Re: [pygame] New Game, KroolJoolz

["Brian Fisher" <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/26/06, Simon Wittber <simonwittber@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> We are planning to extend this game with extra levels and features,
> and distribute it as a independent / shareware title.
>
It's very good for 6 days of work. It is definitely lacking polish
(stuff like the joolz don't do anything cool when matched, menu
doesn't react to you, effects are all linear, awkward load times
starting a game, no sound effects for matches etc) but I'm sure you
guys would make all that rock

The mechanic of having layers of joolz is very interesting, but it's
also hard to understand visually, and even if you know the keys to
control it doesn't seem to pay off for you at all (no real strategy or
combo benefit that I can see from being aware of the layers)

I can see that the rule for taking away pieces (all the matching
colors in a 3x3 grid) might give you some opportunity to want to pick
the right place to click when many pieces of the same color are
together, but in my opinion it's cooler to be able to do really large
clears (like in super collapse games) than it is to want to worry
about what might get you one more piece. I think as a gamer I would
appreciate it more if the gameplay had real highs and lows... I don't
mind clicking through 10 small matches if I get a monster one at the
end, but being able to always get medium matches all day is boring and
repetitve (think slot machine here)

Another thing about the clearing mechanic is I think the matching rule
is not intuitive enough and doesn't play to what humans are good
machines at doing. I think the 3x3 clearing thing gets in the way of
playing because human vision & our brain will tend to see and identify
groups of color, our vision isn't naturally good at counting things in
a zone. also, I think the diagonal matching is an obstacle too because
my eyes and brain don't tell me they should match. I think a hex grid
would be much cooler, because then all the joolz that would match the
clicked one would be adjacent to the center and would be roughly equal
distance (plus if you still do zoned matching it would give a more
circular pattern which I think would be naturally easier to identify
and understand).

If you end up sticking with zoned matching, you may also want to
consider doing some kind of visual guide to show what area it is
counting over

It's nice that you have different modes, but in arcade I had no idea
why I lost and had no clue when it was going to happen. I also have no
idea if I could have prevented it.

An engineer from the Microsoft game testing labs once told me he
thinks the most important thing in a game is the reward schedule -
basically when and how much the player is rewarded for various
actions. (he's literally watched thousands of people play hundreds of
games for the first time, so I really took the stuff he said to
heart). I think the reward schedule in this game is particularly weak
in that it's flat (all matches reward equally), it's not obvious what
I need to do to get rewarded (don't know how to get rewarded more, and
don't know why I was punished with death) and that the rewards are
weak (text messages are not easily noticeable and no sounds or cool
effects) - on the positive side you have definitely made a good step
in the right direction with adding those text things, and because the
game is so simple, you can get rewarded fairly early on.

To summarize my opinion, I think for this to be a competitve product
in the downloadable games space, the gameplay mechanic would need a
lot of improvement and refinement (I'm not saying it needs more
features necessarily, it may even be fine to have fewer) in addition
to the polish that every game needs. It's great for 6 days, and
congratulations on your second place award.