Out Of Memory by adam-gould
It doesn't work all too well embedded in the tiny window on this site - if you're going to play it embedded, please use full screen or go to the alternate embedded upload.
Out Of Memory is a puzzle game, where your goal is to press big shiny buttons using robots to do your bidding! Unfortunately, the robots aren't all too clever, and their memories wipe every 10 seconds. So load them up with instructions, 10 seconds at a time, and see what happens!
It can get pretty tricky later on, but I assure you every puzzle can be solved!
| Alternate embedded link | https://gamejolt.com/games/outofmemory/754494 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/out-of-memory |
Ratings
| Overall | 33th | 4.037⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 51th | 3.929⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 101th | 3.714⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 174th | 3.741⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 263th | 3.389⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 70th | 3.741⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 233th | 2.62⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 168th | 3.444⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 14🗳️ | 15🗨️ |
I had trouble solving level 8 due to lacking of forward modules however. XD
Together with attractive sound tracks, the game is quite well polished after all.
By the way there is no strict time limit of each level, which might no fit the theme well (I guess that it might be too hard to design such good puzzles if there is a strict 10s limit?)
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1608912292?t=6h56m47s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
:purple_heart: :dart: :frog:
And then, holy cow as level 8 hard. I probably spent 20-30 minutes on it, was almost convinced it was impossible for a while, I kept coming up with solutions that needed 1 more move or 1 more u-turn. Finally beat it though! Thank goodness the final level was not as hard (only took one try there).

Great game! Love the concept, nice ramp up of difficulty of puzzles. I wish giving orders was a little more convenient - either keyboard shortcuts, or just select robot, then click order after order and they go into the next slot. Nice sound and music too.
Awesome Puzzle Game, had tons of fun with it.
If you want to keep going with it, consider a second bar that shows the current action stack of the robot that's hovered.
Thanks for making this game :D
This is excellent. One of my favorites so far.
I love programming games, and this is a pretty good one. This is a concept worth having a go at in terms of making a larger product.
In terms of criticisms I will say the game gets very difficult very quickly. Level 8 in particular is extremely tricky. The ramp up needs to be slower I think or you're going to lose a lot of people too early. The UX in level 6 needs to be explained better also. At first I was trying to complete the level in 1 "bar" and when I couldn't do it I'd just restart the level. Obviously the solution requires you to click "Keep Going" but (for whatever reason) my brain just wasn't processing that properly which meant it took me way more tries that necessary to work it out.
Even though I criticized it, I think the massive difficulty spike can't really be worked around given the time limit. You *have* to ramp up the complexity of the levels to show off the depth of the puzzling!
Overall really nice entry. My most played in LD51, if only because I'm dumb as a bag of hammers and it took me an hour to finish :D
Your enthusiasm on the stream made my weekend! I'll check yours out tomorrow when I get the opportunity.
Overall I found this to be a great puzzle game, I like the parallel movement of the bots in some levels that allows for some interesting optimization of the number of moves. The music and sounds were great (not driving me crazy at all after more then half an hour of staring at the same puzzle), although the stacking of the move sound when several bots are moving at the same time was a bit harsh. The art style is clear and simple, and I personally quite like how the lines on the floor look when lit up. The puzzles were reasonably challenging (until 8) and I felt that they did a good job of introducing what the different mechanics were and how to use them.
I agree with some of the other comments here that it was not clearly explained that not completing the puzzle in 10 moves was fine, and you just had to move on to another set of instructions. I did the same thing that I saw mentioned above and restarted a few times trying to get both buttons pressed in level 6. In the end I thought that the game was letting me get a less then perfect score and move on to the next level, it was a surprise to just get to continue with the remaining moves in the same level.
I quite like this style of pseudo-programming game, and I think that this was a great implementation of one. Very well done!
It's a fantastic concept executed very well. The only quirk really is the player not realising that they can accomplish their goals in stages instead of just the 10 allotted moves.
Most of my feedback is about the UI:
- The visual selection for selecting units and controls is pretty subtle. I would prefer something like a huge green circle or glow.
- I think drag and drop of commands into slots would be more intuitive than click to select and click to place.
- It would be nice if the buttons for available actions was physically closer to the timeline of robot actions so that my mouse doesn't have to move as far.
- Gray buttons looks like they are disabled. It might be good for 'Go' and other buttons to be green.
- 'Keep Going' sounded like either "go to the next level" or "try this level again". It really surprised me when it continued the current level without resetting anything. I would recommend not even asking whether the player wants to keep going but instead have it happen automatically.
- Cables and squares don't seem to do anything. I think it would be simpler to just have circles on the tiles that you need to press. As is it looks kind of like you are supposed to place square boxes on square tiles.
- Since robots pick up and drop box in front of them, I thought the robot would hold the box in front of them while carrying it. So for level 6 I was worried about the lasers shooting my box if I stopped in front of a laser.
Unfortunately there were some things that stopped it from being great. The UI was pretty swish but a little clunky to use - perhaps dragging and dropping the icons would have been better? It was also very not.clear to me that you could.program more than one 10 second set for each robot, which I think really changed the dynamic of the game. There were some pretty gnarly difficulty spikes, especially levels 6 and 8 (which I got stuck on).
I think there's the base of a great game here somewhere - perhaps removing the 10 second limit and just having to plan out the robots with a limited instruction set would be better? Potentially with more ways for the robots to interact - in level 6 I tried to have one robot pick up another, which could be cool.
In general though, it's a very solid entry, especially for a compo game - it feels very complete and put together! Good job 😁