next »

[Evilperson]

The rules are simple:
 - A random selection of alphanumeric keys on your keyboard are mines.
 - When you press a key, the number of blips that plays is the number of mines surrounding that key.
 - Press all the safe keys to win.
 - If you press a mine you'll explode.
 - If you die in the game you die in real life.

Criticism on all topics is appreciated, but criticism on the following topics is even more appreciated:
 - Sound design
 - Are the rules easy to understand?
 - Problems with non-QWERTY keyboard layouts

Play the game here: https://hubertslapo.itch.io/kiswpr

[-Ross]

Haha, this is pretty great. Honestly though I would remove the visual representation of the keyboard, except to show the results (and for "Zen" mode I guess). It was much more fun when I stopped looking at the screen and started focusing on my physical keyboard. That's the novelty here I think—a computer game that you don't look at your screen to play. It's like your keyboard is some ancient gaming console with tons of buttons.

When you do show the keyboard on-screen it's confusing since the keys are unlabeled and the punctuation and all other keys are missing, so you have to actually press keys and watch the screen to orient yourself. I would show a subtle outline of the whole keyboard—at least all the numbers, letters, and punctuation. And maybe keep them labeled? Maybe just the outline would be enough.

I type in dvorak, though I have a normal qwerty keyboard so I'm not sure if it counts. No problems though, all keys in the right places.

Pressing space 10 times to restart is a bit excessive, 5 or 3 or just 1 would have been fine, unless you're trying to make some kind of point.

Yup, the rules are easy to understand. Some little nitpicks on the wording: Saying "the number of blips" is a bit more correct than "the amount of blips". Also I would say, "Press every key that doesn't have a mine to win." or "Press each key . . ". "Press all the keys . . . " isn't wrong, but sort of sounds like you have to hold them all down at once. Also, I would just show the instructions at all time. I don't see much point in making people mouse over the little button, it's not like you need the screen space for something else. You could make that text a darker grey if it's too "in your face".

You might make the "safe keys left:" text a bit larger, it's the most important thing on the screen.

The sound design is pretty simple and functional. I like the bit of bassy thump to the key sounds. They could be a little louder relative to the blips. I noticed that sometimes you have a sound on key press and release, and sometimes only on release. And with the spacebar you're using the normal press sound on release. It might be nice to make that more consistent and always have some sound effect for press and release. Also a little bit of random pitch variation or random pre-recorded variations for the key sounds (not the blips) would be cool.

Just my thoughts, don't take them too seriously. It's a cool little game.

[Evilperson]

Thank you very much for playing Ross, I'm glad you enjoyed it  .
You've provided very valuable feedback, so I've started working on a patch to fix some of the issues you've mentioned.

" It's like your keyboard is some ancient gaming console with tons of buttons. "
Haha, that's basically how I came up with the idea for the game. I wanted to make a game where you look at the keyboard instead of the screen. I had a static representation of the keyboard on the screen so I decided to make it react to your key presses.
I thought players might find it confusing for the on screen keyboard to not react.
Maybe I shouldn't have put the representation in the first place and replaced it with a relevant message.

What do you think of the Zen mode? I made it after complaints of the game being too difficult, but then it just becomes Minesweeper :p 

[-Ross]

Awesome, you're welcome.

Yeah, Zen mode is okay. I have mixed feelings about it. It was nice in the beginning when I was looking at the screen, especially the flagging, but if you want people to look at the keyboard then it defeats that purpose. I wondered about having flags in normal mode while I was playing - on one hand it would be nice to be able to put a flag on a known mine that would save you once if you pressed it again after that. On the other hand, without any flags there's those "oh shoot, where was that mine again?" moments when you have to poke around and find it again, which is a good part of the game and encourages you to use your fingers as placeholders or something.

Honestly, if it was my game, I would go all out with the audio-only game concept. So much of this junk is about managing audience expectations. I mean, if you called it "Blindsweeper" or something and presented it as an audio-only game with your keyboard as the playfield, then no one could complain about a lack of visual aids. It's a niche game. If you can sort out the people who definitely won't enjoy your game before they get to complain about it, so much the better.

If you want to have an easy mode you could just tweak the number of mines.

Question: why aren't you using the punctuation keys?

[Evilperson]

Yeah, I believe you're right Ross, I think I might have been too cautious of audience expectations. Instead of trying to match expectations, I should probably make the expectations themselves different, if that makes sense.

Question: why aren't you using the punctuation keys?

The reason is that didn't spend much time trying to figure out how to get punctuation input in Gamemaker Studio in the first place, so I thought I'd leave it for later.
Later I figured out how to do it but have yet to implement it.
However, a problem I have noticed as I'm typing this post, is that the positions of the punctuation keys vary even on keyboards with the same alphanumeric layout. After I figure out how tedious it will be to implement all the variants, I might add punctuation.

Thanks for the feedback Ross, it definitely helped 

[quantumpotato]

Recommend: removing "press space 9/10 times to restart"

Cool game concept