Barely fit this into the time limit! lots of fun! a good and stressful twist on pipes

Why

Lol i got so stressed with the speed of things super duper fun!

I'm creating abominations lol, but I really enjoyed playing it and your idea was really great!

Good Job!

I'm a little jealous of this idea lol, incredibly clever; it does feel a little too luck based and there were a lot of times where I misplaced a pipe and just wanted to reset the level with a button press rather than waiting for the marble to crash. That said I am pretty impressed with how interesting a game comes out of this simple concept, and I think you showed that off well.

Congrats on submitting!

This is a crazy good puzzle concept! It's quite difficult!

I enjoyed the panic state i felt while trying to figure out where to place my next piece.

great job!

the fact that the pieces cant be rotated makes it a very strategy based game and basically designing your own puzzle to fit to the pieces you've placed, very interesting concept

This is a fun little game, though I found it pretty easy to just mash click for most levels and get lucky enough that I could just beeline it to the exit, and while it may seem slightly counterintuitive to the game, I'd prefer if your piece selection were far less random (maybe still shuffled, but like the Tetris definition of shuffled, where there's a very small pool of pieces you can get and you'll get every unique piece before getting another set of every unique piece) as it's pretty chaotic and sort of encourages just being lucky as is. It was super satisfying seeing the ball(s) roll to the end, and I enjoyed my time with it, I'd just especially love if the randomness got toned back just an eensy teensy bit.

Super tough at first, and I kept mixing up the starts and goals lol, but I got the hang of it and I beat all three levels, but only with some favourable RNG on the start and end spots - having a minimum distance between those would make the difficulty a lot more consistent. Some more levels with additional twists would be neat, like different board shapes, pre-placed pieces, or having to match specific starts to specific goals! 

Nice game and I have a lot of reflections from that. This game is very hard for me with the basic speed. Perhaps you can set a few more speed levels or fix the start/end position. I don't often find the need to use mechanics of looping to the other side, but I was impressed when it helps. Would be a bit easier if we can replace the placed pieces for a few times. In the future, you may add more collections / goals in the board. Good jobbb!

Nice take on pipe dream, curious to know if you have the pieces being truly random or if you shuffle a list of them or something else?

Pretty cool game! I had a lot of fun while playing. The only thing is I didn't really feel like I had to use the looping mechanic, and I kinda just spammed tracks until I got the ones I wanted, as you can see in the image lol. But it was still a lot of fun and a creative idea. Nice work!

Grid puzzle gang!

Yea if somebody says the game is easy, they are lying, or there is some kind of unspoken rule of commenting that to make me feel bad! It took me way to long to get the main "twist" of the game I was just trying to quickly go thorugh the options while building a straight line xd.

It is nice, but a bit too random for my taste, but still it was enjoyable in even with that randomness. I wasn't frustrated to a point of quitting but instead I felt the challenge that I needed to overcome, which is probably the right balance, even if a little close to (my) edge.

Good job! (especially when I know a little bit about the trouble of how the game came to be :))

by the way is there anything that decides which path will the marble take on the 4-sides thing?

Simple game, easy to play and get into. Lots of randomness, as people have already mentioned. Level 3 especially, you can just roll a very simple layout with the entries and exits super close.

very interesting puzzle game with a definite original twist. It could use less luck. I wasn't sure if there was a way sometimes and I just couldn't figure it out. I did a lot of restarting but completing the loop was definitely satisfying. you could expand on this mechanic with polish. Also I kept doing a Tetris and trying to rotate them :) but at the same time no need to turn it into some Tetris type clone. Maybe you could come up with something new (I can't). In addition to your ideas. Artwork is fine but needs some more pop and juice, Overall cool though

Loved the game, nice jam scope, solide entry overall! It has the right amount of "learn by playing", and the twist really sends the package to the next level, neat 👌

Can be frustrating at times (I had trouble clicking a little bit aside, that's on me, but that was kinda frustrating because of the rush I was in. It broke my almost first 3rd level win! Also you kinde rely on luck to win, especially on 2 and 3.

