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[canislupus]

 

Hi, there! Looks weird, huh? This game came about when the programming team at Insignio Labs had nothing to do while waiting for the art team to finish clearly more important stuff. It's an arcade retro game about mixing colors.

Prismatic Momentum is on Android here, for your hard-game needs:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.insigniolabs.prismaticmomentum

It's also on Kongregate (remember to login to use the leaderboards):
http://www.kongregate.com/games/insigniolabs/prismatic-momentum

The leaderboards are still cozy for friendly competition against your friends and us.



Any sort of feedback is greatly appreciated!

Regards,
Daniel

[chances_r]

Well... I got my share of insults about how bad I sucked at this.  lol... actually, after a few tries I got pretty good at the first level (single lane).  Then I managed to unlock the two-lane version and sucked all over again.

Overall, a pretty good game.  Very challenging (at least for me).  But interesting to play.  The gameplay is good, but the graphics are a bit flat.  That's an area that could be improved.  Maybe add some depth and/or shadows to the player's object?  Just a thought.

But it's pretty fun as it is.  (I played the kongregate version.)  So nice job so far.  

edit: spelling and clarity

[canislupus]

Haha yes, the game is challenging, so you did well!

About the graphics' flatness, that's a fair point. We'll take your thoughts into account.

Thanks a lot for playing and taking the time to give us feedback. It's much appreciated!

[Kryzarel]

Hi there, I'm also one of the developers of the game. Thank you for taking the time to play it, we're very happy you enjoyed it

We'll certainly try some things about the depth and see how it looks.

Thanks for the feedback

[P-Flute]

Hey! I also enjoyed the basics, the concept seems fun. Like your title screen. I'm not 100% sure the color matching felt intuitive enough for me, like I had to memorize all the combinations, but that could be because I'm used to mixing colors otherwise so I had some hangups on the way colors interact?

I also had a bug moving from one lane to two where two music tracks played simultaneously for a minute?

Anyway, keep up the good work.

[You Blister My Paint]

Looks cool! Installing now...

Random feedback on your post:

Your gif looks a little rough there. I've been struggling with gif creation as well and I ended up following the advice in this article and now gifs are better. This what my gifs look like now. Still a little rough but my game has some filters being applied that make it hard to giffy properly.

Will report back when I have some feedback about the game. Might be a little bit as I have a packed evening.

[Kryzarel]

I also had a bug moving from one lane to two where two music tracks played simultaneously for a minute?

Aw man, we were sure we had that fixed yesterday
Do you remember when the last time you played was? Could it be possible Kongregate served you an outdated version? o.O

Anyway, we're super glad you enjoyed it :D

Your gif looks a little rough there.

Yeah, we struggled quite a bit to get the gif to an acceptable file size and not completely butcher quality. It still turned out pretty bad.
I'll definitely check out that article.

[P-Flute]

I played during the day yesteday actually, so it very well may be fixed now. :D

[canislupus]

Hey! I also enjoyed the basics, the concept seems fun. Like your title screen. I'm not 100% sure the color matching felt intuitive enough for me, like I had to memorize all the combinations, but that could be because I'm used to mixing colors otherwise so I had some hangups on the way colors interact?

I also had a bug moving from one lane to two where two music tracks played simultaneously for a minute?

Anyway, keep up the good work.

We kind of let the color matching be something that you get better at with enough time, but is always part of the challenge. I'm one of the devs (not the best player of the team, though! that's Kryzarel XD) and I find that the game requires extreme concentration from me when the speed increases, even after playing many times!

Memorizing combinations is something I expect players to do after while, especially in harder modes. It's very possible that the color mechanics are not intuitive at first, as players will generally not be used to doing that in their daily lives, but we wanted that extra challenge. Would you say that the non-intuitiveness was/is a problem?

I'm pretty sure you are correct about two tracks playing at once. Like Kryzarel mentioned above, we thought we had fixed that bug. Could you tell us if it happened only once? If it did, it might be happening under different circumstances than the bug we fixed. That one happened always on all modes, though most noticeably on 2 Lanes mode.

Thank you very much for the feedback!

Looks cool! Installing now...

Random feedback on your post:

Your gif looks a little rough there. I've been struggling with gif creation as well and I ended up following the advice in this article and now gifs are better. This what my gifs look like now. Still a little rough but my game has some filters being applied that make it hard to giffy properly.

Will report back when I have some feedback about the game. Might be a little bit as I have a packed evening.

Your "random feedback" is useful! Appreciated! We would have used the video "gif" format from Imgur if we could, but had to convert it to a normal gif with not-so-good results.

Take your time to try the game. No rush.

[You Blister My Paint]

I got a chance to play it. I really like the game, thought I didn't really get too far (only at two lanes).

What I liked:

• Loved the art style
• Menus are minimal in way that you would have just spent some time designing menus to appreciate how much work went into them
• Enjoyed the gameplay

What I didn't:

• The controls felt a little awkward to me. I am playing a Nexus 7 mini tablet, so that may be part of it. I kept wishing the left and right were on the left and right of the screen. Hell, I wanted to just tap either the left half or right half of the screen to cycle colors.
• The color cycle is pretty small on the screen. Might work better if it was more prominent, like at the top of the screen, and have the others elements like time and lives take a back seat.
• Lane changes felt a little slow

Other thoughts:

• The insult death text made me laugh, but might be nice to give it a break when the player sets a new personal record on a level. Maybe give a begrudging compliment.

Overall, really cool game. Any plans to release on iOS? That is my primary device platform and I'd like to play this on my phone.

