Arcen Games

General Category => Tidalis => : Doddler April 16, 2010, 08:50:01 PM

: General Feedback
: Doddler April 16, 2010, 08:50:01 PM
There isn't any place to just leave general feedback, so I guess I get to create a new thread.

I've played a bit with the Tidalis Demo, I must admit it was quite a bit of fun.  I will likely end up picking the game up as there isn't a whole lot of play time in the demo.  So my opinion is a bit biased, more or less because I played the game for all of the 20-30 minutes the demo allows, but knowing how they respond to the demo might also be important.

So some thoughts:

1) Switching the tiles is uh, sometimes really finicky.  Maybe I'm just not used to it, but while you have your mouse over a tile and right mouse is held, moving a mouse in one direction at all will turn the block that facing.  Maybe it's just me, but when I draw lines with my mouse I have a tendency to draw back a tiny bit at the end, which the game interprets as rotating a block in a random facing. I'm probably just too shaky or have the DPI up too high for this game, but at times I would literally change a row of 5 blocks and even ones in the middle might be the wrong facing.  I dunno what can be done, it's hard to get used to it.  It doesn't really feel good.

2) When you start a new game, the game asks you if you want to take the tutorial, which I elected to do.  After I finished the basic tutorial, it asked me if I wanted to play story mode, which I also elected to do.  I did this because I thought I was done all the tutorials, but apparently I wasn't!  Edit: It kind of does it after the second tutorial, it just ends, and you have to escape back to the main menu.

3) When I started story mode, it took me all of like 30 seconds to figure out what I should be clicking on.  It really isn't clear, maybe the stage icons should glow?  Also while it's story mode, there's not much story.  Like bam, you're in a game, no transition or anything, was unexpected anyways.  I guess it's just cause its demo that there isn't at least any exposition?

4) I have serious difficulties tabbing back into Tidalis while the game is running in full screen mode.  The game tries to restore, the music comes back on, and then it plops back to desktop.  Windows suggests that Tidalis is the active window, but doesn't like going back to the game.  I got back in once, but the second time had to use task manager to close the game because I couldn't get back into the game. Edit: Sometimes it does it for first launch too.

5) The basic tutorials was pretty informative I thought.  The more complex ones are sometimes a bit confusing, especially in the wording.  For example, the tutorial with the mid combo rotation, it literally states 'You can clear this in one move by rotating the blue block on the red row after it drops', which is misleading, because you have to change a lot of things, like change all of the reds, as well as the blue block before the chain starts, and find out the starting point in order to complete the  puzzle.  It does this quite a bit, suggesting that a puzzle can be solved by making a simple change, when it usually required more.  You also have to find a starting point, which contradicts the 'this is all you have to do' style of the tutorial.

6) The short circuit tutorial uh, can be completed without changing any blocks just by clicking the top green block.  I'm uh, not sure that even uses short circuiting, because I wasn't completely familiar with what that meant.  (Edit: Looking back, the block that the tutorial asks you to point to the bottom of the board is already pointing that direction, solving the puzzle for you).

7) I'm really just nitpicking now, the second story stage asks you to clear 25 blue blocks, but it took literally over half of my tutorial time because no blue blocks were dropping. :(

8) Serious nitpick mode, confirmation boxes for restarting the level after you've already been presented with a failure screen. :P

It sounds like I have a lot of negative things to say, but don't take it personally!  If I didn't like the core game I wouldn't bring it up, I will probably purchase a key whenever I get some free time to waste with a game. :)
: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 16, 2010, 09:06:09 PM
Thanks for all the thoughts!  Regarding the length of the demo, please bear in mind that is just per-session (as it says in game).  You can play for another 20 minutes by starting the program over again if you want.  You can do it as many times as you want that way with the demo (it never expires completely), but that's our way of preventing some people from just picking up the demo and playing and enjoying that indefinitely, then never buying the game.  It was either that or majorly restrict out features, which we didn't want to do because then it's hard for people to actually figure out if they like it.

