blackatlas 2017-12-03 22:29
Mac user here. Tried to open the application and got "The application 'Junk' can't be opened." doesn't seem to be working :disappointed_relieved:
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → Junk
By jjjjason
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 66 | 3.89 | 75 | |
| Fun | 101 | 3.78 | 75 | |
| Innovation | 52 | 3.89 | 76 | |
| Theme | 71 | 4.10 | 74 | |
| Graphics | 230 | 3.57 | 76 | |
| Humor | 77 | 3.63 | 69 | |
| Mood | 196 | 3.36 | 67 |
Mac user here. Tried to open the application and got "The application 'Junk' can't be opened." doesn't seem to be working :disappointed_relieved:
@blackatlas Sorry about that :(. I've managed to find a friend with a Mac, I'm going to go and debug it now. Hopefully will be functional by deadline.
Opened fine on my macbook. Fun little game, kept hitting up to rotate instead of z/x -- that screwed me up a bunch. oh well.
A Very clever twist on a classic and well implemented.
Very cool concept of a multiplayer game, and the frame that you're working a job and you're left with someone else's problem is a perfect fit for the theme. Also the animation with the history of the entire board is a great visualization of each player. I screwed up my game big time, sorry whoever was after me :)
Cool creation !! I really like the simple shaded shapes and the animated text ! Nice little bit of humor too :) !
I just finished a game started by someone I see here in the comments, which is pleasing me to no end. Very neat idea to refresh an existing game!
An okay tetris clone, and with a fun story. I would really have liked some music and/or sound effects for this game. But a fine game.
For mac users having problems with opening: **right click on the application and click open** :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
I like it, it's a cool twist on the traditional tetris game, and of course, the theme itself.
Okay, I get it, it's Tetris. The fact that your old board is someone else's starting board is interesting, but doesn't have any actual impact on the gameplay in the end. Clearing the board has been seen in previous Tetris before. Time limitation has been seen in previous Tetris before.
I *love* that you're experimenting with "leave some info for someone else to play with", but this game doesn't really use that effectively! Which is really unfortunate!
Additionally, mac version - after every drop of a tetromino, there's effectively a small lag which is really REALLY annoying given the timed nature of the game. I'm guessing that you're communicating with the server at every drop? If so that seems to be overdoing it. And it really shouldn't hang the game, however briefly.
Funny idea and very polished implementation, but it is very frustrating because I don't really see the purpose of being good. What the previous person has done doesn't really affect your game, and what you do doesn't give you any reward, score, etc. It shouldn't be scrolling like this, or you should find some mechanics to make it fun.
Moreover, can't we pass the intro ? It's very annoying to have to see it every time.
Cool idea and really fitting to the theme. I agree with @nyri0 tho that the concept could be explored further, right now the state of the other players game doesn't really affect your game.
But whoever get to continue my game, good luck with that mess!
Thanks for the feedback everyone! Especially towards @tuism @nyri0 @fakeyou, I definitely want to explore the idea of shared, continuous state further in the future, much more than was expressed here. I'm a fan of Tetris personally, but there are definitely limits to how much I can use it as a vehicle for something like this (without it not being Tetris anymore, which is both a good and a bad thing imo). Good stuff to think about in a postmortem.
@tuism Funny enough digging through the code there literally is a random network call happening every drop that is totally unnecessary, probably a remnant of bad copy-paste :(. Working on a bugfix for that now (want to make sure that it was actually unnecessary...)
@nyri0 You can actually skip the intro and outro exposition by hitting "escape". Sorry that I forgot to document that somewhere...
While the core gameplay might not look that different from some other Tetris variants, I like the idea of continuing where someone else left off and I'd love to see what you do with it if you do continue work on it.
Honestly I love the idea, and you executed it perfectly.
Very cool concept and technology! Maybe this can be developed into some collaboration game like twitch pokemon?
That was really, really cool. I'm genuinely impressed! My first game was an absolute trainwreck that despite my skill with Tetris I couldn't get anywhere close to fixing. There was a tower so high I spent most of my time down-scrolling. In levels where people seemed like they were actually trying, though, it was an absolute blast.
I love this concept a lot, and as long as the server is up and running I think I'm going to come back to this to see what stuff comes out.
Keep up the amazing work!
Nice execution of a old idea with a newer twist. Made me wish that the "leave behind a older board" idea was more fleshed out and had more of a impact.
@chronosv2 The server will continue to stay up as long as it doesn't become prohibitively expensive :upside_down:
Thanks for helping to clean up the junk!
Good concept, even better execution. Could have really used the sound in my opinion though :)
Loved that I was picking up where the last players left off. Felt like I was part of a bigger game. Neat idea!
"you did good work kid, what's your name?"
me: alexv
me again: that game was pretty cool let me try again
"so there was this idiot yesterday, what was his name again, alexv"
I enjoyed the concept very much. Great idea turning a classic game concept into a community thing.
Some good points have been raised by other people, so I may have a few suggestions for improvement:
- Provide a quick intro. It's not necessary to read the intro text for each round. Once upon loading the game is enough. Give a short one-liner summary for the player's effort after finishing a round and let them return to the action right away. The longer text was funny, but it doesn't add a lot if you have to read it each round.
- Ask for the player's name in the beginning and remember it
- Display the name of the player whose field you take over to allow recognizing someone's name without having to reading the intro.
- If someone starts with a clean field, let them choose a name for that field and display that name while playing. Give the player the choice to continue working on the same field or pick another one after play.
- Allow the player to select from a number of fields where you show a list of contributors and what they added/took away from the field. That way, some social construct could form where a bunch of people get together to try and clean up the messy play field of other people. Offer some reward/accomplishment if they do. Some chat lobby would work well together with that idea.
- It's much easier to wreck playing fields than to heal them. Erase the "contribution" of people who are merely spamming blocks, e.g. by comparing "removed_lines / added_blocks" against a threshold. That way a team of workers can actually finish cleaning a playing field.
Very good puzzle, genius job here, prety neat mechanics and gameplay, superb art, you did a great game my friend
-Soft applause-
I loved it. All the story and concept... you have done great :)
Nice work, it's a neat twist on a classic game. I played it a couple of times and some of the previous players definitely weren't taking it seriously! The on criticism I really have is that it would be nice to be able to skip the opening instructions once you've played it for the first time.
Hey that was pretty cool! I really liked the corporation stuff at the beginning, really adds to the experience. The whole cleaning the mess and leaving decent for your 'replacement' makes player really to try hard or maybe opposite if someone is into it. Really cool game i also liked how i was 'rated' at the end. Well done, well done.
I couldn't stop playing this game, I wish there was an option to play longer if not indefinitely. Or if lines the lines that I filled would add more time. Even though it's just plain tetris I had so much more fun trying to fix other peoples messes. Good job!
Throwback!!! Awesome
A nice twist on an old classic! I think this is a really clever idea for asynchronous multiplayer, and you have some pretty clever writing in there. As someone used to that free online Tetris, I found the controls to be a bit off (I use the up arrow for rotations), and I found the ghost blocks to be just opaque enough to sometimes throw off my game. Plus, as many others stated, the intro was a bit too long and I didn't realize you could skip it the second time.
I seem to agree with everything @cerno-b said, except for his last point about the spammers. I think they keep the game fresh and comical, so to speak.
@niterich: Maybe have two modes then, normal and hardcore. One is with and one without spammers ;)
@cerno-b but if everyone is trying to get rid of all their junk, then there would be no junk leftover for the next person to get rid of, no? :)
The whole idea is really cool ! I give the sensation to be part of something ! I really like it !
