As usual a really polished game. You probably already know I love your entries :wink:
Now you have to tell me how do you actually manage to last so long as to score millions of points? I tried my best but most of the time I end up with an unlucky path and being overwhelmed by those critters out there :smile:

I have no clue how to get high scores here, but the leader board let's me guess that there are tactics involved I have not understood yet :D

When I saw the art I was immediately reminded of Claustrowordia from a few ldjams ago and then I realized that this game is from the same person!

Looks and feels very polished!

@tanis @bumble Well I'm no expert (it seems) as my current visible record is 100kish and the current leader is a 33 mil. I did manage about 3-5 mil before adding leaderboards though. You can kinda see my strategy (and also my best scored run) on the gameplay video above. Basically the further from the start you go, the more points the enemies are. But of course more of them meaning more trouble too. There are also some major powerful (and expensive) abilities that only start appearing few screenfuls off the start. All the score gains are multiplied by your visible multiplier (duh 🙄) which increases up to x64 every kill and resets if you take damage. The score gains are also multiplied by your current free space so it might be worth not wasting everything you have if you don't really need it.

@antti-haavikko man... I kept trying ... 78k is my best so far.. this is getting addictive :smile:

Moi, moi. Nice mechanic, good execution. Did not get on the leaderboard.

The game got me a little confused as to what i'm supposed to be doing, but it definitely looked and sounded insanely good especially for
compo! so polished!

A really polished game, everything is super enjoyable, a little complex at the start and we don't know how to make the first moves, but afterward it's super enjoyable, well done to you

Awesome game. Got about 12mil points on my 2nd attempt which would have put me on the leaderboard, but it crashed. I think I got kinda overpowered early on which made fun, that's a good problem to have just means it needs some balancing. I kept wishing I could zoom out so maybe that could be an upgrade, also a 2nd enemy even if it's just a larger version of the first one would help tackle ability scaling.

Fantastic game. So much game feel and juice. Your take on exploration is on point, and coherent with the theme. It took me a while to get everything (and I'm still not sure if I do get all the mechanics), but it keeps me coming back :) Very addictive.

@chobochun Dang, too bad about the crash. Which version was it and how did it crash? How long was the run, wondering if there could be a memory leak. 🤔 Zooming out was definitely one powerup I had in mind early on but guess I forgot about it. Yeah new enemies would be a obvious addition. They already vary in stats (and size) a bit and I think to warrant a different look they would need some unique ability too.

@gastricsparrow Good to hear! The mechanics of course seem obvious to me as I came up with them. There is only a handful of them few are really needed to get going.

Amazing! Very polished game. Fun to play. Nice art style. Awesome music and sound. Great job!

Game was great. Maybe could be less repetitive with increase travel time while coming back. Still the concept is cool and well executed congrats !

This was another polished entry as always :D I loved the idea of limited space as in bytes but also space in the way you can get cut off with your own paths. I think it would have been nice if the moves refreshed when I returned to a computer before I expended all of the moves because to me the computers felt like safe havens? but then the bot went all the way back around. There was definitely a point where I felt like the bugs were doing nothing to me because I got all these powerups and then all of the sudden I felt overwhelmed by the sudden increase of the bugs, I'm not sure if it was an rng thing. Overall this was super addicting and polished, it was kinda funny how the music goes out of tune every time you meet another bug.

I loved to strategize how to use the movement in the most safe ways, audio fits it very well

Sometimes game just flows easily, but randomly you can get clapped when 3 huge packs of enemies spawn at the same time around you

Great entry!

Yeah, that was kinda good. Kinda addictive too. It was a bit demotivating to realize you used int (signed, mind you!) for the high scores. It was even more demotivating when the game crashed before I could submit my score of -2,000,000,000. :(

On a more serious note, a freaking great entry. I honestly spent an hour playing it. :grin:

I'd say the scanner upgrade (so you can see the spawns) was a bit overpowered. Once I got it there was essentially no way I could die as long as I planned my moves carefully, only tackling a single pack at a time. Then it was smooth sailing (well, as smooth as it gets with the 10 or so FPS I was getting when some seriously huge packs started spawning :sweat_smile:) all the way to the score range of 2^31, when the aforementioned loss of motivation happened and I suicided, promptly crashing the game.

Oops. 😅 I’ve fallen to that same int score issue so many times yet always keep doing it thinking ”no one is gonna reach billions”. Nicely done though. And yeah, balancing is hard. Of course being overpowered is fun but not if it gets boring and loses all sense of difficulty. So the crash happened after dying? Might be due to that negative score. 🤷‍♀️

Okay, okay, I got this! What the game _really_ is about is who gets closest to 2,147,483,648 without going over! That's actually pretty darn hard if you ask me!

Yeah, the crash (or freeze, really) happened after dying with a negative score. I was also having horrible FPS due to the sheer number of enemies, so it might also be related to simply too much stuff going on.

Also, I don't think the "heal when you activate a new node" actually works. Should it heal when you connect to a new computer or when you buy an upgrade? Neither seemed to work for me.

@juutis Yea yea, price is right rules. 😂 That heal should trigger only when entering a machine for a fisrt time. I recall testing it but of course I’m not 100% it does work.

Very nice, well done.

Amazing! I like it a lot! Really original theme use!

Well done! Take a candy! :candy:

Nicely done @juutis, I’d be surprised if someone snags that from you. 🎉


Realized that the multi actually doesn’t seem to cap to 64 like I intended. No wonder it can get out of hand. Not the only issue though… 😅

Looks amazing and the audio is fantastic! It's very impressive for a compo. It feels nice to play, and I like the take on the theme. I feel like it's maybe missing some meaningful choices for the player, but it's probably very subjective.
Thanks for the game!

Like right off the bat, the menu is so great. Displaying the high score & the cute character that looks at your mouse!

I love how the game does not even need a tutorial, in fact it was a lot of fun to sit and figure out how it works and how to not instantly die. I personally love score attack games, So I will be trying to get that 5th spot from "Emilllll". I am getting closer and tuning my strategy, so watch out for "DevJeeper" haha.

The gameplay is super satisfying, the amount of juice you managed to add is incredible. I love the audio effects that happen during combat and I really like the particle effect when the enemies die.

Overall a fantastic entry!

@simon-rahnasto You've basically summed up my whole design philosophy. I try to make mechanically so simple that they don't need much explanation yet deep enough that there is interesting stuff and strategies to discover. I'm also a big fan score games and juice. Juicing up the base game loop "mundane actions" like killing enemies so much that they're just satisfying to do by themselves adds so much.

I always have a good time with your games! I like how the web you create can end up dooming yourself as you're unable to cross lines you've already made. Great use of the theme! I think the other computers are generated at random after a certain number of nodes are created? my strategy for a while was to just spam the nodes all next to each other to avoid taking up too much space... that seemed to work.

I know it's not the default unity blue background, but I *really* wish there was a little more decorations. I know you don't want decorations to take attention away from the game, but I think some faded circuit board lines, or ones and zeroes, (something computery?) could go a long way.

As always, the characters are super cute (and I love how the character looks at the mouse on the title screen) and the music is a bop too! I was a bit distracted by all the Yoshi sound effects though... Interesting use of samples. I recall your previous LD game having Yoshi sounds in the music too.

Overall, this was a very well made game! Great work.