To your various points:

1) That's something that a couple of advanced computer users have mentioned, but oddly the really casual computer users have had no problems.  Very odd.  Generally if you make fast sweeps and go too far, then it won't do that.  We experimented with some things for having thresholds of movement before it would turn, but that just made it laggy.  This is something we expect to polish more during the beta in general, I think, but like you I don't see a simple solution.  I imagine this is going to be a big topic for refinement based on player ideas, etc.

2) Whoops -- sounds like a bug to me.

3) Yeah, making them animated slightly or glowing may be the ticket.  And, there is literally no story right now.  Please see the beta roadmap (http://www.arcengames.com/tidalis_features.php), that's still on the TBD list.  A lot of the story is planned, and the character art and intro cutscene art is even done, but we haven't had time to program it in yet.  And more writing still needs to be done, too, but that's far enough ahead of the programming that I'm not focusing on it overmuch.  Just a factor of the early beta!

4) That is... seriously odd.  Unfortunately, most likely this would be another of those "Unity 3D problems" that we can't do anything about.  We don't get much access to the bare metal here.  That was what I really liked about my platform for AI War, is that there was almost nothing between me and the bare metal aside from .NET itself and SlimDX (which is very slim, har har).  But that has the downsides of all those prerequisites that are a pain, and not being cross platform.  So we picked our poison, I guess.  Unity is an awesome platform, but it's not without its quirks -- and we can't always affect those quirks, is the one frustrating part.

5) Ah -- thanks for that.  We definitely need feedback on that sort of thing, and I'm sure Lars (the author of the advanced tutorials) will take that into account.  I suspect they do need some tweaking, as in general more tutorials (outside the basic realm) are needed.

6) I'll let Lars speak to that.

7) Yeah, Keith is working on an update for the level editor that will let us weight block ratios better.  That did turn out more frustrating than we thought (someone else mentioned that same thing here already).  It's a really valid point.

8) Someone else also mentioned the confirmation boxes for restarting, too. :)  Great minds think alike!


Don't sweat the criticism, we don't take it personally and those were all really great thoughts.  We wouldn't have released this in beta form if we didn't want feedback.  What would have stunk is if we released this "officially" and then had a flood of user problems, etc.  This way with the beta, we can test the waters, get lots of varying feedback from varying styles of players on various styles of hardware, and make sure the official game is as close to perfect as we can make it.  We obviously don't have a staff of hundreds of testers working for us like the big companies do, so we rely on just this sort of thing to make sure we stay on the straight and narrow with polish.

Glad you enjoyed it!  And if you want to take more sessions with the demo, all you have to do is start it up again and you'll have another 20 minutes. :)
: Re: General Feedback
: Doddler April 16, 2010, 09:14:50 PM
Thanks for the response! I did go back and play a bit more, it was of course still fun. :)

The alt tab thing isn't always just when alt tabbing... it happens when launching sometimes too.  The game goes full screen... then back to desktop, the start menu/task bar does a little happy dance for a minute, and then I get to try again.  Sometimes the task bar never comes back and requires closing explorer to fix it.  I'm fairly certain it's just my computer being really messed up, and you know, Vista, but it's strange enough that I decided to actually show what it does.  Watch out, there's rainbows and unicorns, no lie.

http://doddlercon.com/files/video.php?f=http://doddlercon.com/files/tidalis_alttab.mp4&w=720&h=450 (http://doddlercon.com/files/video.php?f=http://doddlercon.com/files/tidalis_alttab.mp4&w=720&h=450)
: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 16, 2010, 09:33:46 PM
Hahaha -- that's a great desktop background, I still need to pick that book up.  I have all the prior ones (and several shirts, as you can see in my Arcen photo, even), but not that one yet.

