Raytrix is a puzzle game where you try to form long chains of pieces that point to each other and score as high as you can. It was inspired by the pencil-and-paper puzzle Hidato, which involves chaining together numbers in order either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally to make one long path from 1 to the highest number on the board.
The rules are pretty simple if you've seen this kind of game before. Z and X rotate the falling pair of blocks, and the arrow keys move it left and right. Tapping down makes it fall faster, and tapping up instantly drops the piece to the bottom.
At the side of the screen, you'll notice there are a white and black piece with counters next to them. Every 5 piece drops, you get a white light piece, and every 40 a black bomb piece. Press C to use a light piece and V to use a bomb piece, it will replace the next piece to drop.
When you use a light piece, you can move it freely around the board with the arrow keys and change the direction it points with Z and X. You have 10 seconds to position it before it goes off. Point it at a regular colored piece, and it will light up, then light up the piece it's pointing at, then the one that's pointing at, and so on in a chain reaction. You get more points per piece the more you remove like this at once. Specifically, 2 more points per block, so the first block is 10, second is 12, third is 14, etc.
When you use a bomb, it drops onto the field like a normal piece. When lit, it passes light out the other side, but it can be lit multiple times in one chain reaction, up to four. When lit, it blows up with a radius equal to the number of times it was lit in the same reaction. So once makes a 3x3 explosion, twice makes a 5x5 explosion, etc.
The game gets faster and faster as time goes on, so it gets harder to plan out your moves as the game progresses. See how high you can score! Unfortunately scores don't save yet.
Oh yeah, one last thing: escape pauses if you need a bathroom break.
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...Selling the game idea aside, I'd love to get some feedback specifically on whether the game is fun or not. There's no sound, and the graphics are home-made (i.e.
the best), it's pretty bare-bones at the moment. I'd love to know how I can change the gameplay for the better, or at the least make it less confusing to learn. I plan to add at least a main menu, instructions screen, and a configuration menu in addition to the basics, but I'd love to eventually make a sequel with a versus mode or something if people enjoy this. I can't emphasize this enough though: is the game fun? If it's not fun now, it won't be fun later on and I'd probably be better off scrapping it than wasting my time. If it is, I'd love to continue. Please be honest with your criticism, I don't bite.
Download it here (just extract the zip file somewhere):
http://www.mediafire.com/file/7lb5roo73jcosyh/Raytrix_prealpha_01.zip
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