Just a couple more tweaks:

Altered level 05 (I thought I made it easier but I found on a fresh test subject I'd made the puzzle harder).

Adventure mode doors are now punitively placed. The advance door will always be the farthest away from you and the retreat door will always be the closest. Basically what was happening as I was playing this over and over again was that I found myself winning because I would luck out on advance doors being packed together. This reduced getting a good score to luck - which didn't seem fair. Now it's guaranteed that you will have to fight through a room to advance. This should also make this mode much, much harder. Enjoy!

The penultimate build is up.

I've been tuning the opening puzzle levels as well as adventure mode. The adventure progression is now very fast with generators introduced as soon as you go through the advance door.  Winning depends on a little luck, mixed with leaving a clear retreat path - which of course damages your score. State saving is now in the iOS build which will go out shortly.

I'm pretty happy with the current state of the game. One more round of feedback to catch any bugs and then it's off to Apple with it.

Someone didn't figure out how to advance Adventure mode - and to be honest I was checking all the doors before moving on myself, which isn't great design.

So now the "advance" doors animate - you can clearly see which is the best door to go for. The "retreat" doors, the bad ones, have black marks on them - making them look like the bad news they are. Sidestep doors are unmarked, making it clear they don't affect progress.

I've also made the adventure mode ending a bit more fireworks-like with some new sounds to boot.

Still not wrapped my head around Android yet. I'm inclined to release on iOS first and do the Android build after if I'm honest. Android won't be left out though.

Must admit that the black-flash gets on my nerves. It's like its blinking for me and it makes me blink and that does my head in. I think I would have preferred just a straight cross-fade but that's probably just me.

Had me a crash also so I'm gonna have to wait a couple of weeks. I like the simplicity of it though.

New build is up with streamlined UI:



Levels have been trimmed down to 60 to improve pacing. "Benched" levels are still playable on the next page in the editor. Adventure mode level generation has been tweaked. Adventure mode saves current state when quitting to the title menu. Sounds have been re-imported at higher bit rates. Swipe controls for mobile have been adapted for holding down a direction.

Going to get mobile builds out tomorrow and see how I can get this to work on Android.

I think I'll drop it from the next build and see if anyone notices. If it's an issue for people then it's no trouble to reinstate it.

Does anyone else use Undo? Or even know it's there?

I use it fairly frequently, but having had feedback on the iOS version I'm going to move check-mode into the options menu. If I also dropped the undo button it would leave the whole bottom of the screen clear and make it more comfortable to play.

[@st33d]

@st33d
What do you mean exactly?

The shadow off the walls works well to make them pop out. But not so well on the top left hand side of the wall. I think if the walls were offset a pixel or two upwards it would make it clear that you've got a wall next to you because it would overlap you a teeny bit.

But I'm probably biased because that's exactly what I went for in Turnament:



So it's likely it's just my personal preference.

Those walls will need a front on them if you're going with that tilted view I think. Mebee move them up a pixel so they look solid. Just a personal preference mind.

I think it has to be immediately apparent that what you're doing is affecting outcomes.

Plus I think adventure mode is kinda already where it needs to be. I need to wrap this up and polish. After I've ported it then I can't start tackling those Big Questions again.

I tried drawing a puzzle piece and it looked odd. I also don't want to shy away from the classic play icon because that's what most people downloading the game will look for.

How about this?:



Plain play - which I assume fresh players will go for immediately. Maze and I've made the pencil more pen like (or more similar to it's lower rez cousin).

I'm making a game that looks like this:



It's a puzzle game. There's another thread on here about it (there's a playable beta link there too):

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=31065.0

Trouble is, I've got 120x80 pixels to do the whole game in and some of my UI icons have come out a bit vague. I don't want any text in the game - it helps drive aggressive play which is essential to solving the puzzles. I also want to keep the low amount of colours because making the icons busy will make the player assume they are objects in the game and not UI.

The title screen:


The icons mean: Puzzle mode, Adventure mode and Editor mode.

The Puzzle mode I used a play icon with a suggestion of a level grid. Most gamers parse that - some people don't. Adventure mode I just thought should be a bigger play icon and the in-game-goal icon - but most people parse that as the editor (if they've read about the game that is). I would accept the E for Editor, but E in this game means Ending, having E for both is ambivalent. And it doesn't work in other languages. The Editor mode no one seems to have read as a pencil, I had someone think it was a sword.

Problem is, in order to back out of the settings whilst level editing I have a smaller icon with an attempt at a pen:



The icons here mean: Exit (I use an X elsewhere as a cancel option), back to editing (the pen), load, save, toggle tap/swipe. If I don't use the pen I don't know how to suggest returning to editing without confusing it for returning to the title menu.

-

So how do I fix my title screen?

Changed Adventure mode to full random. Still has progression elements to it and you still can't door-scum for a decent room. It's only the difficulty I have issue with now. It's tough, but quite do-able for a skilled player.

I think the moves taken to reach the Ending would be a suitable metric for score. I don't like the idea of killing for score, it would be much harder to escape with a perfect number of moves.

This really just leaves perhaps a few more levels and polish, polish, polish.

Ew. Starting in the same area - even if it is one of 4 - gets old really fast 

Adventure mode now starts with a set random seed. Moving advances the RNG depending on what direction you move in. The direction you step before you die also determines the room you start in.

Basically Adventure mode now behaves random, but you get one of 4 opening sequences. This is a simplified version of what I had in mind, but what I want to test is whether having these static starting layouts that diverge after play is fun or boring.

Do I try to refine this idea further, or is it just a cute idea that doesn't work in practice?

-

I removed the Vonnegut quotes. Unfortunately a lot of people just didn't get it or took it the wrong way. I wanted the game to be void of any instructional text, but having any text at all in a text-desert is leapt upon to try and define the situation.

This way at least I get to fully realise a game that has no language barriers at all.

Your next goal: Get a forum profile picture so I can tell your posts apart from the noobs :O

happy?

5 more levels plus UI fixes now online.

Added check-view into the editor - found myself wanting it so I can get a more tactical view of a level's design whilst putting down tiles.

It's more difficult with the new path digging rules, but I just managed it last night. Still needs a lot of work though.

Anyone else who wants in testing the iOS version click this: http://tflig.ht/VeDizA

I was hoping you could make the game without the tiled look that rogue like's often have?

It's on a grid mate. Grids are implicitly tiles. Might as well ask him to do it all in circles.

(yes I've played HyperRogue, it's still technically hex tiles)

 

Tested all browsers on Windows 7, XP and OSX - no reproduction of the double click issue. I can only assume there's something with some people's hardware or software adding extra clicks.

I can solve the issue however by removing the click-prompt on the title menus. It's actually unnecessary at that stage, so it would be a UI improvement.