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[DamianVB]

Hi

We have just released our second game. Gravity Escape is arcade-puzzle and it is available for Android. It is free to play.

Link to Google play page Google Play indexing don’t like our game so if you will be searching it through app it will be easier to find if you search for “vivified bits” (our id on Google Play).


Any feedback is appreciated, especially I am interested what do you guys think about controls, we have been thinking about entirely removing interface during gameplay, but it seemed to us that it might sometimes be difficulty for the player (in a irritating way), because you would not be able to see whats is going on, because your hand would be in the way. Other question that I have is about randomly generated colors, do you think it was a good idea, does it look good in your opinion? Of course most important question is: is it fun to play?

Before I go to description of gameplay I would appreciate if you would play the game before reading next paragraph and told me if it was self explanatory, just to check if tutorial is well made (full description is under screen shots)












You need to manipulate gravity of planets (by pressing planet itself or buttons on the bottom of the screen) to lead silly avatars to wormholes. At the end of each map you get score base on the numbers of avatars that you rescued, how many bonus stars you have collected and how fast you have achieved that. There is 50 maps. We have also added randomly generated maps. In main menu there is map in the background that contains some bouncing balls that number depends on how many avatars you have saved . You can poke them after pressing “Play with Balls”

Thank you for any feedback!

[GekidoRising]

I can't say I'm the target audience for this game as I'm fairly new to the android gaming market and I'm not particularly good at these skill based puzzlers, but I've always had an interest in these gravity style games so I thought that I would give this one a go! I was only able to play through a few of the early levels (I'll explain why later) but here's what I thought:

• I find it humorous that the first level requires absolutely no action whatsoever. I can't deny that it gives the player a good introduction to how the game is going to work!
• I like the fact that (in the levels I played at least) there are buttons along the bottom for the planets in addition to being able to press the planets themselves to increase their gravity. I say this because actually pressing the planets themselves proved to be rather difficult! In the earlier levels, the planets are so small enough that I couldn't see them under my finger, therefore I was never able to tell if I was actually pressing them or not.
• On that note, actually pressing the planets seemed pretty difficult to do because A) Their 'clickbox' was so small that I'd find that I had actually missed clicking on them and B) They need to be pressed and not held, as in, if I did actually miss them when I initially pressed, I couldn't just slide my finger over them to compensate. I was thinking it would be good if you could increase the gravity on planets merely by having your finger on them instead of having to explicitly press them. In that sense, I could basically play the game without ever having to take my finger off the screen (sort of a weird example but it's the best way I could explain it haha)
• Once I had gotten to 1-3, I had come to notice that the game moves very very slowly. I think the time I beat the level with was something upwards of 20-25 seconds or something, and that was just one planet and one star. Initially, I thought an easy solution to this would be to speed the game up by quite a bit but as I learned in my next point, that isn't really viable.
• One thing I will say, I can't remember if it was 1-4 or 1-5, but the level that first introduced the ability to control two planets felt pretty cool actually. I liked the feeling of being able to fine tune the ship's trajectory!
• Now, I said I was only able to play the earlier levels for the game and here's the reason; this game is hard, holy moly. I had reached level 2-1 and it took me upwards of 20 minutes just to beat it. I'm going to say this right now, the next few notes are extremely 2-1 centric and I don't know if there are many other levels like this in the game but good lord.
• Once I had actually beat it, I'm pretty sure my time came in at almost 3 minutes. It wasn't 3 minutes of elaborate alley-ooping my way around planets. It was basically 10 seconds of getting the star and then another 150 seconds of me doing laps around all three planets just trying to reach the portal but juuuuust missing it.
• One of my issues came from the fact that I was kind of expecting some sort of propulsion mechanic. I think back to the NASA missions in which they apparently used the gravity of other planets to 'slingshot' their satellites by building up as much speed as they could by swinging just within a planet's gravitational pull before activating thrusters and boosting out with all of the speed they built up. That's the thing though, as far as I can tell, there is no propulsion mechanic in this game, you're basically at the whim of the planets' mercy.
• And on that note, those planets are merciless. Part of the reason I had so much trouble on those levels was because either I couldn't increase the gravity on a planet fast enough which would cause the avatar to go completely off course or I had held the gravity on for just a half second too long which would either result in again, going way off course, or just straight up dying. This goes hand in hand with the point I made earlier about why speeding up the game wouldn't be good and why the planet gravity needs to be so slow is because even an inaccuracy of a quarter of a second would mean another either another 30-40 seconds invested in lining yourself up again, or it would just result in certain death. The worst is when you get a combination of both where you can see that you're going to die after about 20 seconds and no matter what you do, there's nothing you can do to change it because of how slow your impact is on increasing gravity (and letting it decrease as well).
• Of course, if I knew I was going to die in 20 seconds, I realize I could have very well just restart the level. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, I'm pretty new to Android gaming so it took me quite a while to figure out how to actually pause the game. Maybe I'm just spoiled by games with in-game pause buttons but I think it would be nice to have one here just to make easier to pause->restart whenever I need to.
• Lining things up proved extremely difficult too because as I mentioned earlier, the stars and portal are so tiny! I had great many instances of just missing a star or portal resulting in a lot of "OH COME ON" moments. It might not hurt to make them just a little bit bigger. You could possibly even introduce their current size as a hard mode or something!
• Last note about 2-1, my final solution, as I stated earlier, was doing huge range revolutions around the entire trio of planets which often had my ship going way offscreen. At one point, the ship was completely gone for 10 seconds. I had literally no idea where it went! Maybe for those cases, it might be nice to have a little arrow that points to where your ship is offscreen.
• Humorously enough, 2-2 took me only two attempts to beat and I beat it with a much more reasonable time, but after a few attempts at 2-3, I felt like I was just going to be stuck all over again, so unfortunately that's where I stopped playing.
• I hope you guys don't mind suggestions, but I feel like the gravity changing aspect would be much more intuitive if you could explicitly control how much gravity the planets had instead of just being able to very slowly increase it. As an example, you could press the outer edge of a gravity circle around a planet and drag it around to increase and decrease the gravity. For the bars you could press on the bottom, they could be similar to progress bars that you can fill or empty by moving your finger left or right. How full the bar is corresponds with how strong the planet's gravity is. I have no idea if this would break any puzzles in your game, but I feel like having more control would be a good thing as the current system feels unfortunately frustrating in some aspects.