That is very strange with the alt-tabbing, and not something we have seen before.  I don't know if it's just something really odd on your machine or what, but we'll keep an eye out for it and see what we can do about it...
: Re: General Feedback
: Doddler April 16, 2010, 09:38:36 PM
I've actually had one other game do that kind of thing on me before (ragnarok online), but that's a pretty old game using DX7 so it's kind of odd.  Don't get too worked up over it, my computer does really strange things sometimes, so it's probably not your fault. :)
: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 16, 2010, 09:43:11 PM
Well, I know it's not my fault, and that's the worst part. My code doesn't even start getting executed until well after the game is initialized DirectX or OpenGL or whatever mode it is deciding on, etc, and it's having some difficulties well before then.  That's the frustrating part, is if this is a Unity thing I can't do much about it except complain to them.  But hopefully it's just something wacky on your one computer there -- Windows is just like that sometimes, as we all know. :)
: Re: General Feedback
: Fiskbit April 16, 2010, 10:25:49 PM
Hey, Doddler. Thanks for the feedback! This forum works just fine for general feedback. :)

1) I run into the same control problem sometimes. As Chris said, we tried a solution during development of requiring a decent amount of movement before the block will turn, but it turned out to be pretty awful in practice because things got unresponsive. I think the solution to this problem lies in averaging out the player's recent movement, and I'll put some thought into how to make that work well. We'll do what we can to get this problem ironed out, though, since play control is really important and I still find myself making mistakes because the game isn't doing what I tried to make it do. :P

2) Chris: Perhaps we should have the end of the basic tutorial let players know about the advanced tutorials, but still try to usher them off toward adventure mode? Or we could simply provide an option. The advanced tutorials are a lot less casual-friendly, so I'm sure a lot of people would rather play the normal game before getting to things about scoring, short-circuiting, rotating blocks mid-combo, and so on. Then there are also special block tutorials... I see the special block tutorials as more reference than anything else. What are your thoughts on this?

3) I definitely think a little bit of animation will solve that problem. There are a lot of these icons on the map, though, so it'd be ideal to only have it on the icon for levels that haven't been beaten (which will include that first level when you start), to try to attract attention moreso.

5) Thanks, I've really been wanting feedback on these tutorials and wouldn't consider them polished at the moment (I might change the puzzles in some spots, and for some I need to think more about how to have puzzles effectively illustrate the topic). I'll give these another look over now that I'm not as busy as I was when putting them together. :)

6) Good catch. That arrow was supposed to be pointing to the right. ;) I tried to make this tutorial really easy because it's a hard mechanic and I didn't want them trying to figure out how to use it the first time they see it (super hard puzzles that require these is what puzzle mode is for), but I didn't mean to make it that easy! Anyway, this is fixed now. I'd love to get more feedback on the tutorials if you have more to say about them.

7) It's definitely too random right now. We totally agree!

Thanks!
: Re: General Feedback
: keith.lamothe April 16, 2010, 10:46:09 PM
Doddler, as Chris and Lars said we will address the usability issues with the mouse-redirection-drag, but I wanted to see if you'd tried using the keyboard (arrow keys to move the secondary cursor, F+arrow-keys to direction-drag; rebindable in the new keybinding UI in 0.401) as while it has some tradeoffs vs. the mouse is more consistent about actually redirecting all blocks you traverse when dragging.
: Re: General Feedback
: PLivesey April 17, 2010, 04:29:55 AM
Tutorial 4 in advanced topics (Picking Start and End Points) had me stuck for a while.  I started from the left side, and tried once, but failed.   However, if you fail this it says "Hint: Try getting the reaction to END on the right side."  I tried for ages.  The only solution I could come up with STARTED on the right side.  Perhaps I missed something, but I think this may be a very naughty hint!

Aside from issues raised by Doddler, I am really enjoying this game and will look out for any issues as I play further.
: Re: General Feedback
: Fiskbit April 17, 2010, 05:13:08 AM
Ah, the hint wasn't telling you to end on the right, but rather asking what happens if you try to end on that side. My intent was to try to get the player to figure out that ending on that side isn't possible by pointing out that side in particular, but it seems I was less than successful. I'll have to think about changing how I direct attention there, or change the hint altogether. My reason for doing it as I did is that one of the key parts of pathfinding in the game is that things sometimes only work in one direction, which I'm wanting to get players to understand from this puzzle. It's something that I feel works best from a realization rather than just being told, but I might change my approach.