But as I said, considering it's a jam entry, really solid and self-explanatory. Good job!

Fun game and a unique idea! The warping / looping mechanic was a great addition that saved my marble on more than one occasion. I think it could be improved by allowing you to rotate pipe and / or see the next pipe coming... just a few tweaks to smooth out the RNG a bit and allow you to plan ahead. But overall I really liked it, great stuff :)

I like the mechanics in this, but I feel right now it’s all a bit too much up to luck. On level 2 and 3 especially, it often seemed the game would just… decide I would lose, by giving me unworkable pieces, or starting the marbles in inconvenient spots. Each level took me several attempts, and when I finally did complete them, I actually never used looping! Eventually, the game would just hand me the pieces I needed, and the level would be over just like that. Maybe I wasn’t playing it properly, but I don’t know… it’s very hard to plan out a complex route involving looping when the piece selection is completely random, and often feels like it just refuses to give me the pieces I need. I think this has some potential, but could use some more playtesting.

What I did like about this game is the sfx for marble rolling and win screen music. The warping mechanic is interesting, but I think it needs to be utilized better. Most of the focus is on ensuring you can build a track to the endpoint. Because of the level of randomness in the game, i do not think many people will be using this warp mechanic, unless they are panicking to get extra time. And that is only if they are able to warp given the randomness of the pieces in their current run of the level.

The instructions need to be simplified.

problem: confusing because it mentions one marble, then says all marbles. after playing you see that it is only relevant to each level since it increases. it's not necessary to put in the instructions, put it in the game itself.

problem: fast forwarding is not entirely relevant to the instructions, it can be explained within the game or simply added in the ui "fast forward" above.

problem: irrelvant information at the end. don't get me wrong, it is a nice touch but not necessary. people only need to know what is necessary to play.

suggestion for revamped instructions: Build a track for the marble to reach the end by clicking on the board.

For things in the game

needs a better indicator of when to start. the colors are fine, but not really good enough as an indicator imo. do this by saying specifically where it starts and ends

there should be a hud indicator of how much time you have left to place a track. race against time should have the time displayed..

suggestion: instead of a mouse pointer cursor, it should be the current track.

problem: game itself is rng pretty much, and because of that most people will not win and will get frustrated. when it comes to challenging games people try to devise effective strategies so that they can win, but it is lacking in effective strategies to make due to the rng of it and fast paced style which is prone to spamming.

good: the warping mechanic is good for giving the player extra time from what i have noticed. but it does not have strong decision making to decide if it is worth it and may be used as a tool to not panic.

Is the game fun to play? does it have a good player experience? Not really. I do think there are things that get away in player experience with feelings of frustration. It's not necessarily because the game is 'challenging'. I do not think there is much of a challenge to it, it is just how fast can you build these tracks based on randomness. It's moreso that this is a puzzle game, but there is not an interesting and strong level of decision making needed to play this. For example with other puzzle games like tetris, orienting the way of incoming blocks is imperative to playing and makes you think about what you are doing. This game kind of feels like spam until you get the right pieces, not really actually thinking about more efficient ways to win with the given mechanics.

I would ultimately change the game design to add mechanics that make adding the tracks meaningful in some way and improve player experience. Maybe there could be a small randomized set of tracks a player can choose from to build the tracks. It gives them a better way to think of what they are actually doing and consider using the warp mechanic if they think it is a good idea too. There could be different indicators on the board that take up a square and if the player builds on them (not directly but there must be an adjacent track) it can help them in-game like selecting a track they need right at that moment. It does not have to be these, but you know make it enjoyable. Game design is an iterative process and takes a while to find out what is fun. I would ask people to playtest while you work on games or playtest among the group and be honest with yourselves on what can be added, changed or removed. 

The most important part of this is that you guys were able to finish something and you should be very proud for doing so. I wish you luck in your future games.