The web version gets laggy near the end, consider downloading the desktop version.


The Perfect Sequence

A sokoban-like game about looping through puzzles and multitasking.


Made using Love2D (Only a library! Most of what you see is made from scratch.) for the 2025 GMTK Game Jam - themed "Loop". This game's art, music and code is licensed under the GPL3.0 and available on  github.

GMTK Game Jam Results:

CriteriaRankTop%
Creativity#79 0.81%
Enjoyment#303 3.13%
Audio#305  3.15%
Artwork#1221 12.64%
Narrative#2226 23.04%

(out of 9659 entries)

Downloading and playing

If you're on windows, it's as easy as grabbing the windows build, unzipping it, and running the game!

Alternatively, if you're on linux or macos, you can get love from your favorite package manager and the .love archive from the downloads, then run the game with:

love ThePerfectSequence.love

TLDR:

The gimmick of this game is actually revealed at the end! The levels are tough as nails and may seem a bit random so if you're too lazy to play through it, you can let me spoil the ending so you can find out what you're actually playing (especially if you're rating this as a jam submission and wondering what this has to do with looping, except having to do every level twice):

WALKTHROUGH, SPOILERS & THOUGHTS

This game doesn't have 15 levels as it may appear, it actually only has 1! Don't believe me? Try this sequence on any level:

{"up", "up", "left", "up", "right", "right", "right", "right", "right", "up", "right", "right", "down", "down", "left", "down", "right", "right", "right", "right", "down", "right", "up", "up", "up", "up", "up", "up", "right", "up", "left", "left", "left", "left", "left", "left", "left", "left", "left", "left", "left", "up", "right", "right", "right", "right", "right", "left", "left", "left", "left", "left", "left", "down", "down", "down"}
If you're using the downloadable version, you can copy this, and then paste it into the game window for it to load it in, so you don't have to input it in manually! Unfortunately the web version doesn't have clipboard permissions :(

Once you beat level 15 the game will zoom out and loop (Haaa, get it?) the sequence you used on the last level, for all previous levels. All of them will complete and take you to the end screen!

This is also what makes the puzzles so difficult. By design there has to be only one sequence that beats levels 14-15 and then also be compatible with every level before it, so that the player has to stumble upon the single, esoteric and long solution. Lune, the level designer, and i tried our best to make the game somewhat beatable, but, oh well. We were in too deep taking our chances with this kind of gimmick to back out from the idea by the time we noticed we created a monster.

Oh you're still reading this? Awesome, let me tell you about how much i hate programming for the web. Love2D isn't really meant to run on the web, so we unofficially wrap it with a lua interpretor in webassembly and a bunch of webgl duct tape. WebGL has been the nr.1 pain point that took like houurs of my dev time. Why? Because it's error messages are complete garbage. I'd spend hours making shaders from scratch, knowing them like the back of my palm, only to build the game for the web, boot it up, and get thrown "shader not found" like what do you mean i am l o o k i n g  a t   i t   i n   t h e   f a c e. Turns out it doesn't initialize because webgl doesn't allow default values for external variables and blah blah blah

other than that, the game's code is open source as linked above, but i beg you don't actually try to build anything off this game's codebase, the main.lua file, past the second day, became a dumpster fire of whatever may go there. vim motions were the only thing keeping me.

That's about it. As a reward for reading through my rambles, i offer you a cookie :>!


Credits:

Birbirl: Lead, Programming, ""Art""

LuneDaFox: Level Design

Bartuscus: Music, Sound Design

Special Thanks to Furreska and Sno for the moral and immoral support (respectively)

Updated 3 days ago
Published 8 days ago
StatusReleased
PlatformsHTML5, Windows
AuthorBirbirl
GenrePuzzle
Made withLÖVE
TagsLÖVE, Pixel Art, Short, Singleplayer, Sokoban
Code licenseGNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL)
Average sessionA few minutes
LanguagesEnglish
InputsKeyboard

Download

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

ThePerfectSequenceWin64.zip (64Bit) 9.5 MB
ThePerfectSequence.love (used with love2d) 5.3 MB

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