[Android] [Free] Gem Eater - an original mobile puzzle game

I have been working on a small mobile game for quite some time now (in my spare time), and I finally made it publicly available on the Google Play Store

It's a puzzle game, that is sort of like snake meets bejeweled meets boulderdash.
You control a snake that has to eat gems to score points, while making sure not to get stuck before reaching the target score.
The trick to high scores is to make long same-colored-gems-combos (simply by eating a certain color without eating any other colored ones in between)

It's a free game, but with (optional) ads

I added Leaderboards and Achievements using the Google Play Game Services as well.

I hope you enjoy it,
let me know what you think!

 

I've updated the game, check it out on the Google Play Store.
The biggest change is that you can now Place checkpoints, so you don't have to start from stage 1 each time you start.

I would really appreciate if people checked it out and let me know what they think. Currently it's only been downloaded about 25 times, of which are probably about 20 people I know. :s

 

If you want to get plenty of downloads, and probably more than a little feedback by way of reviews, you can do a lot worse than use the AppBrain service if you can afford $100 (about GBP72.00 at current exchange rates) for promotion.

CPI (Cost Per Install) starts at $0.10 per install depending on countries targeted, so you can get up to 1000 installs for your money.

We've used this to kick start a couple of our apps with very good results and found it to be very good value for money.

 

Hi, thanks for the advice.
You know, maybe I do have to stop being such a cheapskate.
I guess nowadays you really need to spend at least some money on advertising.

I'll think about it.
But I think maybe I should first make some more interesting images to promote the game, rather than the current screenshots, they don't really look all that appealing IMO.

 

Finally made a video for it:

It's just a short demo, but I needed something for on the play store, unfortunately Google hates vertical videos apparently? Cause it's always played in landscape, even though the video is in portrait and I'm holding my phone in portrait mode.

So I made a rotated version and linked to that instead, I dunno if it's the best idea, let me know what you think.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.MeteorStudios.GemEater

 

So i tried it and i can say the idea is good and plays ok but i have some issues with the input method , feels a bit clunky to me especially when swiping .
Also visually have you tried making the snake movement animated instead of instant between tiles, i think it would work well here.

 

Hi, thanks for trying the game, and for the feedback.

Not sure what you mean with swiping? cause you move the snake either by tapping or dragging.
You can change the input method slightly in the settings, but all that does is limit or allow tapping far away.

and yes, I agree it would look nicer if the snake movement was animated, but I wanted the snake to follow the input exactly and instantly, and the grid structure makes it difficult/impossible to have that movement be smooth.

 

Drag or swipe (swipe is the act of dragging your finger on a mobile screen in a direction i would say) , yes i used the second method and there were times when it felt like there was input lag , and times when it didn't react at all and had to release and put the finger back on the screen , i cannot really explain it better then this , not sure what the overall impact it has on the game and unless others confirm might not be worth pursuing.

I am sure the movement is doable on grid system to since you can see similar things in candy crash , it is just difficult , but basically once a finger enters a grid tile you do a move-to(X,Y) co-routine that you interrupt if not complete by the time the finger gets on the next tile at which point you would maybe move the snake with brute force to the previous tiles X,Y and start the co-routine towards the next tile, just a thought i am sure there are better ways to make this.

As i said this for me ads to the feeling of imprecise and clunky input, the exact opposite as your intention.

 

hm, I never had that it didn't respond, and never heard anyone else have that problem.

Oh wait, I think I may have an idea of what's causing the issue for you: when dragging the snake, when you hit a falling cell, the snakes stops, maybe that's what you experienced?
I made the snake not be able to move through falling blocks because of a technical limitation, cause it really complicates things if I allow it. It's normally not really an issue if you play the game normally because you need time to think, only when you move around randomly it happens a lot.
But I guess for new players it's normal to move around randomly, so maybe I should work on making the snake be able to eat through falling cells.

 

Well yes that is more then certainly one issue, another that i at least seem to detect but cannot be sure off is that you probably set the colliders or whatever you used to detect which tile you are touching on right on the perimeter of the tile and this can sometimes lead to unwanted movements for me at least( moving right when i am going down for example), if you did you could experiment with some padding to allow for the variation in natural finger movements.
As for the snake movement maybe just make stop signs(semitransparent for example) appear on top of the moving rows or the cells that move to make it clear you cannot move there, without this feedback i have no idea it is not allowed, and remember i play the game as i expect to play it not as you expect me to, and so will a lot of other people

 

You're absolutely right about how not being able to move through falling cells is unexpected behaviour for new users. So I added a sign that pops up to show you can't move through there, as you suggested. The update is now publicly available.
Thanks for the feedback!

As for the finger-touch detection, I've never had any issue with that, nor did I hear that from anyone else. Is it possible it's an issue with your phone/tablet?
There is already a small margin, and I'm hesitant to make it bigger as it will make it more difficult to tap on any cell.
Currently I do the detection simply by checking in which cell the mouse is. (no colliders, just comparing coordinates)

 

It could help for the future to maybe implement swipe code for input instead of detecting collision, that way you can determine the vector of movement , but this is a minor issue , as they say if it's not broken don't fix it

 

New version available (1.3):

I added a "Versus" mode, where 2 players can play against each other on the same device.
I also added some visual effects and improved the chackpoints system.

Let me know what you think!