Amazing game, great concept and almost flawless execution. I love it.

It always amazes me how people can come up with games that feel coherent and fully resting in themselves. Great job.

Some minor points of criticism: The color scheme can sometimes make the objects a little hard to read, especially when the water rises. I also would have loved indicators at the left that tell me once I have a row completed, either by accidentally revealing the jellyfish or by placing the flags.

It went really well until RNG was not in my favor and I was presented with this:


Either I didn't figure out how to solve this or I really had to push my luck, which was not on my side.

Anyway, a great game, had a lot of fun.

I like it, the different color themes are really nice. Finding the jellyfish feels a little random.

@cerno-b Thank you so much for playing! You got really far! My best ever is 71, but the game gets brutal around Section G. There just isn't enough information to know where the jellies are, and the shells only help so much. I might tweak it after a bit, but for now I'll iterate on your other feedback! I'm going to work on the color palettes today, and I'll tone down the water opacity so it's easier to see. I'll also see if I can have the left indicators change when a row is done! Thank you so much! <3

@ebbdrop Thank you so much!! It's definitely quite random, but there are some tricks to finding them! Start by revealing the safe rows, and then follow around the seaweed you find to get a good idea of what areas are unsafe. If you found some shells, you can test out some dangerous squares and then drain the water afterward! Once you think you have a good idea where the jellies are, flag all the squares you can and submit!

I really like the ambient music. The sounds in general are nice. I think it's pretty original as well it certainly doesn't play much like mine sweeper. There is less massive brain calculations and more risky decision making. But that can make it more fun. Also this fits perfectly with the theme.

Whoa a really interesting and good take on minesweeper. I like it. More forgiving than the original and the water mechanic is super interesting.

Absolutely fantastic quality. I'm a big fan of picross puzzles, and this game is very relaxing. It's a great use of the theme, and a really unique twist on a genre I really enjoy. The music is very good, but gets a little repetitive. The pallet swap feature - and the rest of the graphical work is basically perfect for this sort of game. I really like that I was able to very quickly determine a strategy, but the game is nuanced enough that it isn't obvious whether that strategy is ideal. I'll definitely be coming back to play more of this game.

One question - Where can the seashells spawn, and is it possible to know if a shell is touching a jelly?

@oxnh Thanks so much! Yeah I was actually surprised that it almost feels like a completely fresh game. Being able to take calculated risks is an interesting mechanic for a puzzle game to have. Thank you so much for playing!

@david-york Thank you so much!! <3

@constantine-pallas Thank you! I think the next thing I want to add is a mute button and palette swapper, so you can lock-in your favorite palette you've unlocked :P Also, the shells can spawn anywhere, so they could be blank OR have seaweed underneath. I may try to change that, I'm just not yet sure the best way to do that. Thanks again for playing!!

Bro, I love just how how clean and *full* this feels, respect the amount of polish this received. Enjoyed the ambience, interesting mechanic, and lovely presentation.

Took me awhile to get the hang of it.

very very cool game, loved the dynamic music and the overall polish. very impressive i love a good minesweeper-like

Brilliant game, very well executed I must say, had a hard time completing lvl's though, would have liked an easier first lvl being someone who doesn't even know minesweeper, but had a fun time trying my best!

Very interesting concept! Only made it to Section C. If there would be a version where if I select the first tile in the line and hit the jelly Id win it easily, because that happened lots of times ^^ Stunning visuals and great soundtrack! One of the best games I played on this Ludum Dare!


@who Thank you so much! I lost many hours of sleep so I'm glad you appreciate it! :sob:

@save-sloth-studios Thank you! Minesweeper-like is my favorite genre :P

@bentekiller Thank you! Yeah after coming back to it it's pretty darn difficult right at the start X - x
Maybe I'll try to squeeze in a practice mode with only a few jellies :thinking:

@rhewid Thank you so much for the kind words!! I too have hit many innocent jellies ; _ ;

This is amazing! Solid gameplay, the visuals are great. I love the different color themes each section. And the music changing intensity depending on water level is a very nice touch.
Really feels like a full game. Definitely one of the best games this time. Great job!

Wow what a great game! I've just played for two hours straight, haha xD I really like how it looks deceptively close to the classic minesweeper, but the strategies in both games are very different.
Sometimes I felt like I had to rely on luck a bit too much (seaweeds only give very basic information), but otherwise I had tons of fun playing. Congrats also for the music, which was still ok for me after my very long playing session.

The idea and execution in this one are both incredible. This almost feels like a ready to release game. The audio wasn't too distracting, and the art is simple and lovely!