Thanks so much for letting me know. I'll see what I can do and appreciate any other suggestions or criticisms people have! :)
: Re: General Feedback
: PLivesey April 17, 2010, 05:35:20 AM
Ah, the hint wasn't telling you to end on the right, but rather asking what happens if you try to end on that side. My intent was to try to get the player to figure out that ending on that side isn't possible by pointing out that side in particular, but it seems I was less than successful. I'll have to think about changing how I direct attention there, or change the hint altogether. My reason for doing it as I did is that one of the key parts of pathfinding in the game is that things sometimes only work in one direction, which I'm wanting to get players to understand from this puzzle. It's something that I feel works best from a realization rather than just being told, but I might change my approach.

Thanks so much for letting me know. I'll see what I can do and appreciate any other suggestions or criticisms people have! :)

Ah, perhaps you should leave it as it is!  After trying a few times I did go through, in my head, the possible ways to finish the right hand side, and saw that doing it was impossible - thus leading me to start there.  Maybe have "Hint: Is it possible to end at the right-hand side?"  Or somesuch, rather than telling people to end there?
: Re: General Feedback
: Fiskbit April 17, 2010, 05:55:52 AM
Well, the current text is "HINT: What happens if you try to end the reaction on the right side?". I'm thinking of changing it to: "HINT: Look closely at whether it's possible to end the reaction on the right side."

Sound good? :)
: Re: General Feedback
: PLivesey April 17, 2010, 06:28:24 AM
Well, the current text is "HINT: What happens if you try to end the reaction on the right side?". I'm thinking of changing it to: "HINT: Look closely at whether it's possible to end the reaction on the right side."

Sound good? :)

Sounds good to me.  Also - in the Bubble tutorial, is it simply there to show taking the greens makes the bubbles disappear?  I positioned my blues to nicely combo, but the blue landing when the bubbles pops doesn't start off a chain - why even have the blues in this tutorial?
: Re: General Feedback
: Fiskbit April 17, 2010, 06:37:29 AM
For the text, I think I've decided to go with a slightly more subtle "HINT: Look closely at what happens if you try to end the reaction on the right side." to make it less obvious, though if the other is more popular, I'll go with that one. The success text also stresses much more that direction matters. "You may have noticed that you need to start on the right side to clear these all as a single reaction; it can't be done by starting on the left side. Realizing that direction matters is vital."

I put the blues in the bubble tutorial to make it clear that clearing special blocks currently doesn't set off a combo. That may change in the future if someone can come up with a good argument for it, but right now I have some worries related to that functionality. In particular, it's strange in context of blocks that fall off the bottom of the screen (rocks and metal grilles) and doesn't mesh well with new functionality I have in mind for glass blocks. I'm open to the possibility of this change because the current functionality is a bit counter-intuitive.

Edit: The tutorial itself was mainly to show off that adjacent blocks clear bubbles, and that they take up space. I should have positioned the blocks such that a stream would pass through the bubble and will change the puzzle around a bit so that happens. When water is in the game at a future time, you can expect this to be a more interesting tutorial.
: Re: General Feedback
: PLivesey April 17, 2010, 06:40:57 AM
For the text, I think I've decided to go with a slightly more subtle "HINT: Look closely at what happens if you try to end the reaction on the right side." to make it less obvious, though if the other is more popular, I'll go with that one. The success text also stresses much more that direction matters. "You may have noticed that you need to start on the right side to clear these all as a single reaction; it can't be done by starting on the left side. Realizing that direction matters is vital."

I put the blues in the bubble tutorial to make it clear that clearing special blocks currently doesn't set off a combo. That may change in the future if someone can come up with a good argument for it, but right now I have some worries related to that functionality. In particular, it's strange in context of blocks that fall off the bottom of the screen (rocks and metal grilles) and doesn't mesh well with new functionality I have in mind for glass blocks. I'm open to the possibility of this change because the current functionality is a bit counter-intuitive.

Edit: The tutorial itself was mainly to show off that adjacent blocks clear bubbles, and that they take up space. I should have positioned the blocks such that a stream would pass through the bubble and will change the puzzle around a bit so that happens. When water is in the game at a future time, you can expect this to be a more interesting tutorial.

