A help button would be neat too, to explain what each powerup balloon does, and how the game generally runs. E.g. the how-to-play at the beginning, but can be brought up by clicking a button, and shows what each balloon does.
Also I am now #8 on the high scores! Fun game for sure, solid core mechanics, easy to follow the action and I saw no mechanical problems. Arguably, if you're interested in knowing whether the scoring/multiplier mechanics are working exactly right, make a debug version with no timer so people can play with it while manually following the scoring rules (on paper) and comparing values.
Oh and THANK YOU for including a mute button. I haven't heard the sounds/music so I can't comment on their quality, but I always mute flash/java games if the option is available, so thank you for making the option available! So many developers do not do this, and it is shameful.|||Quote:
...
If you're obsessive like I am, and you screw up in a game like this, then you'll want to restart the game immediately, rather than waiting for the count to run out. I would add a button to immediately exit the current game session and head to the main menu (or start a new game). Definitely also ask if the player really meant to do this. In the interests of preventing cheating, black out or completely cover the playfield while the game is paused this way.
A help button would be neat too, to explain what each powerup balloon does, and how the game generally runs. E.g. the how-to-play at the beginning, but can be brought up by clicking a button, and shows what each balloon does.
Also I am now #8 on the high scores! Fun game for sure, solid core mechanics, easy to follow the action and I saw no mechanical problems. Arguably, if you're interested in knowing whether the scoring/multiplier mechanics are working exactly right, make a debug version with no timer so people can play with it while manually following the scoring rules (on paper) and comparing values.
Oh and THANK YOU for including a mute button. I haven't heard the sounds/music so I can't comment on their quality, but I always mute flash/java games if the option is available, so thank you for making the option available! So many developers do not do this, and it is shameful.
I know that the scoring portion of it is working correctly from my own debugging. There are only two things that I am currently questioning from an actual debug standpoint:
1)(and this is going to get a bit wordy) I designed the special blocks intentionally so that while you get the score for the total number popped by all chained combos -think horizontal arrow into vertical arrow into horizontal arrow- all those balloons will be cleared, counted up, an scored according to the total number cleared with that single mouse click. I also designed it to not give credit for those balloons cleared by chained combos towards the 3 balloon click rule. So, if you click a group of 2 balloons, one of which happens to be a vertical arrow, it will reset your progress of clicking groups of three or more. I thought I had this worked out perfectly, but last night while playing I thought I saw it reset when I clicked a group of three, one of which was a color bomb. That shouldn't happen. I wasn't able to replicate it though -which is to say that I didn't encounter another group of 3, where one was a special balloon. This may need fixing...
2) on some of the other games I designed (most notably Fruit Madness) the counter that makes the animation happen doesn't seem to function properly on some computers and I don't know why. In this game I scrapped that counting system completely and did an array of 56 timers (one for each balloon) based on your system time and the amount of time it takes for one balloon to travel from the bottom of the screen to the top. It works fine on all the pc's in my house, but it may not function properly on some computers, but gosh I hope doing it this way fixed it.
I have put reset features into other games (Fruit Madness, KerPop) but I just didn't think it was necessary in this game. Also features where if the mouse leaves the playfield it pauses the game. There is no information being stored from game to game, so you can just hit your browser's refresh button to load it again.
As for the help screen... Yeah, I'm slacking on that, and I need to get that written up for the droid version. In the web version it likely won't be in a menu though, it will just be on the page from which you launch the game. I've just been sitting on this one for so long now I wanted to get it out and get some opinions.
The sound in any java/flash game is not optional. Especially in this type of game. In a perfect world this will be being played by thousands of people, in offices all over the world, who are supposed to be working on spreadsheets. Not having a mute button kills this. Plus I am not an audio engineer, so the sounds that I created for the game aren't really all that great (but by that metric I am not an artist or a programmer either, so I'm probably lucky I have it playable at all).|||Quote:
If you're obsessive like I am, and you screw up in a game like this, then you'll want to restart the game immediately, rather than waiting for the count to run out. I would add a button to immediately exit the current game session and head to the main menu (or start a new game). Definitely also ask if the player really meant to do this. In the interests of preventing cheating, black out or completely cover the playfield while the game is paused this way.
