Really nice entry, cute art, great gameplay. Well done !

Nice work!

Awesome graphics. Great job! :thumbsup:

I like the choice of colors

This was actually really good! Very simple but challenging and engaging game. Art is solid too. The game kept me engaged for a good while. I'm sure you could do a lot more with this theme if you keep developing this game!

Oh, and extra props for making this with C++ and SDL. Always inspiring to see that these days!

Easy to learn how to play but also challenging. A ton of fun!

Cute game. Loved the graphics and the sound, it worked great. I think the pushing mechanic is a bit confusing. Never got it to work, nor did it feel like the repairs ever worked wither. Regardless, definitely a solid foundation for a game here.

Great graphics and fun puzzle-like game play. I enjoyed trying to find strategies for pushing the enemies into the water. Felt like a good self contained and finished game that was a lot of fun to play.

@damnscout Thanks for the response. Can you elaborate on what you mean by the pushing mechanic is a bit confusing? I agree but I'm curious on your thoughts.

I really liked the way the game looked, and overall the controls felt very smooth and satisfying. The one bit of polish that would have been nice was a tutorial because I had trouble remembering all the controls, but overall great work!

Really interesting game. The art is crisp and nice, the controls are solid and the difficulty ramps very steadily.

The pixel art is very nice. Enjoyed playing it!

The well-paced ramping up gives a good period of adjustment for players getting used to this game, important for anything that happens in real time. Liked the pixel art!

Nice entry! Looks great and seemed like it had a good progression too. Nice job

Definitely a challenging game. Had trouble setting up situations where I could leverage the push as the enemies generally were smart enough to not get into those situations. Someway of knowing their attack types (hover) might've helped out in planning but can understand if keeping that all in your head is part of the difficulty.

This was an awesome entry all around. It felt very cohesive and complete.

The graphics were simple but very effective, the entire game had this retro arcade/NES vibe going for it.

The mechanics were surprisingly deep for how simple the concept is! Rebuilding, dropping bombs, pushing, outwitting the opponents - very nice! I'm super impressed.

I only have two things I would personally change:
- I would love to get some points when an enemy falls into a hole! My favorite thing to do was just walk around and create treacherous paths with the hopes they would fall in :laughing:
- Sometimes the AI seems unpredictable, like I'm not always sure where they are going to move and what square i am going to end up on if i get hit.

Two very small things. Grain of salt, they are just my opinions.

This was a kickass game!

you've somehow created the hardest game known to man

@adangtran I appreciated the feedback! Forcing the player to remember the attack types was certainly not intentional to keep the difficulty up but was rather a product of not having enough time to add those quality of life features. It is certainly something I will probably add to the game description here at least.

@william-corrin Thanks for the comment! Unfortunately the pathfinding algorithm I used (breadth-first) was a little random in how the enemy chose to proceed, so as a result it wasn't super predictable. In the future I would probably make it clear what the enemy's next move would be to help with this. Again, really appreciate the feedback.

@6smith I try B)

Really hard! I love the graphics and audio, but the gameplay is just too hard for me :cry:

Still, very neat design and very well done!

Definitely a creative entry. A chess-like game with breakeble tiles is an interesting idea and has potential. The graphics were cute and the whole art style was engaging and fit the gameplay perfectly.

But, I was having a hard time actually _enjoy_ the game because of its difficulty and minor problems. Maybe I was doing something wrong but after I pushed a Grunt once, I was not able to push it again ever because of our relative position and its movements. It also felt strange that when I was next to an enemy I was able to turn to it with WASD and then push it, but when I wanted to turn to a hole in the ice to fix it, I just walked into my death.

I still liked it overall and I think this gameplay has potential.

