Foggy Cornslakes

[Release] The Power of 45 Brains

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Hello,

My friend and I worked on a small puzzle game for this jam, taking inspiration from the title "The Power of 45 Brains".

https://foggy-cornslakes.itch.io/the-power-of-45-brains

**UPDATE**  -  The game now has 70% extra content and 200% extra features! Try playing it now and forget what you knew about the first version!

Based on our shoddy at best understanding of the concept of neural network, the goal of the game is performing computational operations on an input, in order to produce a specific output. You do that by creating a network between "brains". The input is introduced as signals, that are generated one after the other. The signals move along the network in "ticks", and at the end of each tick, every brain processes all the signals that have reached it, and produces a new signal, according to some basic rule. The basic brain type, for example, produces a signal of the type (color) of the signals that have entered it, given that they all share the same color. Otherwise (if no signals have reached it, or if a set of signals that contains more than one color reaches it), it doesn't produce any signal.

As the game progresses new types of "brains" are introduced, and new types of puzzles as well.

 

We plan on updating the game over the coming weeks (to make it more stream friendly and so on), and would love to hear some feedback about it!

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Interesting. This reminds me a little of The Sequence. It feels like the kind of game I might be able to have some good "aha" moments with, but the difficulty ramped up too quickly for me to get there. I tinkered with it for a while, but I wasn't able to figure out the difference between the funnel and the paintbrush, and I didn't have a handle on how to space out the colors effectively. (For example, if I'm supposed to have 14 reds in a row and then 1 blue, how do I create such a long loop?)

 

One thing I'd definitely suggest is not having the goal output reset every time I press stop. Being able to brute-force the puzzles a bit at the beginning might've helped me wrap my head around how everything worked. I'd also suggest making it clear that you can move brains by dragging them and eliminate connections by right-clicking them. I almost gave up when I thought I wasn't able to move the brains or reset the connections.

 

All in all, though, this concept has a lot of potential, and the dragging/dropping/connecting feels fast and clean. I've fallen hard for puzzle games like this on iOS, so it's definitely in my wheelhouse.

 

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Hi - sorry for the delayed response. Thanks for checking out our game, this is some ridiculously constructive feedback, and we wanted to get back to you with some results!

We've just updated the game, introducing changes that should address all of your suggestions:

https://foggy-cornslakes.itch.io/the-power-of-45-brains

We've also changes the art style, added main menu and level selection screens (with temporary art as of now), and introduced many new levels.

We are vaguely planning further updates, including sound, better art style, and new levels.

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Just played, and boy, this gets hard really fast!

I manage to beat till level 12, but i think i'm coming back to solve more.

One sugestion i would make is to have some kinda of pop up when you mouse over and wait a bit or something in that sense that could give the player info on what type of brain that is, color and what it does. In the beggining i mixed up the converter with the filter and kinda got stuck on an early level a bit, and sometimes is hard to tell the difference of an orange and red brain.

Other than that, i really enjoyed, very cool concept for a puzzle game!

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