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[Overman]

i love this game, so simple but so fun. I think if u added some stuff you could make it one of the top mobile apps, like Hoplite.  (If you are going to add items you should make them have persistent effects, again you can look to Hoplite which handles this geniusly)

[microrignal]

Wow thanks so much for the recent feedback! I was really pleasantly surprised to find a review of the game on JayIsGames minutes ago  . Thanks to them and whoever made that happen

*Disturbing footage of winning forever*

Well, uh, what can I say... congrats! Hahahaha! Awesome that you pulled it off really, it just confirmed my worst fears about crit piling up with no limit. I made a lot of changes since then. One of them is that swords give 10% each, but everytime the crit triggers it goes down 5%. We'll see how that goes.

i love this game, so simple but so fun. I think if u added some stuff you could make it one of the top mobile apps, like Hoplite.   (If you are going to add items you should make them have persistent effects, again you can look to Hoplite which handles this geniusly)

Thanks! Super encouraging, to say the least! I'll check out Hoplite later, but I'm a bit reluctant to add persistent stuff that changes the gameplay from one attempt to another. It's really interesting as a reward/incentive for the player, but I feel like it's kind of unfair if the game is ultimately about getting the best score.

Edit: Oh my, Hoplite looks neat.

This game is very neat and addicting! I made a profile just to comment on it!
Now make an android version please.  

I'm honored I want to get the game out on mobile platforms and I'm designing it with that in mind, but it's going to be my first experience with such an endeavour, so please bear with me >_>. My objective (which may be dead wrong) is to have it done by the end of april. A web version first is likely.

Stillnoplayableupdate! I've been reworking the UI, and making plans for basic (sufficient?) instructions embedded in the game.

Edit: here's a teaser

[microrignal]

Allright, here it is. A new playable build.
There's a lot of new things. Hopefully, the minimalistic help at the bottom of the screen will, well, help.

Let me know how it feels, and how far you make it.

Because it's kind of a departure from the previous build, I uploaded it in a different place.

So the NEW VERSION is here: http://microrignal.com/spoings/beta/
...and the OLD VERSION is here: http://microrignal.com/spoings/alpha/

Enjoy!

[microrignal]

Made a couple little changes to the UI.
Also, you can use/buy magic with the SPACEBAR. CONTROL toggles falling quadrant animation (now disabled by default).

[Mya]

Awesome work, very fun! - really love the simplicity of it

[Overman]

Allright, here it is. A new playable build.
There's a lot of new things. Hopefully, the minimalistic help at the bottom of the screen will, well, help.

Let me know how it feels, and how far you make it.

Because it's kind of a departure from the previous build, I uploaded it in a different place.

So the NEW VERSION is here: http://microrignal.com/spoings/beta/
...and the OLD VERSION is here: http://microrignal.com/spoings/alpha/

Enjoy!

Hmm, I only played the new version for a couple minutes but I think I preferred the simplicty of the "alpha". The idea of having a max of 4 possible moves at any turn, which still led to emergent and strategic gameplay, really appealed to me. So much so that I spent the last week making a SPOINGS-inspired game where you also have a max of 4 possible moves. I also think the game was better without everything being explained - the effects of all the tiles made perfect sense, at least to me, without any words needed.

However I will play the beta more later, since I'm heading to bed soon.

[microrignal]

Hey thanks, that's the kind of feedback I wanted to get (and the reason why the old version is still available). I did feel like I might have overdone it with the magic. That said, I encourage you to try the newer version. If nothing else it could be included as an "advanced mode" while the default mode would be more like the alpha.

[microrignal]

New build!

I bundled the classic and magical modes into one hopefully awesome build. You can select the mode of your liking from the title screen. I'd love you all to give both a spin and let me know which one you prefer. Either way, I'm thinking different modes such as these could coexist in the game. Not too many of them, but maybe 2 or 3. Some could be unlockable once you reach a certain score. A 'one hp' mode would certainly be hilarious.  

Content-wise, that'd be pretty much it. In terms of gameplay anyway. I'm contemplating the possibility of persistent unlocks, but as I already said I'm not sure about progressively unlocking gameplay elements since I'd like to encourage competition for the best score. I feel like it makes more sense, then, if everyone has equal chances. That said, everyone would have equal chances after playing for a while (and unlocking everything) and it could ease up the learning curve. Hmmmmmmm.

Speaking of which, I need to seek a way to implement online leaderboards. Any suggestion?

I won't lie, I'm behind schedule. BUT I'm getting there! As much as it's fun and unrestraining to code in pure JS, I'm now at the point where I could really use some code completion and refactoring.

I'd like to hear any advice you have regarding monetization. I'm thinking a free web version, maybe with ads, ship it to all the web stores. Put it on itch.io also if possible, get some donations. I thought I'd release an Android version later, but I guess it's better to have it ready right at the start, then use the web version to advertise the Android one. Riiiight?