Ah, perhaps you should also mention in the text that "As seen after removing the green blocks, the blue tile dropping doesn't start off a reaction." or something like that?

And thanks for mentioning the glass and the metal grille - I did wonder why they were different as I wasn't sure about what the difference of smashing and falling through was.
: Re: General Feedback
: Fiskbit April 17, 2010, 06:47:40 AM
Thanks; I'll mention that in the bubble special block tutorial, and will try to make things more clear for metal grille and stone. :)
: Re: General Feedback
: Doddler April 17, 2010, 01:07:48 PM
I uh, thought that the locked block tutorial appearing after the ice block tutorial was a bit odd.  Also, the last story mission I got to, get 8000 points in 4 minutes is a huge jump in difficulty I think, I had to really spam and I got kind of lucky. :P

Using the keyboard has helped a lot in terms of precision, I wasn't aware that you could control the game with that before. :)

Edit: On custom games, if you lose, it says press restart to try again, but there is no restart button.
: Re: General Feedback
: freykin April 17, 2010, 05:38:44 PM
Hey there, I picked up the pre-order beta two days ago, and figured I'd give my first impression.  This was version 0.400, haven't updated to 0.401 yet.

I went through some of the tutorials, and they all were straightforward and easy to figure out.  I played through two story missions, then crashed out since it was 5 am my time.  The gameplay is solid and fun, I like the puzzle solving mechanic a lot.  It's a nice change from the common match three you see everywhere.  I tested tabbing in and out a bunch, and didn't have any problems.

The music that I heard was good, and felt like it fit the graphical style well.

The only thing that is a bit off to me is that I'm having trouble getting arrows to point where I want easily.  Out of curiousity I tried using the arrow keys, which then moved a block around the screen, but I couldn't figure out with some simple button guessing if I could do anything with it.  I had an idea on what could be a useful addition to controls though, which is having it so you can press the arrow keys to point a block's arrow while your mouse cursor is over it.  I have no idea how hard that'd be to implement or if anyone besides me would find that useful, but to me that would be the most intuitive way of playing.

Overall it looks like a fun game to play in those little gaps of time you have where you want to play something, but can't sit down for something more long term.  I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses throughout the beta :)
: Re: General Feedback
: Fiskbit April 17, 2010, 11:09:07 PM
Doddler:

Regarding the special block tutorials, those go in alphabetical order. I could give them a specific numbered order, but the only cases where specific tutorials build on each other are locked/ice blocks and charred/fire blocks (there is currently no charred block tutorial because of current limitations on charred blocks in puzzles). I'm not really sure how to approach this one, but am open to suggestions if people feel it worth changing.

As for the last adventure level, I don't expect difficulty balance to really be spot-on yet. It's hard for me to judge what is and isn't too big a jump in difficulty because I'm generally really good at puzzle games (I can beat that level in as few as 21 seconds). As we get more types of level objectives for me to use to make stages, I'll be able to better build up to stages like this one. Score is driven primarily performing deep combos, so having some stages beforehand that have objectives based around getting combos seems ideal. Balance is something that I really need to rely on feedback to get right, so more comments of this sort and suggestions as to what seems more reasonable would be great. That said, I don't want it to be easy enough that most people don't lose at some point, so I have to keep that in mind, too. :)

Glad you like the keyboard controls!


freykin:

I'm glad you like the mechanic! I agree that it's really refreshing and different from most other puzzle games. In my opinion, this mechanic has a lot of interesting aspects to it that make advanced play so much deeper and more entertaining than in other similar games (such as Tetris Attack / Panel de Pon / x Puzzle League, Puyo Puyo, and Bejeweled), and I think that also leads to a really interesting experience for new players because it means there's so much there for them to explore and discover about how the game works. The basics are simple, but the places you can go from there are a lot more varied and and numerous. I recommend checking out the advanced tutorials I posted in a thread in this forum; they cover a lot of interesting nuances of the game mechanic, as well as give some practice on things like pathfinding and the like.

