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[BigRoundEyes]

Hello!

I have been developing with my partner an original puzzle/strategy game for about a year now. It's a free-to-play browser game where we try to combine an amusing gameplay with a challenge similar to classic strategy games like chess and Go.

The game is called "Pop 'n' Spawn" and the goal is to compete with your opponent to capture territory on the game board. Territory is captured by strategically placing mushrooms that have the capacity to spawn endless copies of themselves. The catch is that mushrooms can only duplicate in specific directions. So you have to cleverly pick the right direction and location to grow in order to manipulate your mushrooms to claim territory, expand in greater numbers and ultimately gobble up your opponent. You can play solo against the AI or multiplayer with a friend.





As this is our first game, we are really interested in getting feedback so that we can learn and improve. Our goal is to make "Pop 'n' Spawn" easy for anyone to play yet deep enough to provide hours of challenge; so we would like to have an honest opinion of whether we managed to achieve this to some degree. And if not, how can we make it better?

If you are interested in testing the game, you can play it for free at: http://www.popnspawn.com.

If you want a sense of the game, we also have a video trailer:
http://youtu.be/5Utb2hZqorc?hd=1

Thank you for your interest and for any feedback you may have!

Best regards,
Dylan & Angélique

[yuji]

Oh haha I didn't realize that you were the two other people in the Lobby.

Just played a few games with a friend and enjoyed it a lot. Like a lot of the classic board games (I'm thinking chess and go) there's a nice balance between tactical calculation and strategic pattern-recognition. And it also does a great job of having fairly easy rules to learn but having a lot of depth.

One thing that was problematic for me: it's hard to "read" the board quickly. The mushroom-based art looks great and makes sense a lot thematically, but the way things are now, only a small fraction of the space in a square is being used for game-critical information (the arrows). Also the arrow points are on the small side, so while I could quickly recognize whether a mushroom had vertical, horizontal, or both, it was harder for me to tell what the exact directions were. This made it hard to quickly see what was going on, which in turn made it hard to develop the kind of pattern recognition I'd need in order to think strategically, as opposed to just thinking tactically about a small part of the board.

Otherwise, some minor points and nice-to-haves:

• Even after 5 games, I found it a bit tough to tell from the game window which player's turn it was
• Playing the "time running out" ticking sound for when it's the opponent's turn that's about to end was a bit distracting, since I kept flipping to the game window and thinking that I had missed my turn. Might not be a big issue if it was easier to tell whose turn it was though.
• Options for a smaller board and/or a shorter time limit would be nice for when I want to play a quick game

[BigRoundEyes]

Hi Yuji,

Thank you very much for trying our game! We're happy to know that you enjoyed it. Your feedback is very helpful, we'll definitely take it into account.

In regards to the difficulty to read the arrows, you are right that the arrows being the game-critical information only take up a fraction of the space with the current design. The mushroom-based art is important though because, as you've said, it makes sense for the theme and we also find the animations help people understand the game mechanics. Having said that, I agree with what you say and we do want players to be able to choose a different set of game graphics in the future; for example there can be a set of game pieces where it's only tokens with arrows that will help players to read the board better.

It's helpful to know that it was a bit difficult for you to tell which player's turn it was, we were afraid this might be a problem. We'll try to think of more visual clues to make it more obvious.

For the smaller board, we do plan to have different sizes of boards as well as different maps (configurations) in the future.

Thank you again for trying our game, we really appreciate it!

[reheated]

I'm having a lot of fun with this, just playing the solo challenges. Nice work with the AI! And I feel the art is well done and appropriate.

I like seeing a complex game come from quite simple rules. If you have the time and are able, I was wondering if you could summarise the thought process that led to the rules for this game?

P.S. I don't understand the leaderboard for the solo challenges... I've definitely lost more than one game.

[BigRoundEyes]

Hi reheated,

Thank you very much for trying the game and for your feedback!

About the AI, I'm happy to hear that you like it so far. We hope to make it even better because you might find that the level of difficulty is not always consistent and sometimes it's weak against certain strategies.

About the process that led to the rules of Pop'n'Spawn, it's difficult to pinpoint exactly how the idea came about. I remember that it started with a general idea to make a game about players capturing territory on a board (much like Go). Then I thought it should be about mushrooms because the central idea was that game pieces would grow and multiply on its own. Then came a period where the game was a lot more complicated than it is now: different kinds of mushrooms that behaved differently, mushrooms that could grow diagonally...etc. After that I removed a lot of extra ideas/rules to a few essential ones. Finally I designed several types of board configurations until I arrived at the present one.

I think once the initial idea was there, most of the 'work' was about playing and taking away (more than adding) elements until the game feels right.

For the solo challenge leaderboard, you earn points each time you win against a bot and the higher the level the more points you earn. If you lose a game you lose some points but only a fraction of what you would gain if you win. The idea is to reward players for playing more and winning more. This is different from the multiplayer leaderboard which uses the elo rating system and ranks players according to how well they play against each other. Perhaps I should add an explanation of the leaderboards to the website.

Thanks again for trying the game. Maybe we can play a multiplayer game with each other sometime? 

[reheated]

Sure thing - not sure if our time zones are compatible but I'll spend some time in the game now and then and give you a game if I see you.