Really fun idea- the minimal tactics-ness reminded me a lot of Nitrome's Rust Bucket. As others have pointed out, I do think that enemy predictability is important in games like these- e.g., break ties in the search consistently, or instead use simpler rule-based/heuristic movement even if it leads to a couple of silly decisions in specific scenarios. While it's still possible to get a feel for the randomness and plan over expected values, it adds a lot of extra labbing for the player before they can get into the strategic part of it. That said, I really enjoyed its current state and these nitpicks are really me wanting more of it. :D

Bro, SDL2 ?!!? What did you eat to think, "hey I'm gonna make a game in SDL" XD ?, I know how challenging it is to use this stuff. It's a great challenge you gave yourself and I must admit it's really well done. You really deliver a nice game. Good job! :) Altough a little bite difficult hahaha.

Really cool idea! It got me four of five runs to figure out main mechanics. Enjoyed another 10 runs after that =) Definetely would play more of it, good job!
Also the game would profit a lot from some lil' soundtrack imo

I'm not the chess kind of person, but the gameplay is pretty good! Nothing else to say, the graphics and sound are serviceable, you did a great job here! I was able to score 31,110 points.

I like the graphics, they are very clean and create a coherent feel to the game. They are primarily what made me interested in playing.


I wasn't spectacularly good but I found out that enemies would freeze if I broke the ice in a complete row if the enemies were on the other side. This helped me crowd control a little because only half of the new enemies would be relevant for me. On the downside I lost a lot of space to move, but that was a good tradeoff because it turned out that I wasn't really good at strategizing what I could do in order to get rid of the monsters. The bishops were somewhat manageable because I could try and move straight towards them and then push them into a hole or off the map.


Some bits where I see improvement potential: I thought it would have been nice if I could have moved without having to wait for the next monster to finish falling. I assume you did not want to break the game's turn system, but I maybe you could have delayed the monster's first move by one turn, which would have allowed the player to move during the drop. Might not have solved the problem but mitigated it. To me, that micro-pause was enough to break the flow a bit.

Then again, I should probably have thought more about my move instead of playing intuitively. Maybe having move indicators for the monsters would have helped me get into a more strategic mindset. Even if you didn't want to show the exact next move, I think adding some arrows that indicate all the different ways a monster could move, including what that meant for you, might have made the game a bit more predictable and strategic. The way it is, invited me to just move around willy-nilly I was often surprised when a monster killed me.

A shame you didn't add some music, that would have been a nice addition to the atmosphere. And if composition is not your thing, then maybe some audio generator ambient noises like wind would have fit the atmosphere of the game.

One minor quirk that I sometimes see with games published on itch: It is always recommendable to put just a single executable in your zip file, because otherwise the game cannot be downloaded via the itch client. I use the client a lot and often just drop games that don't download properly. Yours looked interesting enough to warrant the manual download. I get that it would be a decision between supporting the itch client or having multiple resolution exes in one directoy, but I wanted to mention that this was a thing.

Overall a nice entry, I had fun playing it.

@cerno-b thanks for the detailed feedback. I was working until the last minute so was unable to add music in time - definitely something I wanted to do.

Your feedback in regards to strategy and knowing how enemies would act is fairly common and certainly something I’d work on in the future.

The enemy spawn time was a critique another friend had who played the first version, I messed around with decreasing the spawn time but then they fell too fast. In the future I would find a different method to spawn enemies and make it clear they just spawned - again very limited by time here unfortunately.

Finally, sorry about all the files in the zip, but again I didn’t have time to figure out a static build, plus I didn’t know about that limitation of the itch.io client (or that there even was one).

Nice game. Always nice to see pure c+SDL creations.
The only inconsistence I experienced was that if I am near the monster I can press the arrow key to face him and then push him away. BUT if I want to repair a hole that is sideways from me, I have to step away and then go back facing it directly. And only then I could apply repair action. Instead of turning in-place as being near the monsters (which doesn't even consume and turn) and pushing them away.

I get it, it somewhat makes sense thematically, but somewhat inconsistent. Noticed I was always asking my brain if can turn in place here, or do I need to move away and come back.