Wonder who'll take the cake on this Ludum Dare, hah ;P
A bit shorter and easier than your other LD games, but I still quite liked it.

If I could improve anything, I'd use a darker blue for the water since I felt like it looked a bit too similar to the walkable blue tiles.

Also, some of the puzzles were a bit on the easy side, but that's just me. Some of them did challenge my mind a bit on the other hand. If they could scale up in difficulty as you progress through the game instead of being all over the place. Other than that they are quality and are an absolute positive overall.

The music is your standard fare, that is simple yet effective.

Overall, another quality NES Ludum Dare submission :D

PS: Is it just me or did we both made games that feature rescuing cats from impending doom? (Well, I have cats among other characters...) Great minds truly think alike, hehehe...

Wow great job! I'm thoroughly embarrassed how long level 7 took me to figure out, but your puzzle design and how you introduced mechanics to the player was great! Once I slowed down (and noticed that my movement efficiency mattered) I started getting into the right headspace and really enjoyed it!

Good one! Nice puzzle game. Pretty kitties.

ps: A bit high sentivity on browser for moves.

Thanks for all the positive and constructive feedback! I always appreciate it!

@vectrex28 I think you've probably got this one - your game's really solid! (Seriously if you like NES entries, go check his out too!)

Unfortunately I got pretty sick on the last day and had to cut the scope quite a bit. Part of it was rearranging the stages - I did a quick runthrough, but I totally agree the order isn't great. (Also of note, I never built a way to sort levels in retro puzzle maker, so I had to do it by hand. Apparently I really do need that feature!)

Lastly I was actually intending to drop the player's speed a bit at the end, but it slipped my mind. I hope that the undo key can prevent most of the frustration with it, though.

Thanks again folks!

The puzzles are really well thought out and provided a decent amount of challenge. I found the controls to be a bit twitchy (using a keyboard and the browser emulator fwiw).

Really impressive that you were able to get a full-blown NES game done, awesome work!

Got to level 15 then dinner was ready.

What a lovely throwback... a top-notch submission, and very impressive especially when considering it is a compo game. Now you made me want to look at your other games... :P
Good luck in the compo!

Nice and really impressive game! I've always really liked Sokoban and adding cats and a time limit based on the water flow was a great idea. This has the makings of a future 8-bit classic! Well done!

What a sad coincidence that you also got sick on the last day, I hope you are (or get) better.

About the game: I liked the puzzles, the art and the "meow-like" sound effect, and I only have a few nitpicking points to make:

* I think it would be n**ice**r if moving over ice didn't have the same animation as walking, the character just sliding over it instead.
* For turn-based puzzles like this, I like the character to slightly pause after each step - too many times I'd walk past the point I intended and had to undo a step or two.
* I know it's not trivial, but when pushing blocks it would be nice if they were temporarily turned into sprites for a more continuous movement.

Thanks for all the kind feedback!

@wendel-scardua Ah, sorry to hear you got sick too. Hope you're getting better as well.

On the ice thing, you know, I literally never thought about that! It'd be pretty easy to implement, maybe I'll do that next time I work with the puzzle maker.

The sprite thing I do want to do one of these days, it's just quite a bit of effort. Thank you for the feedback!

Nice retro-style game. Water flooding mechanic is very advances for something made in the NES days, I liked it. The only complaint is that the sprites could have been more unique and meaningful. I was always fascinated with the NES games about the graphics, how much character did their creators were able to put into sprites with such harsh pallet and memory limitations.

Wow, incredible to have a game meant to run on NES, pretty unexpected development idea. Great take on the theme and good sokoban gameplay. Great job !

Ok this is genius AND itching my retro console craving !
The gameplay mechanics are introduced really well !

I'm on linux and FCEUX worked great, but I couldn't make it work on Higan.

Because mdoern systems are too mainstream? Jokes aside, this is a cool game with great puzzle design! Well done!

PS: I'm tweeting about games I play from this jam, here is yours: https://twitter.com/TheAntonSem/status/1512142552476139523

WOW! I must learn your old retro abilities, and how to make a rom and put it on a console. I'm so inspired right now

Thanks for all of the kind feedback! And yeah, I'll admit, my graphics aren't great. It's something I've wanted to get better at, but I'll also admit I didn't put much love into it this time.

@sokette Huh, I can't imagine what went wrong with higan. I've tested this general codebase across a lot of emulators and flash carts+consoles, but I'll admit I haven't tried Higan. I may look into that at some point.

