This is really cool.
Cheers man.
I really like the idea and gave it a go, unfortunately I was the only one online.
overall its a very slow experience. I don't understand the vertical scrolling at all, maybe this makes sense if the stacks get very high??? I found it very confusing to play. there also seems to be a bug/feature where the brick you just placed disintegrates if you press space at the last moment. didnt understand why though (I did not complete a line and it seemed to happen only on the floor). I think if the single player experience was more fun to play, it would be more likely that other people would join in. I was only playing for about 2min, if I stayed online for 10 I might meet up with someone?
maybe you could have game spawn brick-layers with gaps coming from the bottom and the collaborative goal must be to prevent reaching the ceiling. If people start playing bad on purpose this could be an issue for the games-fun?
another idea might be this: every player has different color bricks (or maybe there are teams of players with the same color, when there are more players). if one of your teams bricks gets to the top, the other colors get a point. so the goal would be to prevent your teams bricks getting to the top, but getting as many of the other colors up high. no idea if that would work, but it might be an interesting approach to the game.
Hey marcgfx, thanks for your input.
You're right, single player is pretty slow and boring at the moment. It doesn't showcase what the game really has to offer. I think you're absolutely correct, if I want to make players more likely to stay (and therefore proper multiplayer more likely to occur), I have to make single player more fun. I'm open to ideas. :-)
Note that the speed of your block is proportional to your score, so if you just joined or made mistakes you'd likely be stuck at the starting speed.
Yes, vertical scrolling really kicks in when you have 5-10+ players. It's actually really cool at that point, I guess you'll have to trust me on this until things pick up a bit :-) Trust me, this game gets hard enough when multiple players are flying around attacking eachother
As to the bug, I haven't been able to replicate it. Are you sure you haven't been making mistakes? see the below gif:
In order for this game to scale, I have restrictions around how blocks can be played, otherwise it turns into a giant mess when the player count goes up.
Players are already assigned unique colours. I am going to add other game modes like you suggested though - I have some really cool ideas for team match!
The cool thing is that this game is to it's core very simple. I can spend a lot of time polishing and trying out / adding new game modes, like the one you suggested.
It's very early days so I doubt you'd be lucky to find a random person jump on right now. I designed it to be really easy to play though, you can just link a friend and they're able to join the game within 20 seconds without knowing anything about it.
In the next version I'll be storing and graphing some statistics like the number of players who connected per day and so forth. It will be cool to see how the popularity progresses over time!
massively multiplayer online falling block puzzle game.
Well that's a first, never thought I'd read that sentence before
It sounds like a cool idea, but ultimately I'm not sure if this is something fun to play with friends other than for the initial kick you may get out of it.
Thanks Mahn
- you're right. I'm working on improving the competitive nature of the game which should hopefully stop the appeal of the game from quickly wearing off. Mechanics like block stomping work well when you have multiple players ingame, and I'm adding a persistent scoreboard in the next version. I'd love to hear any more ideas on keeping the game interesting!
Pyre
Community