While the game struck me as quite frustrating in some aspects, I can't deny that this game does have the potential for some neat puzzles. I did actually quite enjoy puzzles like in 2-2 that require navigating an obstacle course of sorts. It's just that the puzzles centered around building up speed to reach the portal came off as super difficult for me :C

I wish you guys the best on the Google Play!

[DamianVB]

Thank you for such extensive response!  

On that note, actually pressing the planets seemed pretty difficult to do because A) Their 'clickbox' was so small that I'd find that I had actually missed clicking on them and B) They need to be pressed and not held, as in, if I did actually miss them when I initially pressed, I couldn't just slide my finger over them to compensate. I was thinking it would be good if you could increase the gravity on planets merely by having your finger on them instead of having to explicitly press them. In that sense, I could basically play the game without ever having to take my finger off the screen (sort of a weird example but it's the best way I could explain it haha)

Yeah the click area probably need to be increased to make it more functional. The idea of reacting on drag instead on click is a interesting one, I will try to implement in my listener class and see how it effects gameplay.

About level 2-1 it not supposed to be so difficult or long. It takes around 30seconds to beat it without star. Basically stars exist for players that want get high scores and are not necessary to beat level. Which makes me think that we didn’t communicate it in the game and maybe it is not to obvious as we thought it is. Do you thought that stars are needed to beat a level?

But game shouldn’t be frustrating, so maybe we need add some system that shows areas that you should go first, if player won’t succeed certain number of times. Would you like to participate in a little test of that method? Here is area that when you go there first you can beat it in 30 sec:



And here is whole route: http://i.imgur.com/jxbnuMO.png

One of my issues came from the fact that I was kind of expecting some sort of propulsion mechanic. I think back to the NASA missions in which they apparently used the gravity of other planets to 'slingshot' their satellites by building up as much speed as they could by swinging just within a planet's gravitational pull before activating thrusters and boosting out with all of the speed they built up. That's the thing though, as far as I can tell, there is no propulsion mechanic in this game, you're basically at the whim of the planets' mercy.

Well game implements a physics based system, every object got its density,  voulme, we don’t move object we apply forces etc. (libGDX with Box2D). We also use Newton law of universal gravitation to calculate force effecting avatar. Using slingshot technique is not exactly possible because source of gravity needs to move, in order for it to work. There is great gifs showing how it works on Polish wikipedia http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asysta_grawitacyjna , left one is increase speed right one decrease, I think I will edit English one and add it later . Thing that is different from real physics is that here force of gravitational field changes during time, so it kind of works like slingshot. If you increase gravity of a planet it is gonna start increasing your speed, because you are falling towards it, but then if gravity will decrease enough that you will not hit the planet(sort of like when planets move away from you), you will end up with higher speed. This “kind of slingshot” is really the only way you change your speed, because we don’t apply any other force to avatars (there is no air resistance), except the initial kick at the beginning  of map.