I second this. Sometimes, by bad luck, the screen fills with groups of 2 balloons only, and you know it's over. Hitting 2 is very bad.
Quote:
But the big question is, did you see any mechanical flaws or bugs in play? Or things happening not as you expected them to that, either by design, or by error, need to be fixed, or at the very least explained in the instructions?
Everything seems to run smoothly. I can only reflect on gameplay.
Maybe an exploit: If you notice you just hit a group of two (=THE END for your score), you can hold in the mouse button and drag the cursor off the screen to release so it doesn't register as a pop. I doubt this can be fixed though b/c it might feel very weird only having to click and not unclick to pop (too unorthodox).
I like the glow when you hover over a group of balloons; it's not too distracting.
I've been ignoring the bonuses, but I'm guessing the extra time ones may be needed to get higher scores. I'll go back and try them out.
It's best to ignore the bottom half or even 2/3 of the screen b/c if you clear balloons down there, very little of the color combos change as only a bit of sliding occurs when new balloons slide into place. And chances are, you will have cleared out opportunities of 3+ balloons everywhere else. In other words, it's advantageous to have the most change possible when balloons slide in, which means I only ever look down in desperate times (when no 3+ groups exist above) or when there is a wall of color down there. Not sure if this is an issue; but it's kind of like in Super Mario if the platforms only went so high making all that sky up there (a big portion of the screen) pointless to check out most of the time.
Regarding the "panic" in title: The game discourages glancing at your time because it costs precious eye saccades. So I never feel panicked. But maybe most people actually do check their time.
There were times when I thought I hit a group of three but it counted as 2 which wrecked scoring progress. However, I have no idea if that happened. It's probably human error given the speed.
Speaking of human error, if you wanted to reduce grumpiness by having this happen less often, maybe make the balloons slide faster? Sometimes a group of 3+ changes to 2 when the sliding occurs from the previous pop. If the slide happens faster then human reaction speed, people cannot shoot themselves in the foot by clicking what used to be a 3+ group. When they do, it's the end of the score progress.|||Quote:
I second this. Sometimes, by bad luck, the screen fills with groups of 2 balloons only, and you know it's over. Hitting 2 is very bad.
I'm still kicking this around... Again, no information is saved from one game to the next, so all you have to do is hit the refresh button in the pop-up window. The games that I did put a pause feature into were designed from the start to have it in place, going back to add it now and stopping all the timers mid-move makes my head hurt. I'll come back to this later.
Quote:
Maybe an exploit: If you notice you just hit a group of two (=THE END for your score), you can hold in the mouse button and drag the cursor off the screen to release so it doesn't register as a pop. I doubt this can be fixed though b/c it might feel very weird only having to click and not unclick to pop (too unorthodox).
This is absolutely intentional. The method that handles the event is the mouse-up method so that you can correct if you make a mistake. Plus, for reasons that I don't really understand I have issues with java if I try to handle some events on click while handling others on mouse-up (it results in clicks sometimes registering twice, or not registering at all -either of which would be terrible in this game). But then I've never had any form of instruction with regards to programming -I just started doing it one day-, so I get better as I go...
Quote:
Speaking of human error, if you wanted to reduce grumpiness by having this happen less often, maybe make the balloons slide faster? Sometimes a group of 3+ changes to 2 when the sliding occurs from the previous pop. If the slide happens faster then human reaction speed, people cannot shoot themselves in the foot by clicking what used to be a 3+ group. When they do, it's the end of the score progress.
Noted. I've increased the speed. I tried to increase it by 25% but then if you cleared a single row horizontally you couldn't really see the balloons move, they just seemed to kind of appear in the spot above (and I am damn proud of the individual timers on the balloons, so they must be seen to move). So 20% increased speed is the best I could do.
