Bindless

Bindless is a magnetic puzzle game with a dystopian backstory, made for Ebitengine's first game jam ever (June 2022).

Controls

• Use the mouse and left-click to select and use abilities.
• Press ESC to restart levels whenever you have to.

Additional controls:

• You can press F to switch between fullscreen/windowed quickly.
• You can press 1-9 to make it easier to switch between abilities.
• You can press ESC to skip the typewriter effect on story sections.
• You can jump directly to any level or scene by writing a number while holding the "J" key (cheat / resume).

Puzzle mechanics

While I encourage you to try to figure out the mechanics by yourself, if you are feeling lost, please read this:

• You have small magnets that can move (floating, pushed or pulled by other magnets) and larger magnets that are static, always stuck in place.
• Magnets have polarity (positive / negative) and can be powered or unpowered. If magnets of different polarities are close (in the same row or column), they are attracted to each other. If polarities are the same, they are repelled. Unpowered magnets don't interact.
• Large magnets have a wider magnetic field than small magnets (3 vs 2 tiles).
• In the cases where magnets could be pulled/pushed in different directions, closeness to other magnets and movement inertia are the deciding factors. You don't need to think about this in advance, only be aware of it so you can understand it when it happens.
• There are circuits which can transfer power from one magnet to another. This can lead to powering large magnets from small ones or transferring power from one small magnet to another, for example.
• You can only poke and prod at the magnetic simulation of each puzzle through your abilities on the bottom left part of the screen. You have limited "charges" for each ability on each level.

Magnetic simulations can be complex. Don't try to predict everything that will happen in advance. Figure out, backtracking from the goal —if the path isn't already clear enough—, whether you get to the next point by pulling (attracting) or pushing (repelling). Use abilities and observe how the system reacts. Don't try to understand the whole system from the start, just move one step at a time and observe how everything unfolds.

Resources

• Coda, one of the many many great fonts created by Vernon Adams, licensed under the SIL Open Font License and available through Google Fonts.
• Everything else is my own work and can be found on github. Code is MIT-licensed; assets and music are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.

Other acknowledgments

• Bindless is written with Golang 1.18 and using the Ebitengine game engine.
• For pixel art I used mostly Paint.NET.
• Music was mixed on Samplitude. Besides guitar and bass recordings, I used Arturia Analog Factory (synths) and Addictive Drums for virtual instruments. For VSTs, I used Tokyo Dawn Labs plugins almost exclusively.
• Coding was done on Ubuntu, using the Atom editor.