Of course, if I knew I was going to die in 20 seconds, I realize I could have very well just restart the level. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, I'm pretty new to Android gaming so it took me quite a while to figure out how to actually pause the game. Maybe I'm just spoiled by games with in-game pause buttons but I think it would be nice to have one here just to make easier to pause->restart whenever I need to.

Problem was that game is in fullscreen and you didn’t know how to make Android buttons show up again or you didn’t expected that Android back button will open pause menu?

Lining things up proved extremely difficult too because as I mentioned earlier, the stars and portal are so tiny! I had great many instances of just missing a star or portal resulting in a lot of "OH COME ON" moments. It might not hurt to make them just a little bit bigger. You could possibly even introduce their current size as a hard mode or something!

Changing exit and bonus size to introduce difficulty levels seems like a really good idea!

Last note about 2-1, my final solution, as I stated earlier, was doing huge range revolutions around the entire trio of planets which often had my ship going way offscreen. At one point, the ship was completely gone for 10 seconds. I had literally no idea where it went! Maybe for those cases, it might be nice to have a little arrow that points to where your ship is offscreen.

Yep we have already implemented that, it will be available in next update.

Humorously enough, 2-2 took me only two attempts to beat and I beat it with a much more reasonable time, but after a few attempts at 2-3, I felt like I was just going to be stuck all over again, so unfortunately that's where I stopped playing.

Yeah 2-3 is the same thing as 2-1, quite easy if you just want get to the exit, hard if you also want to get star.

I hope you guys don't mind suggestions, but I feel like the gravity changing aspect would be much more intuitive if you could explicitly control how much gravity the planets had instead of just being able to very slowly increase it. As an example, you could press the outer edge of a gravity circle around a planet and drag it around to increase and decrease the gravity. For the bars you could press on the bottom, they could be similar to progress bars that you can fill or empty by moving your finger left or right. How full the bar is corresponds with how strong the planet's gravity is. I have no idea if this would break any puzzles in your game, but I feel like having more control would be a good thing as the current system feels unfortunately frustrating in some aspects.

Suggestion are always welcome. Interesting concept, but I am afraid that is kind different game, more puzzle focused game. Which might be not bad idea - maybe Gravity Escape 2? But yeah such fundamental change would probably force redesign most of maps.

Thanks again for such great feedback, didn’t expected that . We will release new update probably next week.

PS.
I am not physicist so I might be wrong, but technique that use thrusters is used when you orbiting around planet and if you speed up in certain points you can travel great distances. Kerbal Space Program knowledge 4 the win   if you interested in games that play with gravity and you didn’t play it you should definitely try it. But I guess you can use slingshot and thrusters at the same time.

[GekidoRising]

Ah damnit, I knew that there was some sort of proper route to 2-1. Now that I applied the route shown in your picture there, I was able to get the star and beat the level in 40 seconds on my first attempt. Don't I feel foolish!

For reference, here's a rough sketch of the route that I took:



Also, as I've just learned, I'm no expert on the whole slingshot effect myself! I actually didn't know it took into account the movement of planets as well, that's pretty neat so I guess you can just ignore that note as well haha

On the note of me not knowing how to pause, it was, embarrassingly, a small combination of both to be honest. Another part of it is my fault too because at one point, I thought I hit the back button when I actually hit the home button instead which brought me out of the game so for a while, I thought the back button did nothing. In other words, for the third time, my bad, haha. Although, I will admit, when I was going in, I was expecting something like this (the upper left corner):



It wouldn't need to go specifically there. Anywhere would do as long as it was in plain sight!

On the note of my suggestion regarding how you could change gravity, that's cool. I kinda figured my idea would be a bit too heavy a change to really work.

In lieu of that, however, now that I know that every puzzle was basically designed with an optimized path in mind, it might be nice for people like me who cannot for the life them figure out what that path is to have a hint system. Maybe if the player fails a level five times in a row or is just taking an exorbitant amount of time just to complete it, you could provide the player with a hint button that shows maybe either the start of or the entire path that the player is intended to take, sort of like a cleaner version of the image you sent me. That would definitely cut out a good deal of the frustrating aspects if you ask me!

[DamianVB]

We will probably add some hint system and hint button, together with pause button.  Just because someone might not want to see hints. We think about adding path and revealing it more and more the more times player fail to beat level.

Thanks again for your time!

[DamianVB]

We have released update. Added stuff:

• hints system – after you restart/loose all avatars few times you will be able to click hint button that will show you one part of the route, if you will fail again you will be able to click it again to show next part
  
• some particles effects when avatar crash into something. Link to gfy. Sadly I didn't find a way to embed gfy on this forum and embedding gif instead would be quite rude (11M gif vs 370k gfy) . If there is a way to do this please let me know.
• pause button – it should be more comfortable to restart map now

We are especially interested in feedback on hints system, if it is easy to understand and does it helps if you are stuck.