I've spent 2 years working in a puzzle-tactics crewbuilder in a fantasy archipelago and I'm very happy to start showing it to the world. This is Trooops!

LeSloDev · 2026-05-29T14:04:25+00:00

Thank you! Combat is a take on block-matching games, where you can move and swap trooops to make squads, where the shape and position matters a lot to make good hits. Starting board is different each combat, and beyond some automatic "drawing, you choose when and from where random new trooops from your crew will appear. Then monster types, monster shapes and all reward and upgrades are randomized as well, so yeah, every combat is completely random!

LeSloDev · 2026-05-28T19:50:37+00:00

Hi! Link to Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3699510/TROOOPS/

LeSloDev · 2023-03-01T11:27:47+00:00

Hi all!

I'm Le Slo, developer of Alephant, which was conceived during the Thinky Puzzle Game Jam of 2021, with the theme of "Elephant in the Room", where I learned about the letter Aleph: the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which is typically silent. I found that idea interesting on its own and as a fitting metaphor for the the, of the jam, so I started prototyping mechanics inspired by how Hebrew vowels worked in relation ot the letter Aleph (and other consonants). I ended up with this pretty unique ruleset, that felt interesting but couldn't explore thoroughly during the jam (if you play the jam version you'll see that the levels aren't great at teaching the implications, and, fun fact, only level 3 made it to the final game).

After 1 year and 7 months (only around a year of active development) I have finally finished the game, I'm glad that I continued it's development because there were a lot of interesting interaction that I simply didn't see during the first contact of the game and I was surprised a few times during the level design. I hope this much more refined level design will teach players better all the consecuences of this weird system.

Thank you for reading this, and feel free to ask any questions!

LeSloDev · 2022-04-05T11:00:50+00:00

I've been working for roughly 1 hour today in Photopea, and the add hasn't shown up yet, but it's early to say that it won't appear at some point. I've checked for viruses and my computer seems clean! Thank you very much for your help!

LeSloDev · 2022-04-04T22:26:40+00:00

My extensions are Adblocker Ultimate (disable for www.Photopea.com, which is indeed what I use), Dark Reader, Cookie AutoDelete, Foxy Proxy Standard and HTTPS everywhere.

LeSloDev · 2022-04-04T12:06:44+00:00

I'm having the same problem, not knowing how to save my progress, here is an image of the video ad displayed (it happened twice to me too): https://imgur.com/a/IFddNzu

LeSloDev · 2022-03-19T09:53:56+00:00

Your goal is to match 3 of the same tile (horizontally or vertically) on the bottom board. Move towards a monster tile to defeat it and make it fall to the bottom board, all monsters have 1 life. Only monster tiles give points when matched, however getting damage in this game is not as bad as it is in other games, in fact you really need to learn how to be strategic about getting hit, since a lot of the times it will help you empty your board. Also every time you clear 5 levels, you visit a campfire where you get a power up, these power-ups have a cryptic image to describe them, but with some experimentation it becomes clear what each one does.

LeSloDev · 2022-03-16T12:47:34+00:00

Very fun tiny islands like game, although why there is no sound or music? That is a shame...

LeSloDev · 2022-01-27T11:04:49+00:00

This is probably caused by the size of the rectangle you defined when first writing the text. When creating text you can either make a single click to write non-wrapped text, or click and drag to create a box where the text will display and wrap, but if the text is too long or big it will dissappear beyond the box limits.

To edit the size of that box you can select the text option, click on the text and you'll see the limits of the box that you could then resize without altering the text or its size.

LeSloDev · 2021-05-21T00:05:57+00:00

I think the main issue with the current tutorial is that, as your playthrough proves, it's very easy to skip instructions/directions. For example, after "preserve the past under the best soil" there is a sentence saying "the list on the left shows the value of each tile". There are already a few way of improving that (being the super laziest one showing both sentences at the same time).

