comments for Squares

Having passive points being determined by pure RNG in a game with no active portion to counter that feels like the gaming equivalent of hostile architecture.

Why did you need AI to make this? It's so simple...

So far I feel like the "QOL indicators that show how lucky or unlucky your total multi is" are kinda... meaningless? I have no idea what average they're using, but even with a combination that is above average from what I've seen it has a red down arrow.

genuinely such a simple game, what was the ai used for, why was it needed?

Some neat ideas, but the non-permanent spells doubling in cost kinda slows momentum to a crawl.
If you are wanting to avoid spell-spamming, maybe have them double UNTIL the manual collection button is clicked?

Shadowsand: we require it for code too. Apologies for the incorrect tag description

Usually there's no way we can tell if you've just used ChatGPT to help you fix a function or something, but some people can certainly tell if a game was vibe coded et al. (or at least, all the verifiers can after how many we've seen!) and not want to play it for that reason. The gen-ai tag is used as such so people can easily hide all such games with a couple clicks if they don't want any of it

I have to say.. the way the multiplier at the end of each row is randomly generated and has such a wide range.. is absolutely game killing for me. If you had allowed us to upgrade it (not just scale it because then same problem, just bigger #'s) but actually improve it so we raise the bottom ceiling on the possible multipliers, then you'd have really found something clever here.

Feels like the longer you play, the harder you will be punished for playing

I like the idea a lot. Some comments:
- The rolling of mults is kinda fun, it makes me reset until I get a bunch of good ones in the start. However it would be nice if I could somehow reroll them when getting a lousy mult.
- In the red layer my blue layer income is really poor, seems to me that the mult I got from blue layer remains active in the red layer and there is no way to reset blue layer anymore except by resetting red.
- Red layer does not have enough updates.
Overall a pretty nice start, looking forward to more.

An export to clipboard option would be nice. I vastly prefer using galaxy's cloud saves.

I like the concept but the actual gameplay is pretty slow and boring. I suggest doing a huge update to make it better and i'd probably come back to it.

This game is not that bad, just slow, can have potential where each color square is a new layer.
-Before pink squares, the end is just a timewall, definitively needs to have something more, or simply better scaling with the upgrades (or a higher level cap/being able to afford more levels)
-Haste should be able to be bought multiple times to add the time (3 purchases = 1min 30s) to make it more afk-able later on
-Unless final combo upgrades are good, combo just feels like a sloppy rng wall where you just wait to purchase upgrades. There should be a blue/pink square upgrade to boost them imo.
-Buy max is needed (or auto upgrading)

I like the idea of the game but the execution isn't the best. I don't think the RNG-aspect should be a part of the game as it's not at all forgiving. Especially when AFKing

QoL suggestions: Be able to view Blue Square multiplier once reaching Pink Squares, view total speed percentage, upgrade minimum multiplier.

are these...squares filling boxes???

Warning -- the combos section resets on pink/blue point collection. The tab structure strongly implies that these are separate and there's no big warning.

I think the arrows are helpful. Allows for many quick resets to get a higher mult. Although it strongly appears below average is the average. Probably related to 1.5 being the min which has a much strong nerf to points than 3 being only 20% higher than 2.5. Basically, I think the wrong kind of mean (maybe need geometric mean? idk) is used here and/or the mult odds distribution isn't taken into account.

yep.. with later progression in the game, it never stopped feeling absolutely wretched that you were running with bad multipliers. and never stopped feeling like a chore having to reset after waiting. over. and over. and over. and over again until you got decent #'s.

i like the idea. i've liked it since the game you took the inspiration from: "pixels filling squares" did it.

it's spoiled rotten by the random multipliers. just makes the game stressful. if you fixed that part, i'd be a lot more interested in this.

Shadowsand: the form for game submission has changed since you last went through it, and it now asks developers if they used generative AI while making their game. If they choose to say that they did, we ask them to elaborate on how they did so. At least for new submissions, we assign the tag on a case-by-case basis based on the severity of use. A case like what you outlined where helper functions or an engine was AI generated but not the UI or content would probably not warrant the tag, but it hasn't come up and if it did I'd probably have a discussion with other site staff.

The current usage of the tag regarding code has been if a player could reasonably infer that generative AI was used. It leaves traces of itself in almost everything it does, and there's often not a lot that's hidden from the user in incremental games so it ends up being applied often when it's used.

I tweaked the description of the tag, however it hasn't been pushed to prod yet: https://gitlab.com/yhvr/galaxy-astro/-/commit/264fda625167a6d61c446c266536079820ae8b0c I don't want anybody to clog up this comment section further with discussion not directly about the game, but I'm curious as to what you envision with two tags. Would you be willing to discuss more in site PMs or on Discord?

I'd say if a game was made using one of those ai website builders or if it's entire foundation was vibe coded, then it warrants an ai tag

> Galaxy requires the gen-ai tag even if you only use claude code or codex to write some of the code.

The description of the gen-ai tag is "This game makes use of generative AI tools for assets (such as writing, images and audio)". It makes no mention of using gen AI to write the code.