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A really well polished game. The game mechanic is fun and has a smooth build-up of difficulty.

I definitly felt spurned on by the comments in the livestream chat. Very original and charming too. 

Yes, It can be really tough to balance indicating the mechanic visually (as a loop) whilst also ensuring readability. I suppose for a first time player it's really important to learn the mechanic and then as people play more the focus is on readability. 

Perhaps a loop that wraps around the screen could work? As long as it's clear it loops and you can see all the chars on the screen. Maybe something like this HTML carousel demo. Except pressing left/right would move it by one character in each direction, highlighting the middle character that is to be set and showing all the other words before/after?

That's a really smart solution for algorithm. I was also surprised with how quickly I could work out the word combinations in the browser using JS and how I didn't need to optimise it at all. 

This game is very creative and unique. 

There was quite a bit of guesswork with the timing of when elements would appear/dissapear.  I wonder if there is a way to broadcast that to the player somehow, perhaps using a timer or indication of how long something will be enabled?

I like the concept but it could do with a smoother difficulty curve. Right from the start getting into orbit and timing everything correctly is very challenging. 

I agree with your feedback regarding more polish and a highscore. I think adding a highscore would really increase replayability and give something for others to compete against.

Thank you for your feedback!

In regards to scoring I was inspired by the way Balatro builds up very big scores. My concern of showing the score before the end of the round would be the player might over optimise their score as much as possible before they submit it, make them spend more time per round then what I think should be ideal. 

I think it might be possible to work out a theoretical max score, but as the letters are randomly generated I am not sure how computationally expensive it would be to calculate the highest possible score with 15 random letters and about 170k dictionary words.

I do think the method of scoring could be more easy to visualise though. Currently it is a base score of 1 multiplied by the length of each word so it can get very high. I was thinking it might be simpler to have a score of 100 for each word multiplied by the word length instead but I don't think it rewards long words as well as it should.

Ah yes. I had a similar concern that it would not be clear that the wheel goes clockwise, as the letters on the bottom of the wheel would appear to go in reverse. I had a lot of Twitch streamers play the game and thankfully that wasn't an issue. I did consider having in addition to a wheel a horizontal text box below that would show what had been submitted but I thought it might clutter and confuse the UI a bit more. 

This is a mockup I put together quickly to demonstrate:

With the list of words it also took me a long time to find a decent one. First day I worked with this which had 466k words, many of them slang, outdated or abbreviations. The one I use now has 172k words which is much better (specifically used for word games). I removed a few hundred words that were less than 3 characters but the tricky part was removing all the profanity and proper nouns which involved finding other filters online and a lot of manual work.

Wow, it's a surprise to see another Loople game! It's really interesting to see how differently we took the Loop + Wordle idea. 

This is very creative and impressive given that it was built in 12 hours. Only one thing I would suggest would be to have the base of the letters aligned for legibility. Especially as some letters are a bit ambiguous at certain angles. Z and N at 90 degrees look alike, as do W/M in some cases.

For the English language data set, I would also recommend this website which I used for my game which I found very helpful. 

A really fun game that I found myself playinng over and over. I was a bit hesitant to make loops to build up a higher score at the start and just focussed on surviving. Once I figure out exactly how the grid movement worked I built up a bit more confidence to play a bit more aggresively. 

Yeah, I keep meaning to add a tutorial/help to my games as sometimes the game page gets overlooked. It would be ideal but a lot of the time it adds more development time that I don't have. 

Ah, my apologies. I didn't realise there was a game page. This is the first game I've reviewed that was downloadable, the other browser games take me to the game page to play the game. It makes more sense now, I'll update my review.

The game looks great but I find the controls are quite difficult.

I really like the idea of having a looping golf course but I think it is quite an under utilised feature in this level. Perhaps having multiple entry/exit points or different routes that increase the difficulty but with the benefit of requiring few strokes?

Wow, I tried different stratergies to try to catch out the AI but it was too smart.

I like the idea but I found movement to be quite tricky.

Very creative and satisfying to light up all the notes and hear the music build up!

It's very rare to find a game a game like this that is relaxing and feels so transcendent without feeling pretentious. The intentisty of visuals and sound is incredible.

Wow. This game really feels magical.

It reminds me of one my favourite levels in Dishonered 2 'A Crack in the Slab'. It's a really strong mechanic and well executed.

This game is absoulotly insance (in the best possible way)! The retro Nintendo 64 era aesthetic is so spot on.

Got bitten on the first tooth! The game really does a good job of building up tension .

I have to say the 3D design is really incredible given the tight deadline. 

Who doesn't love a good die/dice mechanic?

Visually well polished and the SFX have a lot of character to them. Having the board open up was really exciting to see and a joy to get introduced to new mechanics gradually. It felt like the game had a lot to give.

It took my a while to figure out how to interact with the game. Perhaps clearer instructions either in-game or in the submission page will help. If there is a way to move/remove or clear command chip that would be really helpful, either through keyboard shortcuts or UI elements.

The idea is smart and has potential but it would also be good to have some improvements to usability.

Hi, thanks for playing. Unfortunately this game is not optimised for mobile but if you are on a desktop it should be ok. If you still have any problems please let me know.

This reminded me of the really fun mechanic beat blocks in Mario games. I think what they did really well is clearly telegraph when the platforms would change:

Perhap using a clear beat in the background and or adding some visual indication of what will happen next, perhaps using a flashing or pulsing animation would help. 

I found myself staring at the countdown and trying to move in my periphial vision. Also it was not always so clear when to jump as the countdown would show 0 seconds left for a certain ammount of time?

It's a cute game and I really hope you explore this idea more!

I agree, it would be more intuitive I think to click on the door.

I went into this game completely blind, the twist at the end of the first round was really surprising and fun and I really enjoyed it. Some way to keep track of progress would be nice. Perhaps a score multiplier for each modification added? 

The targeted missiles were a good mechanic but sometimes I'd get multiple at once, perhaps having a cooldown between missiles would make it a bit more fair (having time for a missile to be reloaded kind of makes sense).

It's a shame the game jam was not a bit longer as I see a lot of opportunity for this game.

A simple concept but well executed! I had fun figuring out the stratergy for bullets to loop round.

What an incredible amount of intensity and polish for a four day jam! 

I love train based puzzle games like this. Would love to see this idea worked on more after the jam!

Also had the same issue of not realising they were bombs.

Thank you for your feedback. I am aware there is a bug with the clear tiles option, unfortunately it only came up after uploading. You can get around this issue by using backspace to clear all the tiles.

It’s great to see you get such a high score!

Round High Score

6,718,464,000 STAGEDUPEGMATE

Game High Score

7,096,076,016

I like the idea. I assume the position of the balls are randomly generated? It might be nice to have hand-made levels too to ease into the gameplay?

Oh dear. That's definitely a bug, thank you for letting me know. I have the same issue when I check.

I like the idea but I really struggled to complete the level and found it more frustrating than fun. Some levels to ease into the controls and movement to start with would have been nice.

What a smart game, it has a lot of potential!

Round High Score

15,552,000 CRAVEDARESESHI

Game High Score

15,680,601

I love the rotating background effect, I think it looks great but there might need to be more contrast between that background and the foreground gameplay elements.

I agree, if the speed changes it should also be communicated more clearly.