[microrignal]

Reworked the layout, again.
I've finally decided that the text box at the bottom of the screen was unncessary.
Here's a mockup.

[microrignal]

Arrgg ok, so it seems like there's a mobile game called 'Spoing' and it appears to be quite popular, too.

Do you believe that warrants a name change?

Ideas so far:
- Quadrandome
- Tetrazard
- Spoingles
- Tetra Spoings
- Much Spoings

[Christian]

Arrgg ok, so it seems like there's a mobile game called 'Spoing' and it appears to be quite popular, too.

Do you believe that warrants a name change?

Ideas so far:
- Quadrandome
- Tetrazard
- Spoingles
- Tetra Spoings
- Much Spoings

I think it would be best to change the name in light of that info. Personally I like the first two the best. The others are still too close to the current name IMO.

[Pixel Noise]

Oh, this is very addictive.

I played both builds, and honestly, I see appeal to each. I'd say just find a way to ask people who played the game which they'd rather see, and if the votes lean heavily one way, do that. Otherwise, I'd say just go with whichever you prefer.

Following!

[microrignal]

Thanks Christian, and Pixel

I played both builds, and honestly, I see appeal to each. I'd say just find a way to ask people who played the game which they'd rather see, and if the votes lean heavily one way, do that. Otherwise, I'd say just go with whichever you prefer.

I'm actually set on including both play modes, without and with magic, the latter as an unlockable There will be two different leaderboards.

The score multiplier which increases as you level up will stay, though. A way to put it is, it's going to be pretty much the 'beta' build except with no inscructions, improved layout (see latest screenshot), proper menus, minimal animation and more polish and general. More mysterious unlockables. It's coming along pretty nicely, except my hands are full with other life-things right now.

[and]

This is cool, got to level 5 - probably didn't 'get it' enough to really work out any tactics for how to play it better (except for low level tactics such as move to the highest value/lowest risk tiles first).

I'd def buy it for my phone and play lots of it though, it's got that one more playthrough kind of feeling to it.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Played this at the montreal indies meetup thing, it was great! Good luck getting this to the finish line!

[microrignal]

Played this at the montreal indies meetup thing, it was great! Good luck getting this to the finish line!

Hey Frank, thanks so much for the clever suggestions and super kind feedback yesterday, and here again! Just took a full tour of your portfolio for the first time, it's amaaazings.

This is cool, got to level 5 - probably didn't 'get it' enough to really work out any tactics for how to play it better (except for low level tactics such as move to the highest value/lowest risk tiles first).

I'd def buy it for my phone and play lots of it though, it's got that one more playthrough kind of feeling to it.

Sounds good! It's meant to be that kind of game.

It's pretty clear now that the mobile version of the game will be a paid one vs a free 'lite' web version, but I'm still juggling with the idea of allowing people to try it on mobile first, somehow. You have to play the game to get a feel for it, and I figure most potential players browse for games directly on their mobile device rather than a PC. I have to look into how to implement such a thing. Inputs?

Also the identity crisis behind us. Phew.

[microrignal]

Pssssst. I quietly uploaded a new build yesterday

[microrignal]

For the past two days, I've been working on a mobile-friendly version.
I've decided to use Ludei Cocoonjs to wrap it as an Android/IOS app, and I'm probably going to rely on Google Play Game Services for the leaderboards.

Good sucess so far, the game is playable. I'm pleasantly surprised, actually. Works well on a old Nexus One, my only device to test it right now. There are still problems to solve, though. I need the pixelated graphics to be crisp, and the action is kinda choppy. On the upside, idle animations (the monsters') are fluid while nothing happens, and there are plenty of things to optimize in my rather dirty code. It looks like the rendering has really little impact on the performance; rather, the choppiness seems to be caused by the big chunk of calculations happening all at once when the player makes a move.

I encountered a few roadblocks during an otherwise a rather simple 'conversion' process. The first one was that Cocoonjs doesn't have a XML parser, so bitmap fonts (which consist of an image file and a XML-like file containing the data) could not be loaded. Internet came to the rescue with a solution, summed up by the nice person over here. If you're stuck with the same problem, I strongly recommend that you do the exact steps described, as it's tricky to get the proper Phaser-compatible JSON structure - I lost a couple hours trying to save time. Oh also, at the moment of writing this, the links to the fontConverter script and the DOMish parser are mixed up.

The first half of today was dedicated to trying to get a crisp pixel display, by fidlling around and trying to set Cocoonjs antialias to false. To no avail, more or less. However, I did implement somewhat proper scaling of the game according to the device's screen size. The result is that everything is scaled exactly 3x in the case of my old Nexus One, but eventually I'll need to force exact ratios for crispness' sake (e.g. 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x rather than 2.567x).

