a bit trickier with raw web APIs, but yeah I agree they would make a world of difference.
First thought I could only manage 100 points, and then 200, eventually got to 1000! No way am I going to try and top @ulisses but just goes to show how addictive and well thought out you've made this!
Super simple to pick up, easy to understand and the art is really nice and simple/straightforward. Love the shapes which are super readable and with some fleshed out art, I can see this being a great mobile game and time sink.
Add in some music and satisfying sound effects you're on your way to having a stand out time =].
Great stuff and good job!
Thanks for playing @caiolima and @boon!
@lectvs I agree, I like @caeonosphere's idea of increasing the cost of discarding over time/use.
One thing I maybe would like to have done is to sporadically block some columns for some span of rows, making the surrounding ones more valuable but naturally more dangerous.
Works really well and I didn't encounter any bugs.
The only thing was sometimes I got a starting hand that immediately was impossible to place down without loosing (like one right and two lefts).
Apart from that the only things I could criticise are things that are not there, like sound but that's not really necessary for this kind of game and is understandable to have left out for a jam game.
Also, since you opted out of the Audio category, no bad rating because of that as well.
Oh, and a restart button (I didn't found one at least), so I had to reload the page for every restart.
This is the highest score I could manage in my tries so far:

Just to suggest something, maybe there can be a bonus if you fill a row fully, that way you add more challenge to not just trying to go straight on the first and last columns.

That I played this for about an hour straight should tell you everything you need to know about my opinon. Fun, minimalistic experience that felt addictive, compelling and, for the most part, very well balanced. Impressive that these kind of mechanics and ideas can be put together this well on Compo time!
Can't really offer much feedback without going ham into brainstorming territory, of which I'm certain you wouldn't have any shortage of ideas. Things like increaasing the price of Discarding or limiting it so that the player loses at some point no matter how good they are, for example.
Still, this is a very solid entry, and one of my favorite puzzles of the jam. Certainly something I'd like to have on my phone just to mess around every now and then. Great stuff, amigo! :whale:
@charliegray Yeah, I didn't even have time to finish the art, due to extraneous circumstances that limited my time to 10 hours. You can be damn sure the mobile port will have sound!
I... Completely forgot about the restart button, too. At least the game loads quite fast so reloading the page is not as costly as say, a Unity game.
@laurari That is a great score, and an excellent suggestion!
@moski Thanks! And I'm glad you've beaten @ulisses's score, he has records in most jam games I've made (I think he still holds the Wizsnooks record too?), gotta get some variety!