I decided on incorporating all five of the concepts that require "Connections" be in this node-based get-to-the-goal kind of isometric view board-like game where if you dally too long, latency gets critical so its kind of like a communications net like an Internet but pulls in the other four orders as well.  I had used "and be led into the Library of Babel / by the latent manifold" as the last two lines of "Real Penetration Has Never Been Tried / Interrobang" about a year ago as a vocal lyrical track and when this jam came up i found out through research the origins of what the lines really meant (I have a tendency to build rhyme riffs off Twitter / X tweets to make songs).  But this forced me to do some homework and the game is the refined result of this.  Prototyped initally in Rosebud and then vigorously worked on for several days with Claude Opus 4.7.

Essentially it's game over if the latency gets to 800 milliseconds.  shift-click to place portals if you can't hop far enough to the next node.  Solve the encrypted fragments for more bonus points and more mobility on the board.  Bridges can be built occasionally as well as portals but i didn't i think properly flesh out how bridges were necessarily Better than the portal system.  You can gradually get more portals with more time on each board but it's not ideal because latency hurts your score and time is basically your enemy.  Decisiveness is rewarded but that's easier said than done!

Right now the game only has 5 levels before game-win and that i guess chimes with the minimalism of an Itch.IO jam but i am of a spirit to later make this open ended.  So with 5 levels only in the game this also pushes it more to be like a lowest latency refinement-ethic like competing for fastest times in something like 1982 Pole Position.

Regarding assets what i mean when I say Rosebud uses certain common placeholder assets if you look at Vampire Hunter Galactica the little vampire guys are from a wingdings font that is like some modern Google Fonts symbol set of emojees.  The portals etc are primitives of this order.  I had to see it supplied in 2 different games for me to finally notice it was doing that.