I'm not a big fan of puzzle games for the most part, but I really liked this one! I played it for about 20 minutes but only manged to get through the first two puzzles for various reasons (one likely being that this isn't the kind of game I usually play.)
Praise:
1) I really like the music and the opening pulsing orb (although it was an oval on my screen at 2560x1600 (though it looks like the config file was set for 1920x1080). Is it supposed to be a circle?)
2) It loads and exits VERY fast. What engine are you using?
3) Thank you for supporting Windowed (Fullscreen) so that I can type my notes in another monitor without the game minimizing itself.
4) I did like that I didn't really know what I was supposed to do, with the exception of #1 and (to a much lesser extent) #3 below.
5) I liked the sound effects, but the undo sound was really loud as compared to the others (and I heard it a lot!)
Constructive Feedback:
1) It's not at all obvious what to do when you get to the pulsing orb. Clicking doesn't do anything. Escape just exits the game (without confirmation). I finally tried the arrow keys and that worked, and after that the orb ended up on the images of the arrow keys. Was it supposed to start with those arrow keys icons in view? If it were to do so, it would be immediately obvious what the player is supposed to do, so I kind of think it must have been. I also later found your readme.txt... but no one reads readmes!
Having Escape bring up a settings dialog with a Controls tab would be very helpful here.
2) You should consider adding an option to mute the sound when the game is in the background. Normally, mute in the background is the default.
3) I managed to shove the square into a corner but couldn't figure out how to get it back out again. I realize I need this to solve the first puzzle, too, dang it!
I finally figured out (after I found the readme) that Z would undo steps, but it literally took 30 seconds to undo all my feeble movements so I could free the rectangle. You might want to consider not including movements that don't change the state of the game (other than orb location) within the undo stack.
4) My guess is that lack of zoom is by design, but do you intend to support zoom to any extent?
5) You might consider supporting WASD in addition to the arrow keys for two reasons: 1) It's a standard set of controls that people will likely try before the arrow keys and 2) For most of the population, it frees their mouse hand. Even if your game doesn't use the mouse, I think people are used to having that hand free most of the time. If you support both, everyone gets a choice.
6) How do you start a new game? Once I got myself cornered, I wanted to start over again. Game saving / restore would be a great feature for just this sort of situation further down the road. Once I discovered Undo, I think it made more sense that maybe this wasn't necessary.
Thanks for the feedback. I just uploaded new builds with a lot of your suggestions.
If anyone wants to put their old save on a new build, you can copy your "save.level" file in the "data/levels" directory over to the "data/levels" directory for the new build. The level for that save will be slightly different than the level of a new game, but the levels should be functionally the same.
1) The reason why the orb appears as an oval on your screen is due to improper scaling due to your monitor's aspect ratio. If you're in windowed mode, it will automatically preserve its aspect ratio when resizing it, but if you go into fullscreen it won't. I updated the view code to change the view slightly based on the aspect ratio, so the new build should fix that.
2) It's using my own engine which I'd been slowly adding to whilst working on different games, so all the loading is pretty minimal.
1) Was putting the controls in the world confusing? Were you not able to see the controls at the start (if so it might be due to the aspect ratio issue I talked about earlier). One small thing I changed was that I don't allow the player to move over the arrow key symbols in the first area to avoid the confusion of thinking you should interact with them. I put some text over the controls at the start. I also added a pause menu with the controls on it.
3) In regards to not adding movements that don't change the state of the game onto the undo stack, it's a solid idea, but I feel like that diverges from how undo works in most Sokoban games and may lead to some odd situations (e.g. player pushes box on one side of the map, moves to the other side of the map, and undo moves the player back to the other side of the map).
4) I had never even considered adding zoom. Would it be helpful? Are you mainly wanting to zoom out or zoom in? It's pretty easy to add, it just seemed like more controls than necessary. I'll update the view code to work a little better, but I don't want to add zoom unless it's necessary.
5) Yeah, I don't know why I didn't think to add those.
6) I had considered adding in game options for starting a new game, but never got around to it. You could fast undo through all of your progress. A quicker, but less user friendly option is to go into the "data/levels" folder and delete the "save.level" file. Now the new build has a pause menu with an option to start a new game. I don't support multiple saves, but I'll implement it if people want it.
In response to the tutorial suggestion:
I want this game to be an experience where the player figures out most rules of the game through his/her own experimentation. The problem with creating a special tutorial section for controls is that there aren't that many controls and I can't really create a section like that for the undo controls unless I make that section scripted in some way (which I really wanted to avoid). I added your suggestion of having the controls displayed in the pause menu, so I'm hoping that will be enough for most people to play.
Once again, thanks for all of the feedback.
Developer