Regarding keyboard controls, you'll want to check out the Settings menu in 0.401. There's a new Key Bindings button there that lets you view and set the various controls the game currently uses. In particular, you're interested in the Secondary Cursor entries (F, V, G, arrow keys). We'll be putting more work into refining the mouse controls, since trouble with setting arrow directions has been reported by several users (including myself). It doesn't effect all users, it seems, which is interesting. I wonder what we're doing wrong. :P

Making a hybrid mouse/keyboard control setup is on our list and something I think a lot of people are going to appreciate. Your comments make it more clear how helpful such a feature will be for people!

Glad you're liking the game, overall. In case you've not seen them, there are also a lot of puzzles in the game. 18 of them are accessible through the adventure mode, while those and the other 19 are accessible through the single player puzzle mode (28 are in the Levels For Tidalis Main Story folder, and 9 are in the Puzzles folder). The first number in the story puzzle names indicate the rough difficulty of the puzzle (1-5, 1 = easy), while the second is just an ID. The puzzle series names don't have a difficulty convention in them, though (they're series-id rather than difficulty-id).


Thanks for taking the time to give feedback, both of you! :)
: Re: General Feedback
: The 9th Sage April 20, 2010, 12:42:47 PM
I just thought of a small feature request (if I might be so bold ;)).  Currently when you play a Quick Play game it seems that you have to pause and go back into the menu to start a new game.  Would it be possible to add a button that appears after your time runs out (assuming you aren't in endless mode) that either sends you directly back to the Quick Play settings or just restarts the game with the current settings?  It would feel more streamlined as far as starting a new game to me if there was something like that.

I don't think I've run into any bugs so far (no alt-tab problem for me either).
: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 20, 2010, 12:57:40 PM
That's a really good idea on the quick play thing.  We probably want a "Play Again" as well as "Play Another" or similar.  ...Keith? :)
: Re: General Feedback
: keith.lamothe April 20, 2010, 01:00:50 PM
Yep :)  Been really tough to get down to work today, but that shouldn't take long when I get to it.
: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 20, 2010, 01:03:37 PM
Sweet -- much appreciated!  Some days have more non-Arcen-coding stuff going on than others, I fully understand.
: Re: General Feedback
: The 9th Sage April 20, 2010, 01:33:55 PM
Awesome, thanks for that. :)
: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 20, 2010, 02:28:03 PM
Of course!  We do an open beta for a reason: we want suggestions and feedback along those lines.  Makes for a much better product in the end, that doesn't have any of those "gotchas" that only bug a few people enough to really mention.  Doing closed betas, with a staff our size, is just far too small a sample size for us to really find everything.
: Re: General Feedback
: keith.lamothe April 20, 2010, 03:19:36 PM
Doing closed betas, with a staff our size, is just far too small a sample size for us to really find everything.
Well, that and there's no way I'd have time to extensively play the game AND write code :)
: Re: General Feedback
: Ixiohm April 20, 2010, 04:28:47 PM
Hi, downloaded the beta trial a few days ago, played through the adventure, most of the puzzles and quick games. I like the game mechanic and am amazed by the variety that is already in the game, looking forward to new additions. Like it very much so far, it’s very addictive indeed.  Will probably buy the unlock for the full version soon, want to make my own puzzles :D But will hold of until the new patch comes out at least.

Looks like this has the potential to be a great game, keep up the good work ;D
: Re: General Feedback
: keith.lamothe April 20, 2010, 04:30:11 PM
Thank you for the trying the game and for such positive feedback.  Glad you like it :)

Welcome to the forums :)
: Re: General Feedback
: Lamerstein April 21, 2010, 11:12:36 AM
Hi all. AI War fan reporting here. I don't usually play puzzle games. Closest thing to puzzle game I play is Audiosurf in "Mono"mode, but seeing the announcement on your web page I decided to give it a try. After playing for about 10-15 minutes I can say that the game looks fun, nice twist to the usual match-3 formula, diverse modes, puzzles are nice too.
Since this is beta and you probably want feedback, I want to comment about colors.

