UA 2008: Flip sorter

Here is the link to my blog for making the game.
http://ryuuguujo.blogspot.com/
it includes screen shoots and some stuff on playing since the instruction screen is not done yet. I usually do that near the end since my ame design my change a lot during developemnet.

 

A very adictive gameplay, congratulations. Maybe you can get a little bit more "spice" and "rythm" if you add in some physical behaviour to the gemmes...? Maybe just accelerate while descending and deccelerate while ascending.

Nice casual game, good work.

 

Thanks for the comment. "Rythm" is a tough one for me. For "spice" I put some moving obstacles back in. I don't have new gem quality graphics for them yet but they play fine. The blue one bounces and the peach one respawns what it hits. I have a number of other variations for levels working but will concentrate on the visual for now since that is my weakest point.

 

It crashes Firefox, btw. (There are certain errors, e.g. NullPointerExceptions, which standalones and every other browser happily ignore and keep playing, but cause Firefox to freak out and crash... so you have to eliminate all of those. It's a major pain...)

 

Thanks for Firefox test
Fixed nullpointer exception. It runs in Firefox now.

 

I now have a playable beta up with 24 levels of easy and medium difficulty. Please give it a try if have 10 minutes. One level last 5 minutes.
http://ryuuguujo.blogspot.com/
http://www.ryuuguu.com/unity/unite2008/stable.unityweb.html
I am tracking scores and levels played so please put in some handle when playing it will help judge difficulty.
Also if you have any comments I would love to hear them.

 

Added Hard Difficulty so now 36 levels. Also checked wordwrap box on GUIskin when editor was not in play mode so instructions are readable Not sure when I'm going to always remember to redo changes made inplay mode.

 

Added Hard Difficulty so now 36 levels. Also checked wordwrap box on GUIskin when editor was not in play mode so instructions are readable Not sure when I'm going to always remember to redo changes made inplay mode.

 

I like the way this plays... it is genuinely fun and is becoming nicely polished. It was a little frustrating at first because it took me a minute to get a grasp on exactly how things worked -- I know you described the gameplay, but I think this is a case were a little interactive tutorial or even a quick demonstration video would go a long way -- once you get what to expect gameplay becomes very smooth.

 

Thanks for the feed back. I'll try making Demo "Video". It will actually be a live play with overlayed faked mouse pointer I think, because when ever I make real videos I fnd I change some visual feature right after and the video is out of date.

 

my only bigger worry there is a lack of nice guidance,too.
The tutorial video is a good idea to solve that, i´d also like it if instead of having all the helptexts on one screen it would give a step by step tutorial for a basic first level in interactive way as Charles said.
Other than that its a nice brain twister already

 

Thanks for the feed back.

So I have information overload, I guess a full tutorial level will be my weekend project.

Cheers,
Grant

 

nice

 

Added tutorial level. Next I have to clean up the Main menu which grown way out of hand.

 

yeah,the tutorial level is already much better than the static instructions screen
somehow its still kinda difficult for me, maybe that´s just me, but yeah,i´d like some even simpler starter levels

 

OK I'll make the first level or two easyer. I'll redesign them to be more training levels than plaing levels. I have been playing so much and had the intial idea I have trouble judging what is too easy.

 

Nice regarding making it more accessible for guys like me and yeah,that´s a common problem with game design, once one is so used to working a while on a game and playing it a lot its difficult to rate the difficulty well, happens to me, too of course . Well, good to have some playtesting like here then

 

Ok changed level E1 to make it easier. Tried adding floating tooltips for score but that will be a bit trickier than I thought.
[edit] but only a little trickier. Now I have floating tooltips for level scores. To see them work well you'll have to play atleast one level and get a non zero score

 

Sounds good but now i can´t choose any level anymore, when i hover over the level selection buttons it shows a tooltip with a 0 on them. I guess thats the score tooltip youre talking about
While talking about that startscreen: When i tried the game on my pc i didnt get what the sliders at the bottom are good for cause i didnt see the labels on the cheap tft screen i use with my old pc, when i tried it on my mac i saw them but they are still hard to read at certain angles to the screen/different light conditions. I think you should make such texts in a color with more contrast than very light grey on white bg.

 

Oops
Regression controls rather lax on my part. Levels are back to working, and fixed using wrong GUIskin unfortunately I have an error where all my menu GUI appears under the game play gui. I had this before and restarting Unity fixed it but not this time. I am putting the game wth the bad menu screen because it is playable but I will keep trying to find out what i causing the GUI.depth problem.

 

finally had the chance to try this - it was a bit mystifying at first but once you get the hang of it its pretty fun.

IMO you should add some FX (both audio visual) in there to punch things up a bit - the overall feel is a bit bland right now. maybe a particle system gem creation 'poof' and definitely some sort of nice chime flash when you get it to the destination. in general just much more positive reinforcement that the player is accomplishing things.

: )

 

This is going to be an awesome entry, good job!

 

I may add a little FX (there should already be some sound effects) but not much, this meant to be a casual relaxed game. I easy things up on scoring more points after completing the level goal. I do find it work on the easy level to run up points after finishing the level goal.

[Edit]Did some more play testing. I think DrJones is right about needing some visual FX. the amount of Audio is OK I think because when you get better you can start making things happen about once per second or two and so more sounds would start overlapping, but I am adding a sound to let you know when you have completed the goals for a level.

 

Changed the rules around so players can relax if they want after achiving the level goal. I made changed rings value around so they are worth positive points instead of negative points. This meant changing 1~3 values on each of 48 levels and adding a prefab link on each level. Thank you Unity for the Editor classes . A quick script some testing on one level and all 48 levels changed. Also updated the tutorial and rules.


Still need to add some small FX for making new gems and/or scoring gems. Mainly worried about this eating up days of time becuase I know myself. It is so easy to spend hours tweeking something like this with out realizing time is flying past.