@nietrich: This assumes that everyone is good at tetris. I think if you start out with randomly generated junk, it may become a contest between good tetris players and less skillful ones who still want to contribute but actually make it worse unintentionally. Probably requires some tuning of game parameters (e.g. drop speed) for finding a good balance that is neither too easy nor too hard.
Super cool that discussion is going on!
@cerno-b @niterich I think there's an interesting balance here in making the game more fun, versus making the game more true to the theme/original idea. As you've both said, there are definitely people who will just create more junk to deal with (whether intentionally or accidentally) and it's definitely frustrating to have to deal with these people if you're someone who's good at Tetris, or just really want to help clean up. Frustrating to the point of potentially driving away people.
*However*, I think this frustration, the feeling of being in a bad situation due to no fault of your own, was the core idea I was trying to express with this game (I also stayed awake for about 36 hours while making this game so I wonder what I was really thinking while making it lol). But as people have said much further upstream, I'm not sure how effective that is in a game like Tetris, where it is *really* hard to recover as the junk piles up, to the point of not being fun (unless you *really* love Tetris, like me and some other people here :wink:).
I'm not sure how much I'll end up following up this game in particular, but I do want to see how that idea can be better explored, perhaps in a less frustrating way (without just throwing away problems altogether). Cerno has some fantastic ideas for making this into a great collaborative experience though, I'll definitely keep 'em in mind however I continue!
Also @niterich, it's curious that you (and another person upstream) both prefer rotate on "up". I've based this engine off of more modern versions of Tetris, where two separate rotation buttons are required so you can do wallkicks/tspins properly (see here: https://i.imgur.com/epjkHMl.gif). Regardless, sorry that I tied hard-drop to it instead. That's probably the worst thing you can hit by mistake :(
Hey I really enjoy the concept of this game and how the game has permanence with other players. I think its a fun idea that you've implemented really well! I think I can understand the issues that @cerno-b brings up about the crap people put down on purpose, but at the same time, isn't part of the games' appeal to the theme that you can't control how bad other people might act or the kind of mess they leave you?
I also agree with @niterich about the up button. It takes me a long time to get used to not flipping with up and several times I ruined a tetris by pressing up when i meant to press z or x :(. Despite that, I really enjoyed this game and your implementation of this concept! I'd love to see if there is a high score kept somewhere!
this is maybe the best tetris ive ever played, it fits perfectly with the design of tetris i imagine is for technical reasons, but i was sad to see there are different "rooms", you kinda lose track of your "progress", but i think that also is the point so its ok super cool 10/5
@frescogusto Thanks! Yep, there are actually five "rooms" in play, pretty much for two reasons:
1. As you mentioned, to spread out player effects. This has worked pretty well, since two or three of the rooms are relatively clean, while the others are stacked high. 2. It better handles the situation of multiple people playing at the same time (the technical, unfortunately more constraining reason).
@jjjjason yes it makes sense
have you thought a way to handle multiple players in a single room? just curios
@frescogusto
If you’re talking about people playing together, like in a live multiplayer scenario, I’ve played two-player Tetris in an arcade once. It actually had an extended width board to better support two people, but also forced each person to a side, with a six column overlap in the middle to allow for, but minimize potential collisions. People would essentially build a well in the middle, then when agreed upon would fill it up together.
I have zero idea as to how this would generalize to N people—the potential for collisions would be ridiculous, hahaha. Being online would be even worse since you can’t talk with your friend standing next to you. It would definitely be chaos.
However, if you’re talking about everyone playing by themselves but with only a single board, then I guess it’s just an issue of coming up with a merging algorithm for when two people ultimately check out the board at the same time. I think you’d ultimately have to merge based on intent over actual changes, since what do you do when one person clears a line but the the other just adds more junk to it? It would be more add or subtract the relative number of lines changed, and if we have to add, add the general shape of the new lines, but be willing to fudge it if there’s a conflict.
You could also just make people wait, have them spectate the current player. That wouldn’t be too bad unless there were a ton of people (this starts to get into the ideas @cerno-b had).
@jjjjason spectating the play is a good idea, but i think you would quickly get bored of waiting
i think the solution of @cerno-b to name rooms is quite good, just so it gives more identity to a room and you know where you are every time you start. the thing that frustrated me at first was to restart in another room and not realizing it
also i just read about the up arrow rotation, and yes i have that thing too, i kept dropping by accident when distracted
I love the concept. You really ought to make an art print of the giant tetris tower eventually. Or have a website where the thing can be viewed without playing. Some feedback:
* I thought the game had started when the tetris tower was zooming by and was immediately confused and thought I was performing very badly. * The transparency on the ghost block needs to be increased, or the ghost block needs to be removed entirely. I thought it served to clutter things up and make the game harder. * I couldn't slide a block left or right at the last second to fit it under other pieces! I like tetris games that permit that. * Add SFX!
Love the game. Good work.
P.S. I love LÖVE!
It sounds awesome in theory and you actually successfully implemented it. I'm blown away. Well done!
I do have criticisms, but I would be repeating shinyogre above me word for word.
Holy fudge, this is so cool. Asynchronous online multiplayer Tetris, with a well-written story about office workers to frame it within the theme. I love reading through your comments to try and understand how it works, too. I hope you keep working on it because I think if you made a web player version it could be a hit among the general public. As one criticism, I think the transparency on the ghost block should be reduced a lot too -- it was definitely tripping me up. But overall this is one of my favorites this LD.
Amazing idea. I laughed so hard when I saw the stack being built. Brilliant use of async multiplayer, since it's an LD game and very few people will simultaneously be playing the game (problem with pretty much every multiplayer LD game).
The ghost transparency was definitely confusing, and also pressing up to instantly drop a block was terrible. I kept dropping them by accident to the point that I totally took my finger away from the up button and never used it. If these things were intentional to make a messed up stack, I guess that's cool, but it was annoying.
@foolmoron Accidental hard drops are definitely not intentional :( :( :(
At this point I might just make it configurable, whether pressing “up” does a hard drop or a clockwise rotation. Most of the people I’ve asked IRL expect up to hard drop, but enough people have posted about it here to show that it’s not unanimous.
Interesting Idea.
Great idea! It would be nice to get to get to see a snapshot of the whole board, or at least the room you played in at the end (and perhaps at the beginning?) to be aware of your contribution (be it good or bad :D)
Liked the dialogue bits as well.
In terms of improvements...well, first would be the lack of sound, and perhaps the opacity of the tetrominos' previews was a bit too high. As you would be getting close to the board it could be difficult to distinguish which block belonged to the shape and which to the preview.
In any case, I really enjoyed playing. Awesome job!
I really loved the take on this! Quite simple, but a lot of fun <3
This was really quite well done, and I had lots of fun. Seeing all the things that the people before me did was hilarious, and you could always tell who took it seriously and who didn't. The graphics were simple yet that was all that was needed, and it worked really well in that regard. Being able to see who made the mess before you was also amusing, and I had a lot of fun with this. My only minor complaints are with the controls and sound. With the controls, I'm so used to up being rotate, I kept dropping long blocks right on top of my perfectly built stack. At that point I generally just started spamming for fun. I would have also liked to hear some sound or some music, but that's about it.This was such an innovative and interesting concept, and it was so much fun to play, I hope you do really well.
WOW! Really great job! Good luck. "And what his name again?"
Funny little concept, but I think the execution could have been better. No sounds whatsover, boring intro that was drawn out a bit, and controls that didn't feel right like the original tetris. (making it hard to make fun patterns with the blocks)
Brilliant idea! *Curse you finland for the mess you left me!*
Great game, just missing sfx and maybe some visual polish. There's a lot of great tools for making sfx (e.g. sfxr) so hopefully next time you can make time to put some in!
Haha. Nice take on the theme.