Really cool puzzle game! I'm a big fan of Mine Sweeper, so it was cool to see this clever twist on it. It's interesting how you have imperfect information, but more flags than you need, so you sorta have to narrow it down as much as you can and then try to flag the ones that seem most likely. I will say that guessing can become a bit of a crapshoot by the end, especially if you get an unlucky board pattern. I wonder if the game could use some extra rule or piece of information to help narrow it down, something like jellyfish never spawning next to each other, or maybe a different color of seaweed to indicate multiple adjacent jellyfish (but not the exact number). In terms of the presentation, the game looks and sounds phenomenal. It has a very calming atmosphere. I also love how the music gets more intense as the water level rises! Overall, an enjoyably tricky little puzzle game. Great work!

The dynamic audio here is great! I really like how you are forced to make choices (like 50/50s in minesweeper) but the game is actually designed to account for that and give you leeway. Nice and relaxing puzzler.

Really great take on minesweeper! Excellent amount of polish, great work all around.

@sharploaded @chocolat-endive @sozey @superpokeunicorn @kemp @archangel Thank you all so so much!! <3
If you want to see my thoughts on adding a new rule to make the harder levels more enjoyable, check my next post down!

Overall a pretty fun game. It seemed really polished and had a great difficulty to it. The music switch had a nice touch!

What a phenomenal entry! I loved the art, and you absolutely nailed the theme. I really think you are onto something with remixing the minesweeper mechanics :smile: Keep making games \o/

Damn this is the best twist on minesweeper ever. I really loved the music, the visuals and the overall CRISPness of the game. I was so happy to win my first time

Really interesting take on the minesweeper stuff. I'm not personally a fan of a ruleset that doesn't provide perfect information, but it was done in a really interesting way. I liked the strategic aspect of spending extra clicks on tiles you *knew* couldn't be jellies to look for the nice fishies when you were near the top. I got to 46, and that already felt rather lucky (though I died in a very silly way). I agree than an extra rule would be nice. Once you get to rows with 4 or 5 where there are no hints you could have it's kind of eh.

This is such a cool idea and it's executed very well! This game does risk/reward very well, as finding seashells is super important for letting you make mistakes and keep the water low. Feeling maybe some DemonCrawl inspiration?

The graphics are perfect for the overall mood and the game is presented in such a clean way, it really feels like a complete experience.

My best right now is 41, and while I do think there could maybe be some more mechanics to help with the longevity or to avoid repetitiveness, it's a very solid entry!

This is a really fun game although it's a little frustrating that you often have to just guess. The music and sound effects are amazing. I especially enjoy how the music builds with the water level. Great work on this one.

@sn4pi @frozenfire92 @quite-good @nardandas @chaoscomposer @bentglasstube Thank you all for playing!!
I really appreciate all the words of encouragement and enjoyment <3

Also @chaoscomposer I had never heard of DemonCrawl but OMG I just looked it up and I may have to get it XD

**~~ So I want to talk about LUCK, and how adding a new rule to the game might make later levels much more enjoyable. ~~**

I've had a few ideas so far (a few of which @superpokeunicorn also thought of)! The main issue is when there are several jellies grouped up, there is NO way to determine what is where, other than digging randomly and hoping to start eliminating blank tiles, or revealing jellies so that you can drain and then not worry about them during submission. To sum it up:

**Issue: A horizontal cluster of jellyfish can be virtually impossible to resolve, even if you take a few guesses.**

It's important to note that a vertical cluster of jellyfish isn't too much of an issue, because we have the row indicators. Also important to note that revealing tiles around a known jellyfish is almost never worth it, because it will always be at least a seaweed, which doesn't give us any new information to help resolve anything. I think we want a solution that encourages uncovering potentially dangerous tiles to gain info.

**Potential Solutions:**
**A. Column Indicators:** Like the rows, numbers along the top telling how many jellies are in every *column*
**B. Jelly Spacing:** Jellies will never be directly adjacent, vertically or horizontally (diagonals are ok)
**C. Starfish:** When a seaweed is near 3+ jellies, it is a starfish instead
**D. New Ability:** Something like drain but focusing on info gathering. Maybe it lets you place a 3x3 grid somewhere tell you how many jellies are in that area? Maybe combine it with **A** and let you place an indicator on a column of your choosing?

Now I'm personally leaning towards **C**, as it takes what would otherwise be useless seaweed around a known jelly, and turns it into a GOLDMINE of info. Finding seaweed next to a jelly would mean that there can only be 1 more jelly in the 7 remaining tiles around it! 3 jellies lined up would also become incredibly clear. Or maybe this works well with **B**, as you could safely pop the 4 tiles adjacent to a known jelly.

