I have added a stand alone exe.
www.livealiens.com/dublet/dublet_standalone.zipIs the preferred way to use stand alone executables? I used the installer because it is based on XNA and it would install that if it was not installed already. Either way, I updated the original message to have both.
I can't speak for other people, but for me any sort of portable version of a game is much-preferred, whether it's a single file or just a zipped archive of the game files. It makes giving feedback on multiple versions of a game much easier and doesn't clutter up my registry or my list of installed programs.
Anyway, I gave the game a try.
-The first thing I noticed was that the mouse movement felt strange. It's not even close to being a game-breaker or anything, but I just feel like there's a very small delay in the movement or something.
-Level 1 was fine. It seemed a bit basic but, it was all right.
-Level 2 was...practically the same and felt unnecessary. It just had me wanting to get to the real gameplay.
-Level 3 was challenging, and I like that you bump up the challenge pretty early on. It felt like it required trial and error, though. Have you considered giving players a list of all the tiles/pieces that will be coming up? If I'm going to come up with the right pattern, it can help to know what pieces I'll need to fit in and I'd rather not just have to try five times to find out that info. The fact that the pieces are given to me in a random order also seems to encourage trial and error, since I don't know at first how many of each piece I'll be needing to place. In level 3, for example, there's a red piece that only shows up once. If that's my first piece I might place it in a spot thinking that I'll need to make a pattern with red pieces when in reality it's not part of a pattern at all. I do think that the random order works to keep players from just memorizing where they clicked last time, but I still feel like it works against the game to just show the next piece and not all the upcoming pieces.
-I don't really like that pieces rotate in different directions when they're the same type. I feel like some already look too similar, so it's weird to have different ones sometimes look more alike at a glance than ones that are actually the same do. I feel like it should be the opposite, with different types rotating at their own speeds and in specific directions. Maybe you did that to make it trickier, but I like being able to "read" the board at a glance.
-I like the graphics as well as the font used for the interface.
-The music is pretty good, although maybe on too short a loop for me.
-It would be nice to be able to go back and view the instructions again for a group of levels. I thought I understood "The Twin" but then I went and put two things next to one another that were alike and it told me that was wrong.
-The Rover levels confused me at first because I wasn't sure if I was still supposed to use Twin rules or just Independent rules. I think that's mainly an issue of the level groups seeming like they use completely separate mechanics when they're really just building on one another. It wasn't clear at all to me that the outlines of the pieces were what decided their rules. Maybe a slightly different interior shape would be good (ex. make the colored part octagonal or something).
-I expected to drag Rovers rather than clicking them. Maybe they should respond to the cursor passing over them and be made to look "clickable" in some way when that happens (Maybe darken them like you do with the other pieces?).
-This is a tiny thing, but it felt weird to have the Covert still be hidden when I'd completed the level. I expected it to be revealed again and show my nice, completed pattern.
-I found the Imposter section a little bit pointless. It doesn't feel any different from the earlier puzzles. The outlines you have to look at is a bit smaller, but it doesn't change anything.
-"The food you eat has a huge impact on the brains performance." - This sentence is missing an apostrophe. By the way, I really like these little bits of brain-related trivia.
-Other than the Imposter section, I really like the rules you've set up for the pieces.
I tried most of the first level group and at least one or two levels from every other group, but always got annoyed by the trial-and-error element. Often, I'd be so close and then the last few pieces that I couldn't have predicted would screw up my whole pattern. When that didn't happen, though, I thought it seemed like a pretty good game. I really like the concept and it's got a really nice visual style.