I also made a couple of other changes based on my own play:
1) The image for the special bomb was missing, and has been added. The functionality was there before, but you wouldn't have known which balloons had the bomb on it, so you probably either never clicked one, or had a weird clearing pattern go on that you didn't really understand. The bomb, when grouped, will clear all balloons of that color that are on the board. This is an extremely helpful special if you get in a position where the top couple of rows are in a checkerboard pattern that you can't clear.
2) I reduced the number of balloons needed to be popped to get the intentional special balloon bonus. When balloons auto generate, each balloon has a chance (currently 8%) to spawn with a bonus block on it. These random blocks will currently spawn with a 60% chance to be added time (30% 1 second, 25% 2 seconds, 5% 3 seconds) and a 40% chance to spawn with either an arrow or a bomb (10% bomb, 15% of each of the arrows). The intentional special balloon bonus chance is now set to happen when you clear a group of 9 (previously 10), when you do so, you are guaranteed a single special balloon based on a different set of percentages, which look like this: 35% chance to be color bomb, 25% chance to be a vertical or horizontal arrow (25% chance of each) , and a 5% chance each to be +1, +2, or +3 seconds (5% chance of each). The rest of the balloons in the group of 9 or more will spawn with the previously mentioned random chances.
Ideally these changes will make the game have just a bit more action, and hopefully be just a bit more fun. And thanks to all for the feedback.|||I did play it now. Very fun! I've played other balloon pop games, but this one was pretty addictive! Not much that I would change. The reset would be nice, like when halfway through I mis-click on a group. Its not really that big of a deal though.|||I am still a fan of Sudoku.
|||Quote:I am still a fan of Sudoku.
Sudoku is one that I have thought of programming, but every page seems to have one now...
Also on my thinking of programming list are a game similar to Mastermind, with the computer being the codemaker, or a dice game like, maybe something similar to Yahtzee, where I could try my hand at both writing the AI to play it solo, and see if I could work out how to get a multiplayer thing going. But that makes my head hurt.|||You may be right that this is a game that rewards finesse over random spaz clicking, but so far my best click-fest score is two times higher than my calm, calculated score (4th highest reported score vs. what would have come in at 8th). ...And I did only two frantic rounds and about ten attempts actually trying.
No bugs that I saw, but I did see this "typo" in the game description:
"Groups of 10 or more points are worth huge points."
That should read "10 or more balloons...," right?
It also reads that there's a horizontal row clear special block, but I don't think I've seen any.
Decent game, regardless; anything beyond my own skill deserves praise.|||Quote:
You may be right that this is a game that rewards finesse over random spaz clicking, but so far my best click-fest score is two times higher than my calm, calculated score (4th highest reported score vs. what would have come in at 8th). ...And I did only two frantic rounds and about ten attempts actually trying.
...
Unfortunately, a bit of play and viewing some debug info shows that you are quite right. It shouldn't be affecting only the horizontal arrow though, the way the code is currently written there is a bit of wonkery with the way it is handling the random events. I'll have to dig back into the code to figure out just why, but that will probably have to wait until after I get back from vacation. Thanks for pointing it out though, it certainly needs fixing.
But on the plus side, I fixed the typo in the game description
EDIT:
I think I have that issue resolved. I had an issue in an array that was causing an iteration error which made ending with the number 2 impossible, and ending with the number 4 about 5 times more likely than it should have been. Because of the fix, however, I had to reduce the chance of random special blocks down to 3% (it was 8%) to keep the board from getting cluttered with +time blocks. The end result is the controls I had in place to govern the % of each special block are now working so I can tweak as necessary.|||Been playing a bit more, pretty fun, but the issue is really that randomly clicking is better. I wonder if the first place person was using an auto-clicker or something. I just took the second place spot, which was about a 4 minute game. And trust me, my fingers feel like they are about to fall off. I can see it being much better if you could somehow restrict it to being better to use strategy. I could see myself enjoying it for a longer period of time if that was possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment