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Hi! I have recently completed a short project of mine using Stencyl and have uploaded it to the Stencyl arcade. The game now needs testers and players for me to get feedback off and improve it. The game is a casual tower building game where you click to place tiles that fall from the sky. The aim of this is to get the highest score and tower you can before it collapses. And now... Screenshots!

(http://i.imgur.com/bbenkki.png)

(http://i.imgur.com/r9lN6d3.png)

(http://i.imgur.com/JtRYUX9.png)

Here is the link:  (http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/27141[/url)

At first, I thought the title was a typo. :P  I did find one typo, though: "type moniter" should be "type monitor" in the tutorial.

I think the green platforms need some friction on them. I placed a vertical yellow title on one and it shifted around so much that it fell off. Maybe that's on purpose?

I hate the red ones. I have to purposely destroy part of my tower? That just seems really strange and takes the enjoyment out of building, for me.

Purple tiles seem useless. They can be weighed down too easily and can be pushed off-screen. Is that intentional? I thought I could use them to stop my other things from shifting too much.

I can't really figure out what the point of this is. I'm not building a tower. I'm placing green tiles with things on top of them and dropping the exploding ones on the platform at the bottom so I don't lose points. Most of the tiles feel useless, and I don't know why I'd stack things when I can just wait for green tiles.

I'm kind of curious how you tend to go about building things. Maybe I'm just doing it "wrong".

Thank you for the quick and detailed reply! I find your opinion has several valid points and I have just started working on implementing changes that you suggested.

I am curious about your opinion here especially, do you believe that I should implement something such as having npc's spawn around the game and walk around, do things etc. Or do you think that there should be a plot or something along those lines.

As a way of say,  getting rid of the tiles that you don't like do you think there should be an options button or something like that. Also do you believe that music would help with the game and/or better/different graphics?

There are a lot of issues with grammar in the tutorial text that I skipped over earlier. For example, there's the line, "But! Whatever you do never!" Why are those exclamation points placed within a sentence?


That depends on what you're going for. I think it could be just fine as a score-based building game without NPCs, plot, or anything like that. The reason I said that I don't feel like I'm building a tower is that the best strategy seems to be to use the hovering green tiles, so there's no "tower". There are just a bunch of disconnected platforms.


I don't think there's any need to let players get rid of tiles. I think a better approach would just be to make every tile feel useful in some way, and then force players to figure out those uses and take advantage of them.


When it comes to games, I'd personally say that music is a good and necessary thing in over 90% of cases. As for the graphics, yeah, I don't find them appealing at the moment. I was just assuming that they were placeholder art and would change at some point. I don't really like the palette either. The shade of green, especially, is something that I find pretty ugly.

One thing you might want to consider is making the tiles thicker. I'm not sure if this is my imagination or not, but it often seems like people find "chunkier" art more appealing. It might also help to give your tiles the appearance of weight/strength.

Thank you once again for the feedback. The tutorial is definitely something that I just skimmed over and now I see that I made lots of mistakes while making it  :concerned:. The graphics are indeed placeholder but still they are the best art I could make  :-[ perhaps it's time to go search up some tutorials on art.

This is indeed a problem! I don't know how I should go about solving this one to be honest perhaps just getting rid of those tiles would be best.

This is something that I have been thinking about for a while now, perhaps it is time to act upon it!

This is a valid point! Perhaps I should have thought about it more when making the tiles!

When it comes to the art, I'd suggest just looking into complimentary color palettes. Simple shapes are fine and a lot of games manage to come across as clean and elegant while using flat-shaded, abstract shapes.

I implemented some changes and updating the new link is http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/27141 (http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/27141)

Changes include:

• You now detonate red blocks by clicking on them
• Green blocks have friction
• Purple blocks aren't pushed down

Tell me what you think!

It's an interesting idea, but there's not a lot of challenge at the moment. 

• You can completely block off the pit with the immovable purple blocks.
• The red blocks are the same as the yellow ones unless you (optionally) detonate them.
• The moving ones are too slippery to be useful, but you can just place them at the top of the screen to get them out of the way.
• It's really awkward to place the tall blocks because if you click too low, they spawn in the lava and instantly die.  I'd have the bottom center of the block appear where you click.

The physics also really started chugging at around 50 blocks too and I had to quit.

I can never get the tiles I need to actually make a tower, I just get a lot of horizontal tiles and no vertical ones.
I'm not sure what the purpose of making the tiles have different properties is either, it doesn't really add much to the game.