Also @exevirus the tool I used for the basic puzzle effort is online and free, if you're interested! The water mechanic was added using C, but everything else was done with it: https://puzzle.nes.science. (Disclaimer, I made the tool :sweat_smile:)

Disclaimer: no worries I used an engine that I contribute to as well. It's what you know best, right?

Great job! It's really cool to see an authentically retro game done in the time frame for the Compo!

Gameplay was pretty straightforward and easy to understand. I felt that the levels were designed in a good way to get the player acquainted with the mechanics, like with the first level having no threat at all due to the water being behind walls and the sixth level having no danger to work out the new block mechanic. Most of the puzzles were pretty simple to figure out, but I must say there were a few in there that were head scratchers (like level 19, which took me a bit of experimenting to figure out)!

Graphics were great overall. Cats are very cute (naturally) and the tile design is good for ease of knowing was is going on. My only criticism along this line is that it can be a bit tricky to differentiate between the water and ice sometimes due to similarities in color and lack of a dividing line (like the light blue tiles have). Maybe using darker colors for the water might help (perhaps using the staircase color palette)?

Audio was good. The song was pretty catchy and felt like it fit well. The cat meow on pick-up was adorable and the higher pitched version of the sound for when they drown is horrifying (I made it through the whole game without losing any to drown because I always reset the level before that, and restarted it just to see if it had its own sound and I regret it >_>).

Having done some retro console work before (NES included), I know there are some pretty strict limitations for what you can do, so it's impressive you got this done in such a short time. Also, that base engine looks pretty cool. I might just have to play around with it a bit when I have time in the near future.

Edit: I completely forgot that I wanted to say that the name is fantastic!

@the-great-gallus Thank you so much for the detailed feedback! I always love seeing this kind of detail, both positive and negative.

The water color thing has come up a lot, but I hadn't noticed how bad it was with the ice - that's a really good point and something I'll have to keep in mind!

If you do use the engine, I hope you enjoy it!

Had to come back and finish, First time playing through I thought it was real time and was running around frantically, haha. Wife and I played it together.... She's so smart <3


Nicely done! I love seeing that end screen, I'm always curious how long it takes someone other than me to win it out.

Oh my god ! So much dead cats ! Very nice take on the theme, i liked the sens of urge there is in your game, and it give the desire to retry to get better again and again :)

It just says "Created with NES Puzzle Maker" and I can't do anything. What am I doing wrong

Really neat, we really enjoyed the puzzle sequence! Some good surprises, like the ice mechanic! And it often felt really close to save all cats! My favorite game of LD50 so far! :)

We would've liked it better if you could undo all your moves, but maybe that was an intentional restriction?


We made a similar game, but from the side! :D

For a retro puzzle game, this was a complete and excellent game. Not too easy and not too hard, I really approve of it, because over too difficult levels the brain starts to get tired and tired of playing. And so I think it’s worth thinking in the direction of some innovative ideas for a retro game

Thank you all of the kind feedback!

@dot-dev - My first thought is that you have to press start (enter) to dismiss that screen - I should probably have mentioned this, sorry. If that doesn't work, can you share what browser and operating system you're using?

You could also try downloading the [rom](https://cpprograms-nes-games-https.s3.amazonaws.com/ld50/ld50-latest.nes) and run it with either [Mesen](https://mesen.ca) or [fceux](https://fceux.com), if the web emulator isn't working for you. Please reach out if you're still stuck and want to play!

--

@blinry The undo limit was actually a system limitation - I really wanted to allow more! The engine allows up to 50 undo steps, but the way I implemented water broke it. Water is very dynamic in how it expands, and it wasn't easy to roll back. I ended up storing the entire state of the map for each step, which worked perfectly but used up a ton of the NES's 2kb of ram. Given more time I could probably fix it.

My god I feel stupid right now. Yeah I just had to press enter... well nice game man! Really creative puzzle design and good use of the mechanics!

Don't worry, we've all done things like that! Thanks for coming back and playing it through (and letting me know that it wasn't an emulator issue!) - appreciate the kind words

Great to see someone dev a ROM for the jam! Perhaps I will one day... anyway good game looking forward to the next one!

Awesome game, really fun puzzles, and I really liked the design of the floors which introduced a mechanic. Game feels really polished, and I really like puzzle and retro games. Awesome work, loved playing through it and rescuing all 50 cats