Also RE: the gif. Try turning off the noise filter when creating a gif. It should be a lot easier for the gif algorithm to encode to a reasonable size without the noise.

[canislupus]

I got a chance to play it. I really like the game, thought I didn't really get too far (only at two lanes).

Great! I think we wouldn't get too far either at first, if we weren't the devs.

What I liked:

• Loved the art style
• Menus are minimal in way that you would have just spent some time designing menus to appreciate how much work went into them
• Enjoyed the gameplay

Thank you!

What I didn't:

• The controls felt a little awkward to me. I am playing a Nexus 7 mini tablet, so that may be part of it. I kept wishing the left and right were on the left and right of the screen. Hell, I wanted to just tap either the left half or right half of the screen to cycle colors.
• The color cycle is pretty small on the screen. Might work better if it was more prominent, like at the top of the screen, and have the others elements like time and lives take a back seat.
• Lane changes felt a little slow

We tried at least 4 control schemes for mobile:
1. Vertical swipes for lane change and horizontal swipes for color change. (Too cumbersome and lots of finger movements.)
2. Vertical swipes for lane change and taps on the left/right side of the screen to change color. (Worked well, but on harder modes using swipes was still too slow.)
3. Taps on lanes to change to them, and taps on left/right arrows to change colors. (Current control scheme. Using taps for everything felt good and almost as quick as playing with the keyboard arrows, but yes, I also think the left/right screen taps feel more natural. We couldn't use those because changing lanes already requires tapping on the left half of the screen.)
4. Taps on lanes to change to them, and taps on Cyan/Magenta/Yellow buttons to change colors. (Way too easy to play this way. You memorized a combination of lane+color button and always used it, even though there could be another combination that resulted in the same color.)

Should we give the option to change to method 2 if the player wants? Would you be in favor of yet another method we didn't think of?

The remaining points you raised should be easier fixes. About the size of the color indicators, we can make them bigger with ease, but we think that having to look at the top of the screen to see what color is selected would make your eyes jump all over to see the obstacles, player and colors). We can try it, though.

Other thoughts:

• The insult death text made me laugh, but might be nice to give it a break when the player sets a new personal record on a level. Maybe give a begrudging compliment.

That's a very fair point. We'll probably want to create a set of semi-compliments. XD

Overall, really cool game. Any plans to release on iOS? That is my primary device platform and I'd like to play this on my phone.

Actually, yes, we are thinking of releasing on iOS too, but it probably won't be available as soon as in the other platforms because of the hardships of submitting games for Apple's approval.

Also RE: the gif. Try turning off the noise filter when creating a gif. It should be a lot easier for the gif algorithm to encode to a reasonable size without the noise.

Good idea!

We loved your feedback. Good points and criticism. It's much appreciated and raised important design questions!

PS: I wanted to play your game, but unfortunately I only have Android 4.3 on my Galaxy S3. Anything I can do?

[You Blister My Paint]

We tried at least 4 control schemes for mobile:
1. Vertical swipes for lane change and horizontal swipes for color change. (Too cumbersome and lots of finger movements.)
2. Vertical swipes for lane change and taps on the left/right side of the screen to change color. (Worked well, but on harder modes using swipes was still too slow.)
3. Taps on lanes to change to them, and taps on left/right arrows to change colors. (Current control scheme. Using taps for everything felt good and almost as quick as playing with the keyboard arrows, but yes, I also think the left/right screen taps feel more natural. We couldn't use those because changing lanes already requires tapping on the left half of the screen.)
4. Taps on lanes to change to them, and taps on Cyan/Magenta/Yellow buttons to change colors. (Way too easy to play this way. You memorized a combination of lane+color button and always used it, even though there could be another combination that resulted in the same color.)

Should we give the option to change to method 2 if the player wants? Would you be in favor of yet another method we didn't think of?

Hmm this is tough because I figured you guys had iterated on the control a bunch already. Rather then suggest a solution I'll just say that as a player, the button placement felt cramped to me and I had to move my fingers from where they would normally be holding the device to hit the buttons. I am an usually case though as I was using a 7 inch device and I have fairly large hands.

EDIT: I will also add that the game need a pause screen for when you want to multitask away from it and come back to it.

PS: I wanted to play your game, but unfortunately I only have Android 4.3 on my Galaxy S3. Anything I can do? Winki

The Android version requirement was pretty artificial and I chose it because I wanted to ensure I had good test coverage for all supported versions. I just did a quick update to the beta to allow Android versions 4.1 and up. Check it out when you get a chance.

[canislupus]

Alright, we'll try to take a better look at input. This is important to get right. If large screens are a problem maybe we can add some configurability, though it would be better if the game auto-chose the expected best settings.

Thanks for the version update. I've already installed your game and it runs well on my S3 (not 60 FPS, for sure, but still good). When I feel like I can give you useful feedback, I will definitely comment on your thread.

Cheers!

[canislupus]

We've updated the game and increased the sizes of the color indicators, adjusted a few minor things and fixed the bugs with music tracks that were happening on the browser version. Oh, and now there are slight...uh... "compliments" on new records.

- Daniel

[Kryzarel]

We just officially released on Kongregate! http://www.kongregate.com/games/insigniolabs/prismatic-momentum
There's a new game mode too! (As if the other modes weren't hard enough already)

The Android version is still in alpha while we iron out a few details. We will also update the original post with the correct links.

[canislupus]

Now it's released on Android too! We've added offset options to tweak the position of the controls. That seemed to help a bit.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.insigniolabs.prismaticmomentum