Cable Repair Man

Add description, controls and instructions please. Thanks.

@MrAmericanMike - done! We posted the game as a work in progress yesterday, now it's finished :-)

Easy, but nice!

That's not a very complex game, so the controls and rules are easy to unnderstand, and the overall is nice. The only problem I have is that this game is that it's pretty repetitive, but apart from that I liked it.

I actually really enjoyed this! The concept is neat and it gets frantic in later levels. I also like that if you just spam the "A" button and connect everything, you make it hard for yourself to navigate without dying. Graphics and audio were both great as well.

Sometims the connections only showed up in certain spots, but the quicker I played the game the less I noticed it.

PS: the highscores seems to be ordered by lowest level instead of highest level

@mr_chocolatesalmon thanks! I experimented with 'auto-connect', without any need for pressing 'A', but the main problem with that was that you quickly lock yourself out of a solution ("Can't connect all").

The highscores were indeed ordered incorrectly (at first the score was the fastest time on a fixed number of levels, but I changed it later). Fixed it now!

@matote you entered your score (10) incorrectly or enclosed the wrong screenshot (7). I've suspended it for now (cannot change it myself) and will update the score submission text.

I love the rythmn of the game, very franzy. Difficulty is well adjusted, sometimes it can be a bit tricky to find a connection between two cables but otherwise the game is smooth.
It felt a bit frustrating too when a connection I just made instantly became electrified and killed me.
Nice game I liked it :)

Super solid game! Simple in concept, but very well executed.

The game design is very effective. Initially I thought I could just spam the A key, but this quickly backfires when a cable is created in a very roundabout way and ends up blocking other cables, or electrocuting you. This makes for interesting decisions where you do have to consider the network as a whole, and how to order things so you don't end up having to cross too many cables. Sometimes allowing yourself to be zapped to go back home is the best approach!

Execution is great too: snappy controls, readable graphics, and fair balancing. Not to mention all the graph algorithms that must be going on behind the scenes. It's a pretty twitchy game, but the game works with you rather than against you in various ways, most notably that the clusters get recoloured when you connect them.

Oh yeah, fitting music too! Not too much presence, and I think it's a pretty short loop but somehow it doesn't get repetitive. Love the robotic voices.

It looks simple at the start, but it's actually very polished!
The controls, the cable projections etc. are pretty neat.
The music is very nice too!

Simple game but pretty fun, cool that the levels are random, though it can be a bit annoying getting to the right position to put cable to a solo node

Great entry! Did you use A* pathfinding (or any method of pathfinding) to find the connections, because since it doesn't take into account future connections, it can easily cause no possible solution. Also, if you are using pathfinding, would it be better to use the path length instead of the distance between 2 nodes to decide if it is a valid connection? I ended up with a cable stretching over half the entire map - you can see it in my score submission. Anyways, great music, great graphics, great idea!

Thanks everyone!

@AaronBacon Indeed I agree the solo nodes don't feel very satisfying. I messed around a lot with different ways to generate the levels but in the end did not get around to enforcing clusters of size >=2.

@AlexDavies Just a quick homebrew BFS! All the pathfinding stuff is quite inefficient but priorities were elsewhere :-P I'm not sure what you mean by easily causing no possible solution, the way it calculates whether there is still a solution is roughly like this:

maybe_full_set = []
add random node and all other nodes in its subnet to maybe_full_set
could_connect_something = true
while could_connect_something:
    could_connect_something = false
   for try_node in maybe_full_set:
        if try_node can connect to node new_node not in maybe_full_set:
            add new_node and all nodes in its subnet to maybe_full_set
            could_connect_something = true
            break
if all nodes are in maybe_full_set:
    return can still be solved
else:
    return no solution possible

where the if try_node can connect to node new_node is evaluated by checking that the try_node and new_node are close enough together for the player to connect them and that there is currently a path possible between them. So it's actually conservative in it's judgement of whether a level is possible because of not taking future paths into account; it may be that a path blocks a subsequent connection, but it never occurs that adding a connection makes new connections possible.

Of course there could still be an error in my reasoning or a bug in my code, but so far I didn't run into situations where I got "cannot connect all" but could still see a solution myself - reports are most welcome!

In the end the "could not connect" is quite superfluous since on the last day I changed the timer to a countdown instead of the initial increasing timer - the player will die quick enough through a timeout anyway if there are no solutions…

With regards to using distance instead of path length, I think it actually improves the game that long paths are possible, since this makes the 'spam A'-tactic inviable as @thomastc noted - you actually have to consider carefully which connections you make :-)

Very intense game and the music on point, it gets you into the game rythm. Nice entry and interesting idea for the topic.

Good job on this game! Overall, it was a fun concept. I was expecting you to have to make a circular connection or loop of some sort, or maybe having more rules to the structure of the connection. The movement controls as well as the connection detection could have been tighter. The "Ready, Set, Cable!" sound effect was very charming.

This is a great fast paced game. It's challenging but not impossible.
Cable repair man is my favourite avenger.

Excellent concept and rock solid execution! The audio-visuals also fit well.

Of course, design tweaks can always be made so here are a few ideas:

• Block the edges so that simply circling the level is not as viable. (Dodging hazards is more compelling)
• Don't always change the color of the newly connected node graph. Instead, keep the color of the bigger graph. (easier to keep track of progress)
• Connection path preview should go around the repair man when standing on it (harder to instantly electrocute said man)

Lastly, while the one-button-automatic-proximity-build-system is novel and rather neat, it does suffer from impreciseness, especially under pressure which is all the time in this case. Slowing the pace down (more time per level) and using another kind of connection system (some sort of mouse control) would mitigate issues such as filling all connections due to panic spamming when the time is running out.

Nonetheless, as the ratings claim, this is great stuff!

Overall: Great (8.0)
Graphics: Good (7.0)
Audio: Great (8.0)
Gameplay: Good (7.0)
Originality: Amazing (9.0)
Theme: Great (8.0)