Build a city in this small puzzle game!
Reach 250 points to progress to the next stage.

Game includes 3 levels.

Controls :

• Mouse Left Click to place buildings

• Mouse Right Click to rotate

• X to reset your current building or pattern

This is a small game for the PICO-8 fantasy console. I've made it in a couple of days during prototyping and searching for something fun. I hope you will like it!

Updated 4 days ago
Published 7 days ago
StatusReleased
PlatformsHTML5
Rating
Rated 4.3 out of 5 stars
(6 total ratings)
Authormshrmgirl
GenrePuzzle
Made withPICO-8
TagsCity Builder, PICO-8, Tetris

Development log

Comments

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(1 edit)

This was a lot of fun! I'd love to see more levels in the future or some sort of infinite mode where the game automatically clears certain combinations to give you more room.

A couple of notes from my side:

  • I think a very brief, skippable tutorial would be helpful to teach players the mechanics for color matching zones, rotating pieces, etc.
  • It took me a while to realize what I though was two tiles in the "Next" queue was actually just one tile. Unless the building design in the top actually matters then I would just show the colored shape outline to limit confusion
    • Additionally isn't it just displaying your current tile and not actually the next one? Even without the text I associate that zone/layout of the screen as Next queue.
  • Not sure when if ever it make sense for me to overwrite previous pieces, I guess if I can put 3+ squares into the "right" color while only overwriting one square I'd be net +5 but still feels very rare.
  • It would be cool if overlapping buildings on the correct color had some sort of upgrade system. Then you can increase target scores for later level.

Thank you for playing and for the feedback ❤️

I agree with your notes and will tru to incorporate changes on next update. Gonna think how to squeeze it all. Thank you again for such detailed feedback!

(+1)

One other note: I tend to associate "x" with negative things UX/UI wise, so when I have a tile matched with it's respective zone color the "x" appearing within the tile to signal the bonus points kind of confused me. I think having an icon of some kind there is definitely helpful, but maybe a checkmark or plus sign instead.

Though come to think of it a "+" might also look like an "x" with the isometric view lol.

I totally agree with you, in the first round I totally misunderstood what the + meant, saw it as an X and tried to avoid placing it, and ended up only getting 50 points

(2 edits)

Thank you, it never occurred to me that it can be read as X!
Now it's a smiley face :)

Nice game! c: I admit that at first, it took me a moment to figure out how some of the placement mechanics worked and how to score enough points to move on to the next stage, but eventually I realized that placing buildings in the zones that match their color was the key! 


Speaking of placing buildings in the right zones, I do like the different sound effects that play based on whether you placed a building in an optimal spot or not (and I really like the sound effect for putting buildings in optimal spots, simple but satisfying)! I also like the details you managed to fit into the (building) sprites!


As for some suggestions, I have the following:

  • I had some moments where I had no more (good) moves yet and I wondered if it'd be nice to have a button to end the timer early and go to the results screen quicker (and then that could be a statistic alongside the score and resets too)
  • Renaming "Reset" to "Skip" would probably be good since you're skipping the current piece to generate a new one, seeing "reset" made me think I was doing something drastic like undoing a move or resetting my entire board
  • Maaaaybe rename "Next" to "Current"? This might be very nitpicky, I'm just used to puzzle games where "Next" means the next piece you're going to get after placing the current one, eheh ^^;
  • The color of the piece shape in the "Next" slot changing to be the color of the type of building you're about to place could be neat, but it's not super necessary

Thank you for playing and feedback!
Yeah, i love your suggestions, as soon as i will have free time i will work on them, thank you again!

This is really fun idea! I like it. :)

Thank you! 🩷