Hi Rusk,
Thanks so much for playing all the way through and leaving detailed feedback. Really helpful.
I got a crash when finishing the level Enough Breakers (I think it was called). The error occured just when I synthesized the tricone needed for the objective. The popup window just said "Null" and the location of a runrecord file, which I'll pm you.
Thanks, I got your PM, I will take a look.
edit: I finished it. I enjoyed it, it's a fun game. The difficulty curve was pretty flat with a few exceptions. I was stuck for a while on "Cauldron" as well.
Glad you enjoyed it. There will be more mechanics and a lot more levels to come...
I know it's alpha and you are still working on the mechanics, but I would definitely like to see some more color, sounds and some sort of setting (either educational or at least some vague "dr mario" kind of character in the background). Otherwise I feel it might as well be as abstract as minesweeper, using default windows widgets.
I will definitely be adding sounds in the near future, and a bit more UI polish.
I have thought a little about characters etc. However, the focus of the project is to produce a good gameplay experience, which I think derives more from the puzzle design than the setting / backstory / nice graphical effects. That's just my personal opinion of course and I realise there are a lot of different player types out there. Anyway, because of this focus I'm not going to spend a lot of time on these items at this stage; rather I'll be looking to develop the gameplay further. I do take the point that it may mean the game does not at this stage instantly appeal to many game players, but the project is not at the moment on a standard commercial pathway, it is really just about creating an interesting form of gameplay.
When you move to attach a breaker or mover to a wall, when the wall highlights you can see a dot somewhere along the wall. You can't attach to the wall close to the dot, which has led to misclicks sometimes. I suppose this dot is some internal thing that maybe could be hidden from the player?
Well spotted. This is indeed an internal engine thing. You will see the dot when attaching to a cell which just consists of a floating bubble. The line which forms the bubble must have a node on it somewhere, this is one of the assumptions of the topology layer. The dot you can see is that node. I should be able to both hide the node and also allow you to attach your mover line to where the node is.
Sometimes you need to make a mover to move a mobility unit. But there's a difference between a mover that can move one mobility point, two spaces away; and one that can move two mobility points, one space away, right? They take the same ingredients to make but the result depends on the order they are added? Having to rely on undo to get it right isn't the intent I hope.
Heh, okay we are veering slightly into spoiler territory here!
I can confirm that the type and nature of the compound node which is produced by a transporter catalyst is totally predictable based on the order of the player's sequence of actions. This mechanic is of course at the centre of one of the levels that you have completed.
I realise that this mechanic breaks a minor game design rule of mine, which is that the state of the game must be fully visible at all times. In this case, you can't tell (after the fact) what order the resources were linked to the transporter catalyst. Do you think this is a major problem? What about if it was explicitly spelled out in the node information dialog?
For the sake of comfort, I would like to see less alert windows and more streamlining of the mouse commands. I don't use the keyboard commands because I don't feel there's enough to do to require both hands.
- How about left click for selection, right click for action (synthesize/break/release)?
- Dragging for connecting is cool, at the end I would just like to be able to click a couple of units and get going.
- How about being able to move a breaker/mover through several walls at once, by targetting the destination or at least dragging a path through several walls?
I'll be adding double-click for synthesize/break/release pretty soon. This will mean you can play the whole game with just left clicks inside the main playing area, unless you need to undo / restart.
I've thought about moving through several walls at once, assuming that the moving node has the mobility level. Unfortunately it would be quite hard technically to bring this in. Did you find it really annoying to have to do the moves hop-by-hop?
Finally, if you have an installer, you should have an uninstaller as well.
Good point. It's a standard JavaWS application, so JavaWS provides the uninstall method. I'll add some tips to the web site to cover this.