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[vultrix]

Just wanted to let you peeps know about a re-release of Overflow a puzzle game originally released back in 2001.

As we have a new business venture in the guise of Vultrix.com for developing indie games we wanted to give some fun things away first.

So, go checkout Overflow over at Vultrix.com. Its a little old, but completely free.

Enjoy and I'd love to hear your comments.

[increpare]

hmm.  there was an ideal like this somewhere else more recently, was there? (I recall some games with drops of water bouncing about to get into a bucket?) 

I think the concept is sound, but the implementation is a bit awkward/frustrating.  I tried level 2 about five or six times, and made tiny errors each time. Have to place pixel-perfect passageways is tough...even being able to see an outline of how thick your brush is might help here.

I didn't see a 'reset' button ... that might help as well (as, indeed, might a 'speed up' button >_<  ).  What about an eraser that would increase your bar again?

To some extent these problems could be overcome by having slightly more forgiving designs (at least for the first couple of levels), don't require people to construct almost-horizontal bridges unless you want to turn this into a game that tests how steady people's hands are.

The bar on the right-hand side also discourages people from experimenting.  If you got rid of that, and made the pace a bit more hectic (more bombs maybe, other interesting things that people would have to cope with at various points during play), maybe it might be a little more fun?

Also, the water droplets are really small.  Do consider either making them bigger, or increasing the contrast between them and the background: they don't really feel too watery at the moment either...sort of a powdered water, but that's more or less in the physics now I guess, so no point complaining.

[vultrix]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback. There is a game on the iPhone / iPod Touch like this.

Please bare in mind this game is old and re-releasing it is purely to give back to the community. We don't really have the capacity or resources to do a major update to it, too busy on other projects.

This being said there is a reset. Hold both mouse buttons for a few seconds. Also right clicking erases and fills up the bar on the right again.

All this should be in the on-line help.

Its funny as when this was originally released there was a huge divide between people thinking it was too easy and ridiculously hard.

The physics were always a tad wonky, it actually started life as a sand game (you see why the droplets behave the way they do). Again, this was 7 odd years ago.

Thanks again for the feedback and if we do get a few spare moments we'll try and fit in a few tweaks.

[Sim9]

Just downloaded it, cool stuff

If you're just re-releasing it and not building more, then maybe this is redundant, but...

Water drops - Agree they're too small.  Its usable on my fullscreen monitor, but you can't see them at all on the video.

Reset - Not intuitive on how to do it.  I also didn't figure out you could click the exit sign.  So I started off just waiting for the countdown to finish which was a bit frustrating.

Level 2 - It requires you to immediately jump into the action to save 90% of the drops.  A more graceful learning curve would introduce this pacing later in the game.

Overall, I enjoyed it.  I like the idea of a sand game with an objective - I'm not sure if it's been done before or not, but this is the first place I've seen it.  Thanks for sharing

[Alex May]

I recall playing htis when you first released it, and my main problems with it then were that the water didn't really behave much like water, and it took far too long to actually play it - once you've worked it out you can sort the level out and it's just a waiting game after that. It probably works better on the iPhone owing to the smaller resolution. Good luck! It's a great idea for a game that I've had independently myself, but just never managed to do it.