I have light form of color-blindness /funny thing is I work  pre-press processing for printing :) / and right now I have very hard time distinguishing  green form yellow blocks and to a lesser extend blue from purple blocks. That is in the default block set. If I focus on the blocks i CAN tell their color but that makes hard construction of chains since I cant figure the colors from one quick glance.

I tried all the other sets. I'll call them by numbers since I don't know their names. That is after you press the option to choose Blocks-Set form the drop-down, top-most set will be 1. Here I'll be talking just how quick I can access colors, not for actual design of the blocks - that is personal preference.

Set 1 - OK ( ai war set may be ? ) - this one works the best for me. All colors are clear and easily distinguishable.
Set 2 - not ok, same as default set.
Set 3 - OK, but to a lesser extend , set 1 is better.
Set 4 - not ok. actually the worst set - the green blocks are somehow dark and blend with reds ??? At first I thought - where are all the greens, or the yellows are missing ?
Set 5 - default ? Already said - not ok.

At home I tried the game on my monitor there, today I installed the game at work to see it at my somehow ... "professional" monitor.  Looks a little better, especially Set 4  got  better. Probably because this monitor has more uniform brightness.
I'm thinking that Set 1 works better, because the blocks there are more or less from solid color - no gradients around the central arrow. And the arrows in Set 1 are from the same color as the base of the blocks - one thin stroke is used to draw the arrow. The whole block looks form solid color and still the arrow "pops out".
As a suggestion you may try using a slightly different shades of green and yellow - the biggest offenders, to make them easier to distinguish.  

Enough rambling from a man that my never play the game, probably will bye it as a gift, girlfriend is puzzle addict :)

Cya, and keep up the good work.
: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 21, 2010, 11:15:45 AM
Thanks for the info!  That is data that we can really use, and I really appreciate your taking the time to tell us.  Phil, if you're reading this, can you take a look at the colors there?
: Re: General Feedback
: zebramatt April 21, 2010, 04:39:02 PM
Doddler:

Regarding the special block tutorials, those go in alphabetical order. I could give them a specific numbered order, but the only cases where specific tutorials build on each other are locked/ice blocks and charred/fire blocks (there is currently no charred block tutorial because of current limitations on charred blocks in puzzles). I'm not really sure how to approach this one, but am open to suggestions if people feel it worth changing.


Could the special block tutorials be very easily obtained unlockables?
: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 21, 2010, 04:47:16 PM
Generally speaking, I'm not keen on unlockables (out side of a specific mode, like adventure) because it creates barriers for players getting to the content they want.  Especially for something like tutorials, which are all about teaching, that seems like something not to unlock.
: Re: General Feedback
: regnared April 22, 2010, 09:56:24 AM
Thanks for the info!  That is data that we can really use, and I really appreciate your taking the time to tell us.  Phil, if you're reading this, can you take a look at the colors there?

I also have minor color blindness in yellow and green colors. It's a very touchy subject since everyone perceive color differently.

For the set colors, I think color blindness varies by hues, so changing one color to suit one person, might make the existing skins not workable to someone else. There's a dozen or so type of color blindness. Basically, we won't ever be able to make one "perfect set color" which would work well for everyone. That is why there's a lot of different styles of blocks(with faces or textures to distinguish).

The only way to fix this is by having different type of block skins like we have. I can make more "texture" typed blocks thought.  :)
: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 22, 2010, 10:49:48 AM
You might be able to vary the hues a bit by color set, too, to make it so that different color block sets work well for different types of color blindness.  What do you think of that?  Shifting the yellow/green balance on one of them might make it so that he can use it better (and you, perhaps?), and then as other players come along with colorblindness issues, we could tweak hues on various sets to make them work for them.  What do you think?
: Re: General Feedback
: WinterBorn April 22, 2010, 11:24:49 AM
Thanks for the info!  That is data that we can really use, and I really appreciate your taking the time to tell us.  Phil, if you're reading this, can you take a look at the colors there?

I also have minor color blindness in yellow and green colors. It's a very touchy subject since everyone perceive color differently.