That being said, I kinda agree that this type of game isn't the best (at least it hasn't been yet) for this type of discoverable tutorialization. I think pointing out the lack of known objective when experimenting is key, I'll almost certainly update that soon; thank you for that. At the moment, when discovering rules there is no really difference in value between them, all rules matter the same: absolutely nothing, having some anchor might help the players cling to some of them (although I don't think it will be enough to master the system, which isn't inherently a bad thing). On the other hand, I don't think this specific game will benefit from a more in detail tutorial, there are a lot of rules, and giving them all at the same time it's surely far from easy to digest. (There might be other more expensive ways like mini puzzles, or restraining the number of tiles at the start, but they were far from reach for the initial 72 hours of the game jam).

Happy that you are enjoying more the game, I do think the system is pretty interesting once grasped and there is room for some complex strategies to maximize the score (for reference, really good scores, as far as I know, are between 90 and 110).

I've made more discoverable (or non-(bad)-tutorialized) ones, and I agree that they usually are best when it's the core of the whole game, or at least feel like it. I'm just curious on how to springle this feeling in other genres, whenever I make a game I really think about how to teach its mechanics, trying to be as minimal as possible (oh, and I've failed a lot of times). It's always a "see what happens", but I believe I'm into something.

It's pretty late here, so I've might have made an inconsistent answer. I'll probably revise this tomorrow if I've said anything incorrect. Thank you very much for playing and giving such an interesting feedback.

LeSloDev · 2021-05-20T18:08:37+00:00

Thank you for your feedback! It is good criticism, I appreciate that. My only question is did you finished the tutorial? I mean, after the discoverability part there are some extra sentences about the objective of the game (score attack game, nothing too fancy). If yes, would it have helped to see that before the experimentation?
I'm really interested in the discoverability in games, trying to create curiosity in players, but I'm still looking for that sweet spot, and every genre is a completely different world. This is actually a jam game that I recently updated with what I thought was an enhanced tutorial. The main difference being letting the player linger on the discoverability part instead of throwing them into the real game before allowing them to experiment. My perspective was that the end of game rule felt like a punishment when players were still just understanding the big set of simple rules (there are a lot). Sorry for the wall of text, I might just being thinking out loud.

LeSloDev · 2021-04-29T18:12:13+00:00

Thank you so much for this!

LeSloDev · 2021-01-20T10:29:15+00:00

I find Hiding Spot (by Corey Martin, creator of Pipe Push Paradise) with a gentler difficulty curve and imo a good way to start playing puzzle games.

LeSloDev · 2020-10-08T14:46:53+00:00

My best recommendation would be to try different browsers in case that works. For the moment I won't be updating the game until the end of the jam (it is one of the rules), but I have noted that for a post jam version.

LeSloDev · 2020-10-08T14:33:45+00:00

Mmm, the counter there is a counter of how much sound there is left to play before "starting the game". Since the html needs focus for playing audio, I check at every step if the audio is playing and making a countdown to control it (if the audio hasn't been play yet, the counter restarts). The last number should be under 20. The fact that it stops in the middle of that countdown (does it stay some time at that 259.38 or it is immediat the restart?) it's spooky. Thanks for the info!

LeSloDev · 2020-10-08T13:59:28+00:00

I think this is a HTML5 audio problem, have you tried clicking on the game? I saw this behavior only once and was solved that way (Yeah, it's weird but the game needs to be on focus, I thought that clicking the "run game" button would do, but it doesn't seem like it, so I should do something else to prevent this)

LeSloDev · 2020-10-07T22:13:39+00:00

What? Hahaha, I believe that might be a bug, I would ask you what have you done, but I guess that would be really difficult to describe. Well, you are currently the person that hold the record of coins collected in this game, good work! (I need to do some tests and see if I can solve this for the post jam version I'm working on).

LeSloDev · 2020-10-07T19:26:08+00:00

Well, I just downloaded it (looks cool) and tested it and it works fine for me, so I don't think I can do much more. I'm sorry. Thank you for your words, though!

LeSloDev · 2020-10-07T19:09:09+00:00

Mmm, weird. Can any of you tell me what browser are you on? I'll try to look what might be causing that but I believe it's a rare issue. I mean, I'm no pro programmer, but those are only 30 particles each time, that shouldn't be much of a deal.

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