ch33s3-22 2018-08-13 19:35
can you clear lines or am i just bad?
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD42 → Master The Space
By nenas, DNAlith and JoFiredragon
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 883 | 3.11 | 23 | |
| Fun | 789 | 3.02 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 616 | 3.14 | 23 | |
| Theme | 508 | 3.59 | 23 | |
| Graphics | 992 | 2.80 | 22 | |
| Audio | 563 | 2.94 | 21 | |
| Humor | 1.83 | 8 | ||
| Mood | 916 | 2.70 | 22 |
can you clear lines or am i just bad?
You need to combine the planets of similar colors, if you combine 5 planet pieces (or 20 tiles), then one planet will vanish (you don't need necessarily lines). :)
Yup, I had a hard time figuring out how to clear the pieces. It might be good to make that rule more clear.
But other than that, neat concept, and nice planet textures.
I almost didn't get it because i didn't read the instruction here ;) For better reception next time attach some info/tutorial into game itself. Anyway, when i knew what to do it was quite addicting! :) Nice game, good work!
Really nice idea. It was confusing at the beginning, but really nice!
Hi! I think this game is pretty addictive! Time you have is lower every time so that makes it more dynamic.
I liked it! :smile:
Very good implementation of the theme, well done!
The first thing I thought of was space tetris. The idea's pretty good too. I was kinda confused as to what I was suppose to do at first, but I eventually got the hang of it. It's a nice first entry. Good job.
Like the idea. Combine tetris with a shrinking space World. Cool. Keep going!
The game isn't that good that I expected by a title but one thing that impressed me is that you made it in libgdx. I tried to learn that but I had so much problems and finally I am making games with Unity so nice job, keep doing games and they'll get better. Good Luck
Very nice idea. Good take on the theme. Great job!
I think it's the first libgdx game I've seen in this jam, good job! In-game tutorial would be handy, but I figured out what to do pretty quickly and from then, the game turned very easy. Maybe scaling difficulty (less time to assemble pieces together) would make it more fun in the long run :) Good luck!
Cool take on tetris. The timer mechanic is not that interesting in my opinion since you can reset it pretty easily. I was surprised it has more than one main track which sound pretty nice!
@outstar There is some scaling: The number of different tiles increases from 4 to 8 and also the time until the screen gets small decreases from 7 to 2 seconds. We could do the scaling a little faster though, since it takes a while until you reach the 2 seconds.
@happy Yeah, I think it would be better to reset the timer only if a shape got "placed correctly", e.g. when there already is a shape with the same tile type on the board, you have to place it next to that in order to reset the timer. But sadly I had that idea only after the deadline.
@all Thanks for all the feedback, I realy appreciate it. :)
Got 670 after few tries,
Initially, I was very confused. I had no idea what was the goal, what are the controls, nothing. And no, I didn't read the game description here on LDjam or itch.io. You should not expect people to do that. I then opened up the "help" section of the game, but that didn't contain instructions on how to play the game either - just the controls which were of not much help. I then randomly got pieces of same color together and they cleared out.
The game ramped up very slowly. I think one run of a game in this format should take about 1 minute to play through, 3 if you are good. My runs lasted usually around 6 minutes, which is just far too much. I cannot think of a better example right now, but a game from this LD [Seasaw](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/seasaw), which I think is in the similar style of "time-limit-based high-score puzzle action game" does this really well - I just wanted to keep returning and try to up my high-score. The time limit there is set to exactly 1 minute, and it is just enough. I know setting hard time limit may not work with this game, but you could set other things to get closer to that mark. I think time bonus for placing pieces could get smaller (or if it does - get smaller faster).
Another thing - feedback. That is an important thing in most games. You need to let the player know when he did things right and reward him. Placed a tile adjacent to same color? Play a small rewarding sound and make the tiles glow a bit! Player cleared some blocks? Play a sound, make the blocks explode, add fireworks! It may seem like it takes long time, but for example graphical effect of coins in my game took me exactly 30 minutes to make, and it was so much just because I wanted fancy stuff like gravity and the coin rotation (which you don't need). And I think they look alright and reward the player. Also, the "active" block should be visually distinguishable from the others. There is a great talk [Juice it or lose it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg) that explains these concepts very nicely.
Next, the timer. I think it is an important enough timer that it should be more visible. Also, visual timers > text timers. A bar at the bottom that counts down until the next black hole. Blocks at the edges slowly getting darker. Pie-chart timer in the background. A timer with at least one decimal place displayed just above the block. The possibilities are endless. Also, this way it would be more obvious that you get extra time for placing blocks.
I didn't really get the "story". It was very unnecessary and didn't make sense. Black hole... but it is around the play area? It doesn't even attract anything. And... I make planets... which are not round? From pieces that randomly appear from nowhere? I would just scrape it. It is obviously duct-taped to an abstract game because "like, space, get it?".
Phew, that was a lot of things to cover. It may seem like I didn't like the game, but I really enjoyed it! The core idea is very fun and engaging. Hope I helped.
Hi @boltkey, thank you for taking so much time and giving such a huge amount of valuable feedback and suggestions.
At first I didn't really like the idea but I ended up really enjoying myself but I do think it would get old pretty quickly. The sound, graphics and atmosphere where really nice and added a lot to the game experience! I also used libgdx, I wonder if you had as much trouble as I did converting it to html :p By the way if you know of a way to remove the libgdx compile arrow from the top left of the screen plz let me know!
@shakedimus Thank you for your review.:) I think I got lucky, didnt have any trouble with html at all. I used gradle on the command line: https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Gradle-on-the-Commandline The only thing I had to do in the project was setting the resolution in the html subproject. I cant help you with the arrow, I also dont know how to remove it.
Interesting idea. Simple and solid implementation. At first it wasn't that clear for me that the black hole only grows if I take too long to place the tile, this could have been a bit clearer. Also, sound is way too quite.
@smbe19 Thanks for the suggestions.:) You can raise the volume, see the help screen.