You know, even though you had to scratch so many things because of bugs, you still created something nice :D

I personally enjoy puzzle games a lot and what you created was entertaining. I got stuck at some point because I couldn't solve the puzzle, but it was nice nonetheless!

Only critique point I might have is that the music sounds like a sci-fi raygun charging up :sob:

But I know the stuggle of making music for compo games. So although I don't like it that much, I still respect that you made music at all and didn't leave the game silent!

Didn't manage to beat Thread despite all the effort. A nice entry overall, I also loved the sound effects and the humming. Nice idea!

I found it a bit hard to understand, but slowly got the hang of it. Well done for submitting a compo tho! Even with bugs, its still impressive.

A really neat puzzle! I liked the aesthetics, both sound and graphics. I don't know of many puzzle games that has this cool of a mood. And you accomplished it with very few elements.

I wasn't smart enough to get past the level marked "Omen", but I enjoyed my time while playing! The siren sound effect and abstract art made the game feel kind of spooky and post apocalyptic for me. The initial on-boarding is not very intuitive but once I got past the first level and learned what to do, I was able to complete several levels fairly quickly. I'm sorry that you had to give up on the story and collection aspect, but I think your main game play loop is solid. Congrats!

Surprisingly challenging and elegant! I love how the feels like it has so much depth in it. Also do I see webassembly? so cool!

Interesting puzzle concept, once you figure out how it works!
I liked the art, reminds me Meteos (NDS).

I missed having better feedback, sometimes the results just pop up.

The music fits the game really well, but unfortunately, it did give me a headache after a few rounds.
Nice entry!

Great concept. It also has solid visual and sound design. Don't give up on development!

Took me a while to figure out, but definitely worth it. I don't think I've already played a game with these exact mechanics before, this is a nice idea!

( You might want to hear how the web version sounds, in a chromium-based browser :D I would have suggested a workaround to this, but it seems the source code archive is incomplete (e.g I see refs to "screen.h", "game.h" which dont't seem to be included in the archive))

Nice puzzle game. It will melt your brain for sure. You have to plan your moves to work towards your objective without screwing yourself up by making unintented moves.

One great improvement/polish would be to make a small animation when destroying a row/column and collapsing the others (kind of like candy crush I reckon) because sometimes it is a bit hard to follow what happens when you unintentinally make more moves than what you wanted.

Also I think I had a bug on this level, don't know why it didn't validate

Its not a big deal that you didn't fully get to explore the mechanic you wanted to, there's always opportunity to try again with that! But the presentation of the game was very nice; minimalist pixel art plus some fairly atmospheric music framed by a crt-like screen looks super cool

@ace17 I downloaded chrome to check out the audio issue you mentioned but it sounds the same to me as on firefox. Several folks have mentioned audio issues but I'm afraid I have not been able to experience the problem to understand. The music is pretty experimental so perhaps it's just not to your liking?

As far as the completeness of the source archive, the missing things are in my LD game library: https://git.sr.ht/~bentglasstube/gam which is included as a git submodule in the game repo as well. I guess the source archive doesn't capture that well, sorry.

@petitlu The problem is that since I didn't mean to show you the solution directly, I didn't really design the UI for that and so the pattern has run off the screen and there is a fourth symbol (probably ^) to the right that you cannot see. This ruins the Omen stage unfortunately and more or less make the game unbeatable :(

@bentglasstube disclaimer: I'm an audio programmer, and I really like your music. Sure, this is pretty experimental, but hey, experimentation is what game jams are for, isn't it ? :-)

I recognize the audio issue because I had the same with my web builds (C++ + SDL2 + Emscripten), when running inside Chrome (no issues with Firefox). What I'm hearing is output buffer overrun, meaning that the sound callback gets called, but the audio buffer hasn't been completely filled yet. This is highly dependent on the browser, especially, the audio buffer size : the bigger the buffer is, the less likely you are to experience underruns (but the more latency you will have).

To this day, the only workaround I know is to manually increase the audio buffer size when opening the SDL audio device. 4096 bytes should be enough.

If you're interested, I can post a recording done with a mic, so you can hear what some of us are hearing.

Great screen design and an interesting blend of match‑3 and Tetris. The puzzles are genuinely engaging, and it's clear how to solve them. As a direction for improvement, you could add more expressive visual effects to make it clearer what disappeared from the board. Overall, a very good concept and game!

Very cool idea, unfortunately I wasn't smart enough to get past this level, maybe some tips to help out the player could be something to be added in the future. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this one, good job!

Didn't manage to play it :sweat_smile: the pattern was never visible for me

A clever and atmospheric puzzle game with a unique row/column rotation mechanic. The minimalist art and experimental music create a moody vibe, and while the UI and audio may need tweaks, the core gameplay is engaging and challenging. A solid, brain-teasing compo entry with a lot of character.

@ace17 Thanks for the explanation, I definitely have not encountered that for myself and I will make a note to adjust that in the future. Hopefully I can find a computer where I can observe the problem to ensure it gets fixed :sweat:

@bluedandelion The general strategy is to count the glyphs and make sure you don't get yourself into an impossible situation. I'll put a detailed explanation for the puzzle you shared in a spoiler (but they are randomly generated so you aren't likely to see it again)

!> You have 4 moons so you need to be careful with those. The only way to get down to the exactly one that you need for the solution is to eliminate three of them. Since the pattern is four tall, you'll have to eliminate a row of three. The same applies to the mountain glyph. With two rows eliminated, the height will be exactly four, so the rest of the clears will have to be columns. Continuing the counting, there are eight tree glyphs (all extra), six extra sun glyphs, and 12 extra water glyphs. So, you will have to clear a column of suns and two columns of water to start. Then clear the two aforementioned rows. This will leave you with a three by four grid with the glyphs you want and the trees. The trick is to be careful to not chain any row clears with the trees when doing this since you need all four rows for the solution.

@xlambein Sorry, the first puzzle wants you to clear the board entirely, so there is nothing shown for the solution on that one. Hopefully that is what you meant.

Everyone else, thank you for the very kind comments. It's easy to feel disappointed when you don't make the game you wanted to make and not realize that what you did make is still something folks will enjoy. I do plan to finish the rest of the game at some point :smile:

I'm amazed by the graphics in this game, I hope you can fully implement the game, I liked the puzzles, you're great, thank you for everything!

I totally get barely getting something out, I spent most of this jam just wrangling a new framework into doing what I needed. This was a neat puzzle though! I like how you have to plan ahead around the number of glyphs you remove so you get the right count at the end. And the pixel art is really gorgeous.

One thing that would be nice is a rewind or undo button. It's hard to keep track of where everything's aligned, so it's easy to accidentally remove more rows than you planned to. Granted, rewind features aren't necessarily straightforward to implement in a crunch.

Finished all the puzzles (last one was pretty challenging!):


This is a super cool concept! And implementation! I love the overall vibes.

My only complaints are that the music's droning bass gave me anxiety, and Omen betrayed me.

I'm sorry to hear about the issues that got in your way, but I'm really glad you published this, it's very good.

I do hope you finish it at some point!

very cool that you made support for linux. liked the retro pixel neon vibe. puzzles were challenging, got stuch for a while but got how it works, though did mode it too far. on second level I thought that made a wrong move, but it unlocked the next level for some reason, but Im not sure, old level disappeared instantly so I could not validate what I saw.