A very nice idea. I feel like it would be very nice to have a visual representation of it outside of the actual game, e.g. a map of the current situation, because I personally sometimes can't see the consistency between the games. Sometimes it is there, sometimes it's not.
So far my favorite game. Tetris part feels a little clunky but other than that it is very nice. Great job!
nostalgia : ) I like the idea with your multiplayer. It looks fresh and can be used in many scenarios and game mechanics
I don't think I've got anything to say that hasn't been said, but really clever idea. Was fun to see my (sad, out-of-practice) impact on the world. Thanks for sharing!
A solid and clever twist on a classic game! I don't know what more I can say than all the other people. So yeah, congrats!
For something so simple, polish in the way of game-feel-y stuff or sound would go a long way.
TGM player here! I feel like I am the only person who is going to get the "SRS" joke, heheheh. Little did the narrator know: I'm not an SRS inspector at all, but part of the ARS "Death" corps!
Though I would love to point out the little minutiae that you could have improved in terms of DAS charging during piece spawn, blahblahblahblah, honestly it is an LD entry so I can't expect you to do all that. I'm not 100% familiar with SRS rotation but it seems like you more or less stayed true to that so, props for that at least! It seems like you also implement a 7-bag randomizer, yay!
But yeah, the inability to charge DAS (autorepeat) during the delay between pieces would be my number one complaint, as it makes DAS not nearly as helpful as it should be. The other thing I'd change would probably be to add lock delay to make it easier to do spins, but eh...
I for one am pleased that you mapped the controls the way you did (though being a joystick player I use my left stick for movement so I just crossed my hands) but alas, enough people use up to rotate that you probably have to consider them using some alternate scheme.
I found it a bit aggravating that the view frequently seemed to pan upwards too far (I'm sure you have some rules for how this is done) which didn't allow me to see where I needed to drop pieces.
Anyhow, I'll stop nerding out about Tetris now. Many thanks for an actually-decent implementation and props for the interesting idea! Also, please let me know if you fix the camera panning and the DAS charging -- if you do those two I might just try to drill down all the way to the bottom, hahaha
@ddrkirbyisq Oh man, no need to apologize for nerding out about Tetris. Besides the core multiplayer mechanic, I did want to see how much Tetris I could make in 48 hours.
Your points are pretty much 100% in line with my Tetris-playing roommate, who (alongside random Wikis) were pretty much my only guides here since I'm definitely no expert. He even played it with his hands crossed!
I'll have to look further in how DAS should look/feel--he also noted that it wasn't quite right (although I will say that it was much worse until like -4h to compo end!). The camera was also a pain point; I wanted to avoid moving it whenever possible since it does interrupt the flow, but there are enough situations where you have to place below the screen, but not far down enough for it to trigger the scroll.
All-in-all thanks a ton for playing, as well as the great feedback. Same goes to everyone else who's posted since my last comment!
Very nice! I loved how the twist is revealed at the start, especially since most people probably entered their LD username, and that you included a small narrative aspect to the mechanic. I'd be repeating what other people have already mentioned as far as suggestions go so again great job!
@YouBeStrong thanks! The frame story was ultimately a last minute addition so I’m glad people appreciate it.
Also, big thanks to the repeat players who check in every once in a while! Noticed that the play count keeps going up independently of the D/L and review count :smile:
While the gameplay was just tetris, I loved the idea of cleaning up the mess of everyone else, especially as a gamejam game where you know 100 people are going to play it.
Great idea . I like it. it gives a lot of fun. only the subtitles at the beginning are a bit too fast
ps. sorry for my bad english
@Querk No worries. thanks for trying it out! Sorry about the subtitle speed issue, it's actually a very rare bug that I've only been able to discover twice now. Thankfully the story bits aren't too important as long as you can play the game :smile:
Games help develop social qualities. Educational and logic games should become the most popular this season. New content and new resources [spam] have to live. They make students start using their old PC. I want to give a good assessment of this decision.