two white circles and a green circle

I made this game for the 2013 js13k contest, which had a theme of bad luck that year. Originally, I was inspired to make a game about bad luck and failure. I had a vague idea of making a point in this game, so I tried to do that by forcing people to give up. The game encourages you to keep going with little text snippets, but then at some point you cannot progress any further. I’m not really sure anymore that this fits with ‘bad luck’, but I thought so at the time.

Many players had a reactions of anger and/or confusion. One thing that added to the confusion was that each level introduced something new. When the final, unbeatable level arrives, it can appear that the player is simply missing some new mechanic.

A design goal I had in this game was to have minimal to no instructions. Overall, I think this worked out pretty well, as the players I observed seemed to discover the simple controls and mechanics fairly quickly with a bit of experimentation. I think the complete lack of information contributed to the annoying effect of the eventual impossibility of the game.

Although I’m happy with the mechanics and visual aesthetics of the game, I feel that it really tries too hard to mean something.