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[AJirenius]

Hi, my name is Andreas Jirenius and I've just finished my very first game as an attempt to see if I can make a small living out of this. I'm just using my sparetime to fiddle with music, audio, graphics, texturing, coding, design etc and here's my first final result. New to TIG as well so bare with me if I do post in a bad manner or ask stupid questions
Here it goes, try it out and please give me some feedback (oh oh, and buy the game to support a dreamer!)

innovative casual game that takes the player through place and time with mindthrilling puzzles.
Features
 - 48 unique and varying levels
 - 4 different worlds with it's own playstyles, puzzles and gamemodes
 - 12 different gamemodes giving the player a fresh gaming experience throughout the whole game.
 - Find new locations and collect treasures
 - Stunning graphics and audio (am I allowed to say that )

The free demo and full version game are available at http://www.solodev.eu/g_Cryptex.html
You can also view a movieclip of the game at




Yes, to be my first game developed by myself, I'm pretty proud

[Guert]

It would be a good idea to introduce yourself here...

Later!

[AJirenius]

really, noone has nothing to say about it? 
Maybe this forum isn't for this type of game 

[Alex May]

You might get some feedback over at indiegamer. I think most people here wouldn't bother with a match-3 game. The game itself looks fine from the youtube I just watched. You might attract some flak because of your use of cliché themes and lack of innovative gameplay.

[Guert]

Haowan has a point there. The screenshots you show us looks like it's a bejewel in a tube with some explosions slapped on. 

Judging from your post count, it may also be because people here like to check out games of developers they know or at least have chatted with a bit. If you read the boards a bit and post a couple of messages here and there, I'm pretty sure people will be a bit more inclined into checking out your stuff. Also people who comments other games will usualy get more feedback when they post than someone who just pops in to see what people ar esaying about their game without caring for those of the others.

In all cases, I will try the game eventualy (I try to play every game posted on these boards) so you'll get at least one feedback post for sure. You just have to be patient and while you wait, post around and become part of the community

Later!

[AJirenius]

Yes, I'm sorry that my first finished game isn't innovative enough for you to try. As you say, people at Indiegamer gave me some great feedback and response which they always have done during the game progress. As my game was finished now I wanted to spreaden the words somehow and get a wider response so I guess I didn't post in here and made any friends before telling I made a game.
I wont bother you with my next cliche game, I promise.

[Alex May]

Well, if you want to be like that, then that's up to you. I'm sorry if my comment offended you; I didn't think I was dissing you or anything so it's unfortunate if that's how it came across.

How about chilling out a bit, have a chat with people in the other parts of the TIGS forums and settle in a bit

[Guert]

Well, you are not bothering, it's just that here, people are interested in the community. We just like to know the devs behind the games we play.

The game looks very good and well polished. I'll know for sure when I'll play it.

Post up your new game when you can, even if it's still in development.

[jeb]

Heh, well... You're writing about a finished game (what kind of feedback do you need now?) aimed for the casual market in a forum consisting of "game is art" hippies...

Anyhow, the game looks great, I bet it will sell well. I read over at Indiegamer about your "source code giveaway". Maybe that's interesting to people here?

For all you Blitzers in here I also offer my whole sourcecode to those who buys the game. The game is coded in Blitz3D, so you must have licensed copy of Blitz3D to compile the game. Just email me your serialcode after buying at
andreas.jirenius@...

That's really cool, too bad I'm not a Blitz3D user

[Zaphos]

I like the nonword "mindthrilling".  Excellent innovation in language!

I'm not really a fan of the "wrap it on a cylinder" school of innovation, though; in this case for example it seems to rather aggravate the issue typical of bejeweled clones that combos just go off randomly a lot of the time without the player really having to set them up.

To make broad generalizations, the popcap school of casual design (bejewled, peggle) seems more interested in scheduling random rewards regardless of player skill than in creating actually-compelling puzzle content.  It's the kind of design that can keep a player's attention for a while, but when they're done playing it they just feel sad about having wasted their time.

[Guert]

If you walked in a 5 stars restaurant sat down at a table, ordered the best meal on the menu, marveled upon the fantastic decorations and excellent service but got served a processed cheese and mayonnaise sandwich you'd be quite disapointed, would you? Well that's pretty much what is happening with cryptex of time.

The game is highly polished, has a very nice presentation, very well crafted ergonomicaly speaking, very user friendly, easy to pick and play, quite stable and offers many variation of the core mechanisms. But under all the meat, we still feel that the bone is a mere twig.

The first thing that strikes me is that this game is a match-three game but differs alot from bejewel. I think it the game would benefit marketing-wise if it didn't use jewels. Cryptexes are a very good theme to use in a puzzle game but here, it doens't feel like a cryptex at all. Anything besides jewels that would fit with the cyptex concept would be better.

The second that bothers me is that the game in itself doesn't offer as much as it could.

Many "modern casual" devs clone Bejewel or other popular match three games thinking that the key to success is within reach when using a gauge, mechanisms using only the click and movement of a mouse, some sparkles along with some points. In fact, Bejewel's success comes form the fact that it's simplicity starts off in its design, not it's input. To "win", all you need to do is move one element at the right place. The grid offers many possibilities of "wins" so the player will win very oftenly (every moves he makes actualy). So the player goes through a quick phase of search and wins after performing one move. Quick satisfaction at its best.

Another thing that's important to notice is that bejewel is a game where all information is know to the player. Bejewel is a game focused on searching and analysis, not expectation and planification (like Tetris). In other words, Bejewel's strenght lies in the fact that you can easily win and that you always know what you can do.

In this game it is not exactly the case. Cryptex doesn't show all the info to the player so planning a move is alot harder and less accessible to the "modern casual" player. Since half of the jewels can't be seen, sometimes there are some unwanted results, positive or negative, when moving gems the player sees. Also, to win in this game, you need to use two different mechanisms: spinning a level and spinning the whole cryptex. Using one of the mechanism will cause a raise in the puzzle's difficulty (spinning the cryptex will add jewels). So to summarize, the player doesn't have all the info he needs to play and when he tries to get it, something negative happens: it becomes very hard to analyze the situation and the game becomes somewhat "random" for the player (he starts clicking randomly everywhere until he wins) 

Masterhsip in a game of bejewel comes from using some planification elements to score some bonuses. Here, it's hard to tell. The game would truly benefit from a deeper core game experience. The game offers many long-term and mid-term goals, it just needs to add more short-term goals (using planification such as a way to regroup jewels together in order to score bonus points, liek bejewel for instance).

In a totaly unrelated topic, I've mentioned that the graphics are well done. True, they are well crafted but alas, they lack soul. All the graphics feel like they were pulled out of a 3D model generator.  I think the game would benefit graphicaly speaking, from the personal touch of an artist who would simply give a bit more character to the game.

So yeah, the game is well crafted and the presentation is very well done. Unfortunatly, it fails to deliver gameplay as strong as it suggests. I really hope to see more out of the creator as this title shows talent.

Well, that's all I can think of at the moment. 
Later!