Router Runner by JustinMullin
A lone bit must manage network connections in an overloaded router.
Created with love in Godot, C#, and many other useful tools.
Font credit: "Pixellari" by Zacchary Dempsey-Plante.

Ratings
| Overall | 81th | 4.146⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 87th | 4.1⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 260th | 3.775⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 419th | 3.872⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 153th | 4.363⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 97th | 4.09⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 913th | 2.667⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 190th | 3.987⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 35🗳️ | 60🗨️ |

Overall, enjoyed my time with it. And the character is cute! Nice work!
Even without a tutorial, it was easy to grasp what is demanded from the player. The clear signs and labelling without words did a great job.
I especially liked the graphics. The lighter and darker color animation on the player was nice, as well as the playfield itself.
Actually there is not much to critisise. Well executed!
If I would need to nag about one thing then that there is not much of a big surprise, wow factor or something that made you chuckle. The game was not boring, but also not exciting, if you know what I mean.
I initially thought you couldn't cross wires. I thought "umm, this game is impossible." But after coming back and checking the screenshots I realized my mistake. From there, it's almost like managing the wires in your computer and making sure they're nice and neat, trying to keep any 90 deg angles limited to the center of the playspace so that you don't get blocked on the sides. Of course, there's still an RNG aspect to it, but the game was fun enough to try a few times.
This was a fairly polished game so I'm pretty impressed. There are a lot of small graphical doodads and effects that really sell the game, and absolutely conveys the LD theme by the end of it.
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1173646881?t=4h7m12s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
The ambience here is just amazing, the audio really works well and although the puzzle can get quite hectic with time as the limiting factor, the calm music kept the experience chill. I can't imagine how stressed I'd get with a forward-leaning turbo-song going on.
I really enjoyed this, and I experimented with some different layout approaches. For a while I though that turning immediately out of the port was good, but after there were more connections this really hosed me and I started turning in the middle of the board a lot more, and in my last runs I kind of just turned somewhat randomly to have a variety, which did okay. I wonder if there's a systematic approach.
I made a LLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTTTTTT of mechanical execution mistakes, landing on the wrong row/column, entering the wrong port, or dropping the cord one cell outside the port. The movement is interesting: the game is a discrete grid, yet the movement is continuous. There's kind of a cool vibe to it, but I certainly would have had more precision with a discrete/cellwise movement scheme. It was interesting how you rounded to the nearest row/column as I moved in the other direction, I heard NES Zelda did something similar. My experience was that I'd move downward to get to, say, row 5, and then turn right. But of course I would try to turn as soon as possible, so subconsciously I was aiming for row 4.5 I guess. And if I hit 4.49, as I turned to horizontal movement, then I would go *backwards* in the vertical to row 4. The discrete movement is interesting, but I wonder how it would feel to change the straight "round to nearest" to include a small buffer in the direction I was last going, almost like momentum. Or maybe this already exists and I was just cutting my corners too hard!
Anyway it didn't hurt because some of the mistakes yielded the "oh NO!" moments that were a lot of fun.
Art was super effective, and again the audio ambiance and mood was just awesome.
I see you have a second Mullin in the credits this time... Does that mean this is a family effort? That's awesome.
Nice entry!
I love heraing about your thought process trying to solve the cycles, we definitely wanted this to be a game where you could plan your route and improve over time, and it sounds like it was engaging enough to go down that path.
I really appreciate your deeper look at the movement mechanics, we went through quite a few versions experimenting with various methods to try to find one that felt "right" for the types of puzzle moments that were emerging as we built. For instance, at one point movement was instantaneous from one tile to the next, this was great for clarity as 1 button press = 1 tile moved. As the day went on we felt the game was really shining at a hectic pace and the speed of pressing keys was carpal tunnel inducing to say the least, and really wasn't conveying a satisfying "dragging" of the wires. We added a "press and hold" but ran into similar precision issues at faster speeds when stuck to a grid. This led us to the smooth movement that we shipped with, we did a lot of number tweaking to try to land in a spot that felt natural and predictive of what row/column the player was looking at as they shifted directions. I think where we ended has an acclimation period and definitely causes some undesirable mistakes that you noted, I definitely learned a lot as we went!