I can mess around with the other ideas too, but this is all still just swirling around in my head! Anyone who reads this, please let me know what you think of these solutions, or present your own! I think the first couple levels feel really good, but there is definitely something missing to make the harder puzzles fun and less of a luck-of-the-draw situation! I really do want to strive to make this game the most enjoyable experience possible. Thank you all for playing!! <3

@nate954 I think the starfish indicator is a great solution! I think having column indicators by themselves at all times would be a bit too strong, so I'd agree if you went that route you might need to combine it with another ability of some sort.

@nate954 The starfish idea is great. It reminds me of a minigame in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword which was very minesweeper like, but where you got ranges instead of specific numbers (e.g. there are 2-4 bad outcomes near here). It gives a little more balance than the pure luck that happens with the seaweed as you have it now.

I honestly think with a bit of polish you could easily sell this game.

One other thing I meant to mention is that my go-to strategy is to flag everything once I have enough flags to do so since there seems to be no penalty for flagging a safe tile. With that strategy I got to 103 points before I had had too much beer and couldn't focus well D:

Excellent game! Innovative gameplay, good art style and interface, and very fun to play! There are still some game mechanic not very clear such as clicking red jellyfish did nothing, and sometimes it's a bit "unfair" under minesweeper standard, but it's just some minor confusion maybe just to me. Great entry! Well done!

LD really brings out the coolest games in folks. Fun idea and cranked out in such a small time frame. Well done!

For jams, it's a really nice QoL addition to include volume controls. Your game ran a bit on the loud side and the volume scaling with water level made the audio range pretty wide. Even if it's just a master volume slider, that can be nice for folks.

Uncovering seashells felt a little weird sometimes. I quickly found out that seashells are worse than other squares in that they're neither seaweed or blanks, so they gave no information about adjacent jellies. Perhaps removing them from the board and replacing them with more information might make them feel a little better?

I really liked the mashup of picross and minesweeper. I'd love to see this combo explored more and it got my brain juices going thinking about other ways to mix and match these two. Great idea!

Congrats on finishing the jam!

@yulotomorrow Thank you so much for playing!! It's definitely a bit unfair haha, sorry for the trouble! Also if by red jellyfish you mean the shells, they unlock the "drain" button so you can lower the water! I should probably make a tutorial to help explain some of the rules! Thanks so much!!

@harrison-dunn Thanks so much! Sorry about the volume, I'll at the very least try to get a build with a mute button out in the next few days! Also yeah I was originally going to try to have the shells disappear when you collected them but I couldn't get it to look right, I'll see what I can do! Thanks so much for the feedback and for playing!

This is a really polished game! I feel as though it could maybe tackle the jam theme a little better - my actions don't delay anything, and if I'm being really picky they're actually what prompts the tide to come in to begin with - but it's definitely in the right ballpark in that you'll lose sooner or later and playing well is what staves that off. The actual gameplay is lovely. My only quibble there would be the heavy element of luck that comes in later (four jellyfish in a horizontal row of five tiles, for example), though I suppose if there were some guaranteed way of working out how many were where then failure wouldn't be inevitable.

I do like your idea of a starfish to indicate clusters of 3+ jellies. It might still involve a bit of probing around to work out what sides they were on, so wouldn't totally break the game, and more than anything it would avoid the situation I ran into a few times where sections of a level were more seaweed than anything. I also wonder if the shells could be reworked a little so they didn't stop a tile from helping you. Obviously finding one is a win overall, but occasionally they pop up in places that would have really helped to work out where everything else was.

I've played this for waaay longer than I thought I would.

Things I really like:

- Fading in multiple tracks as the level rises, that's a really clever way to bring attention and also tention into the game
- The music in itself is very cool, and fits the game well
- Tetris-style palette changes are cool really help bring some variety in otherwise very similar levels.
- The gameplay itself is a great idea. It's fun to explore the patterns and see how few digs you can get away with and still get it right.

One of the things I discovered pretty late was that you had way more flags than there were jellies, so you didn't could mark non-jellies without much penalty except maybe missing a drain powerup. Maybe it could have been communicated better somehow that it's fine to mark tiles that are not jellies?

Having the drain powerups carry over to the next level helps keeping the game fun from the start as you want to save up for the later harder levels, but it also means that you don't really get a feel for the ramping up in difficulty until it's really hits you and you're out of drains.

Also, the sound effects feel really nice. Submitting a level feels great.

It's kind of weird to put this as a feedback on a jam game, but I really missed being able to save the game and return to it later.

Overall a great game. Definitely on of my top three this jam.

Oh, and section Q was just ridiculously hard.