Actually, I've made a promising discovery in my quest for crispness. Indeed, I noticed that every sprite that has a tint applied to it is crisp and sharp, unlike the rest. If nothing else, it would just be a matter of tweaking the rendering to have everything go through the same process as tinted sprites. I suspect this would involve rendering everything twice, but if that's the case I could just pre-render everything once instead of doing it every frame.

As a first attempt at optimizing, I've bundled all my graphic assets in a sprite atlas instead of using plenty individual sprite sheets. It does not improve performance, but it helps greatly with the loading time.

To be continued.

[microrignal]

Another more technical update. The plot thickens!

Yesterday I upgraded Phaser to the latest version 2.3.0. It didn't change anything in regards to the issues I'm trying to solve.

Shortly after that though, I modified my code's structure to use multiple states for boot, preloader and the game itself (kinda like described here). And now, for some reason, pixels are crisp! I'm not sure yet what has caused it to work, but I can confirm that Cocoon.setAntialias(false) is required for it to stay that way. The antialias setting upon creating the Phaser Game object seems irrelevant. I've been able to test it on another Android phone (a really more recent model) and it displays just as well. Plus the framerate is top notch.

I got some performance drop at the same time as the display issue was solved, but it seems like it's related to my phone's irregularity since the previous, not-crisp version, which used to run smoother, faces the same problem while I haven't changed anything to its code.

So today I'm stripping parts of the game to see how I can make things smoother. Contrary to my previous assumptions, it seems like I should avoid tinting sprites and bitmap text as much as possible. It causes a visible, sometimes quite severe lag, at the moment something tinted is made visible or the tint is applied. I used tinting quite a (manageable) lot, especially to color text without having a different source image for each color, so I'll need to find an alternative. The obvious one being to make a pre-tinted version of everything I can. I suspect the same applies to transparent sprites (alpha properties), I'll look into it.

I'm hoping to make more strides today. Pew pew pew.

EDIT at the end of the day: I'm making tiny progress here and there. I discovered the Phaser.Image class which is lighter than Sprite, thus I replaced most of my sprites with images since they're static. Then I settled to try and disable the game loop in most of the code (setting exists to false but visible to true), to prevent stuff from updating needlessly. I went a bit overboard with that, it broke some buttons and I had to backpedal. I also 'ungrouped' the tile objects as a test, using a few local variables for positionning instead. Can't say it changes much but it feels good to remove that layer of compexity. It remains to be seen how far I'll push that logic. Lastly, I merged the slight upward movement of a quadrant's tiles when it's reset with the tween of the quadrant itself.

All in all, it's getting pretty decent on my old phone. The game actually gets smoother over time whenever I test it, which is good news I guess. I think it has to do with displaying stuff on screen for the first time, as if the game gets used to it after a while.

Another issue: tapping a quadrant hides what's happening there (because fingers) and it's annoying. I shall implement a nice, small, D-PAD thing at the bottom of the screen, where there's plenty of place due to the screen's verticality.

[microrignal]

Heeeyyy TIGForums. We meet again at last.

After a big summer of adventures, I'm *almost* to the point where I can resume work on Spoïks. There's nothing to show in terms of what has been done since last fall, but I did figure a new workflow to boost the performance of the game on Android - and actually making it work all the time, too.

Indeed, in addition to other previously documented annoyances, I had this fatal issue with Cocoonjs where the standalone export for Android resulted in a game that would exit instantly 3/4 of the time on my testing phone. Fortunately, I had the chance to discover Cocos2d-js for another project, and it looks like it's doing a mighty fine job with native Android export. I'll need to adapt the current Phaser-based code for Cocos, and all shall be fine.

I have a few adjustments in mind, too. Whathever happens when you land on a tile/grab an item needs more feedback to make it clear, and that's especially true for leveling up. Currently, you gain one extra HP for every two levels, which makes it super extra unclear. The spoïks multiplier which doubles every time you level up also seems to be mostly ignored by players for a while. To address that, I'm thinking of making an actual "LEVEL UP" screen that would point out what you just gained, and possibly give the option to either get completely healed *or* increase your max HP.

Another thing I'd like to clarify is the "floor" (aka difficulty, aka max monster level and abundance of spoïks) progression. That mechanic is mainly hidden right now: For every 4 quadrants that you leave, the max monster level increases by one. A possible (clever?) solution would be to introduce a staircase icon, which would be similar to the dice in that it randomizes everything, but it would also explicitly bring you to the next "floor". Some tricks should be used to ensure that you can't just delay that moment forever, of course.

Oooooh I'm also looking at the idea of bosses.

Excited to be back! Sorry about the sloppy update schedule ha ha ha.