Cool! I feel like with a few adjustments, a really fun puzzle game could be made from this mechanic.

Thank you @untitled-studios !

Yes, it may need some more equilibratings between energy costs and energy gains. It may also need some special option to prevent you from spending all your energy when there is only two heavy isotopes left, far from each other, and you have to merge them.

I made a tiny update this morning, to add the game restart function when you have no more energy. You have to use the button "2".

yeah, I agree with Untitled Studios, very nice mechanic, slight refining and would have made very cool puzzle game

Thank you @fonkin . I will think about other ways to calculate energy cost/gains, and maybe some little bonus, like if you send a lot of neutrons to the same border, you may get specific things.

One last tiny edit, not in the game itself but on the page. I checked the "do not rate me in audio", because there is (still) no way to play sound with Squarity.

Hey that's a neat game. I agree the game need some slight refining but it didn't stop me to enjoy playing it.
Ps: I didn't know about Squarity seems like a cool game engine.

GG @pvp .

Squarity is the game engine I have developped for one year. You code in python, you quickly draw some sprites, and it makes a 2D grid-based game that you can share and play directly in your web browser.

Evolutions and features come very slowly, but I am still on it.

Nice game! It is quite satisfying to see all of the isotopes activate and clear the board from one click haha. Agreed that it could use some refining. Overall, very nice!

This is fun! Isotopes go BOOM!
Now this is what I call Unstable!


Cheers! [-LB](https://ldjam.com/users/the-lame-brain/)

Nice. Relaxing.
First time the chain reaction happened was a surprise. Fun to watch it with the animations.
A lot of luck is needed, seems to me, therefore, I would have liked a bit more energy at beginning.
Played it a couple of time and enjoyed it.
Well done!

I like games made with special engines. Good spin on the theme!

Liked it. All I would ass is an option to replay the level, rather than go back to the start.

Thank you very much for all your feedbacks. Special thanks to @douwe-ravers concerning the appreciation of the game engine. I am coding Squarity, and I try to spread it by showing game examples.

@itzemii : If you want more energy, you can modify the source code in-place.

Go into the big text zone on the bottom left of the web page. Scroll down to skip the game description. You will see a line with the instruction `START_ENERGY = 20`. Put a greater number. Then, click on the button "Exécuter", on top of the page (French text, sorry). And that's it !

This is one of the strength of Squarity. You can directly tweak the game, or completely change the whole logic, right in your browser.

@malcolm : There is some kind of workaround for this.

Go back to the text zone containing the source code. Scroll down a little, and you will find the line `import random`. Add a new line under it, with the instruction `random.seed(42)`.

Click on the button "Exécuter". You will start a new game. When you finished it, click the button again. You will restart a game with the same level sequence.

To have other levels, just modify the "42" with whichever number you want.

Despite "think-ahead puzzler" not being my favorite genre, this is a really cool direction to take the category. Love the idea of basing a puzzle game on chain reactions and energy. I like that there's not just one solution and that you can really think about optimizing your score. It looks like a really elegant piece of code, too, which is worth serious bonus points in my book.

Given the unique platform and the barebones nature of the game, I don't have any major criticisms that feel like you don't already know about them. The only one that feels relevant to address from the design perspective is that I did have some trouble intuiting the rules at first. It took me awhile of playing around with the game to feel like I was beginning to grasp what would happen when I made my move.

In terms of post-LD, if you were to continue developing this concept into a full game, I'd love to see level design get brought into play. Such as some smaller tutorial levels to start out with and explain each rule and some later levels that are much bigger and offer unique challenges to even complete them at all. Feels like you could pretty easily crank out a ton of levels for this and very gradually ramp up the challenge. I'm also kinda dying to hear what it would sound like with some awesome sound effects (preferably sounds that harmonizes together and come together like a cascade of beautiful notes, because that would be so cool). And of course more visual polish would be welcome. But I'm sure you already know all that!

Nice work!

Thank you for this detailed feedback @polymathld , and thank you for complimenting my source code. I try my best to write beautiful python.

You are right, it would be cool to have pre-made levels, with a specific amount of energy at start, and with at least one specific solution. Not too much energy, otherwise there would be way too much possibilities, and the player may find a solution just with luck.

Sound effect is one of the feature I want to add in Squarity, I just don't know when. I need to think of a way to define the sounds. Pointing to .mp3 and .wav files would be the easiest solution to implement, but it would be hard for game programmers to use. Because not everybody knows how to produce sounds. I think I will search for ways to create and store simple 8-bit sounds. Some basic sound editors may exist somewhere. Or I can just end up with bare musical notes : one tone + one duration, and so on.

See you next time !

This was really cool. I have to agree with how close this implementation is to a full puzzle game. Really well done and incredibly satisfying to get a full clear

It's hard to plan too much ahead due to amount of energy you have at the start. So just make a few moves and launch a reaction playout itself. But this is suddenly a very satisfying process.

I enjoyed experimenting with it. Very nice!

Wow, nice to see a person who remembers KadoKado. Aqua Splash was my favorite game there - used to be pretty good at it too :D Nice little change to mechanics you added which makes game different enough so it's not a full copy.

Short info for people who don't know KadoKado: There used to be French company MotionTwin which was creating a bunch of web-based games - mostly mini-game-based (Aqua Splash was one of the games on KadoKado). They later turned into Twinoid which developed Dead Cells. And almost all of their web-based games are now dead due to Flash being blocked :( Sad story - really loved their stuff...

This was really fun! I've always found puzzle games really hard to make, and I always think it's super impressive when they're actually enjoyable to play :D

Nice little puzzle game.

The random distribution of objects makes it hard sometimes to win, but the chain reaction is a very satisfying thing to watch :)

I like how you use Squarity for your game. I didn't know this before and I'm always happy learning new things :).

Nice graphics and it is fun to play different rounds.

So all in all: good job! Keep it up! And thanks for submitting ^^.

Thank you for all your feedbacks.

@vidim888 : great thing to find a "motion twin historian" here. Not all of their flash games are dead, and some could be resurrected, but it may be a hard process. Motion Twin was also the initiators of the open-source language HaXe. But I guess many of the HaXe creators left Motion Twin, and the company does not contribute to open-source as much as before.

I followed them almost at their early beginnings : Natural Chimie, Hammerfest... I would so love to have access to "Jama Jama", a game on their now-dead platform Frutiparc. It was a nice puzzle game, with very clever and "atomic" elements. If I only had the description of these elements I would remake the game in Squarity.

@mordrick : don't hesitate to try Squarity, and to join our Discord (the link is in the page of the game). For the moment it's mostly French, but we welcome English speaking people, of course.

I now have 21 ratings, so it's ok for my game and I am really happy with it. I made to this in a shorter time than my previous ludum contributions. I will now try to play and rate the games of all the people who commented mine. Though I can not promise I will manage to make all of them.

Cheers !