I know it seems that I already left a comment on this game, but I'm the other half of the chocolat-endive team. I just wanted to say that I have enjoyed your game too! I quite agree with what people here told you about some little things that can be improved, but it's overall a super good and lovely little game. One of the best LD50 game I've played so far.

By the way, I'm impressed by the music, the loop is not really long, but it's not boring or annoying. It just fits the game perfectly. That's not an easy thing.

I can't stop coming back to this game. Does it end after section Z or does it go on forever?

@damonwakes Thanks so much for playing! I agree with your feedback on the shells, I think I'll try to make them disappear from the board when you collect them, leaving behind a blank space/seaweed/etc.

@johanhelsing Holy moly you got INSANELY far!! Definitely the highest score I've seen so far! Totally agree with all your feedback, and I'll try to get saving/loading done for the post-jam version :P Thank you so much for playing!!

@chocolat-endive Thank you!! I really appreciate the kind words. And I'm really glad you like the music :)

@bentglasstube Haha thanks so much! I'll have an updated post-jam version done soon with some new stuff to play around with! Also, it goes on forever! However, I never really expected anyone to get that far, and the difficulty gets insanely unfair. I'll try to fine-tune the difficulty curve later in the game, to make it actually enjoyably infinite. Thanks again for stopping by!

As far as LD games go this year, this is one that I keep coming back to! Absolutely love the choice of sound design and overlapping music as the tide gets increasingly more perilous. The music is awesome and makes me nostalgic for the Gameboy Color days. Did you make it yourself @nate954? I also really love grid puzzles in general so it absolutely blows my mind that you successfully managed to combine both minesweeper and picross into a functioning game (I'm not sure if that's ever been done before?). I will say, at first I wasn't sure what to do with all the weeds because they don't tell you how many jellyfish are adjacent to them. Then I learned to take that for what it is. My solution was to use resources strategically in order to cheese my way to the end (ie: take some hits, use shells, then dump all my leftover flags). I guess my only gripe is that sometimes it gets tricky to distinguish between shells, flags, jellyfish and even weeds. Section J is especially notorious for that.

This game was incredible! I played it for much longer than I thought I would and truely had a lot of fun with it the whole time. Many Ludum Dare games I really find fun, but would not want to play for longer than a few minutes. This game I feel like I could play for hours XD

The mechanis are very clever. It is kind of like minesweeper, but without the 100% certainty. Sometimes you just have to take the right risks to get information that can help you further. The game nicely helps you to do this with its shell system, meaning that if you happen to hit a jelly it is not the end of the world. I think it was balanced really well, such that hitting a jelly hurts, but is not completely devestating. I also loved the art. I have a soft spot for pixel art, and this is exactly the kind that I like. On top of that the audio is great, with rising tension as the water rises. That you were able to all of this at such a high level in a compo game is truely awe inspiring I think :D

I have two really small points of feedback. One is that I did not realise at first that I could place more flags than there were jellies. Given that this plays very much like minesweeper I assumed this mechanic would be the same as in minesweeper. I know the number of flags is on the screen and I figured it out after some runs, but just something I noticed :) Secondly is the rules around the shells. I think the entire game had a very strict set of rules, with the number of shells in each row given and the well-defined meaning of seaweed. However it was unclear to me at first what it meant for there to be a shell somewhere. I assumed that a shell also meant that there would be no neighbouring jellies, but this quickly turned out to be false.

I think this game is amazing and by far the best game of the jam I have seen. Maybe this is also because these kind of puzzle/strategy games are right up my alley ^_^ If you decide to release it as a full game sometime I would probably buy it :D Really amazing job!

oo, further I got for now is section C. Really loved the color shifts as you switched sections. I wanted to point out how sometimes you just don't know where the jellies are if too many are grouped horizontally, but looks like you've got some ideas on that already. nice job!

@whirlguy Thank you so much! I'm really glad you love the music! Yep I made it all myself! I kinda just started throwing the mechanics together and was incredibly surprised when it was enjoyable to play! I'll be making some changes for a post-jam version, so thanks for the feedback!!

@wuppos Thanks so much!! I'm so happy you like it so much :blush: Thank you for the feedback aswell! Keep an eye out for the post-jam version! It will have some new stuff to play around with!

@aeveis Thank you so much for playing!! And I'm glad you like the color shifting, it took me multiple hours to implement :smile:

It was fun game. At first, I was thinking about Minesweeper but it turns out it's a bit harder than that.

Looks like this game is all about blank tile since it tells me there's nothing around it.

As other guys already said, it would be great if there's some other indicator to guess the position of jellies. Great work!