For the set colors, I think color blindness varies by hues, so changing one color to suit one person, might make the existing skins not workable to someone else. There's a dozen or so type of color blindness. Basically, we won't ever be able to make one "perfect set color" which would work well for everyone. That is why there's a lot of different styles of blocks(with faces or textures to distinguish).

The only way to fix this is by having different type of block skins like we have. I can make more "texture" typed blocks thought.  :)


For me RED/GREEN is my weak area and pastels are much harder for me in a wider spectrum.
TY
: Re: General Feedback
: regnared April 22, 2010, 11:32:13 AM
You might be able to vary the hues a bit by color set, too, to make it so that different color block sets work well for different types of color blindness.  What do you think of that?  Shifting the yellow/green balance on one of them might make it so that he can use it better (and you, perhaps?), and then as other players come along with colorblindness issues, we could tweak hues on various sets to make them work for them.  What do you think?

Personally the hues is a bit hard to judge just by myself. Currently The Yellow and Green mix I see the contrast perfectly, but some doesn't at all. I am wondering, would it be possible if in code there could be a hue value bar they could tweak for the button skins?

Would this be possible or be too much work or take too much ram? Giving this possibility, everyone could play with any skin and make it work with there color blindness?
Basically opening up multiple possibilities for colors.

waveman35 - Is it a certain shade of RED/GREEN or pretty much all the shades of the color? For me Yellow and Green is the shades that are close together.


: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 22, 2010, 12:07:34 PM
Unfortunately, there is not a way for us to adjust the hues short of using a pixel shader, which has huuuge overhead on the rendering, and is not compatible with many graphics cards.
: Re: General Feedback
: ShadowOTE April 22, 2010, 12:16:17 PM
I tried the demo yesterday. It was pretty cool (the puzzle mode was really challenging, starting only a few puzzles in), but it seems more like something my mom and her friends would like... I may have found her next birthday present ;)
: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 22, 2010, 12:30:11 PM
We are always happy to provide something fun for moms, too. :)  Our own moms also are really into it.  But we also enjoy puzzle games ourselves, which is the root reason for actually making this.
: Re: General Feedback
: WinterBorn April 22, 2010, 12:47:01 PM
You might be able to vary the hues a bit by color set, too, to make it so that different color block sets work well for different types of color blindness.  What do you think of that?  Shifting the yellow/green balance on one of them might make it so that he can use it better (and you, perhaps?), and then as other players come along with colorblindness issues, we could tweak hues on various sets to make them work for them.  What do you think?

Personally the hues is a bit hard to judge just by myself. Currently The Yellow and Green mix I see the contrast perfectly, but some doesn't at all. I am wondering, would it be possible if in code there could be a hue value bar they could tweak for the button skins?

Would this be possible or be too much work or take too much ram? Giving this possibility, everyone could play with any skin and make it work with there color blindness?
Basically opening up multiple possibilities for colors.

waveman35 - Is it a certain shade of RED/GREEN or pretty much all the shades of the color? For me Yellow and Green is the shades that are close together.


I have worked with people who were totaly color blind - for them shape and texture would be critical.

For me it is in the pastel, low intensity especialy pale red and pale green where I am challenged most. Preschool toys have bright colors - easy for me- but softer colors (like shopping for coordinating clothing) I need my wifes help to avoid mixing colors that amuse most people.

An optional set of bright "circus" colors might be fun and useful

   Hope that helps.
BTW just bought 2 copies of the game (one for my wife)  :)
: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 22, 2010, 12:58:38 PM
Many thanks for your support!  And yeah, something Phil and I were talking about just a minute ago is that we're going to make extra high-contrast versions of the block sets to hopefully overcome some of the colorblindness issues that still persist.  That's a major goal for us, and we thought that the faces blocks would largely overcome it, but looks like we still have more to go.
: Re: General Feedback
: The 9th Sage April 22, 2010, 09:34:35 PM
I tried the demo yesterday. It was pretty cool (the puzzle mode was really challenging, starting only a few puzzles in), but it seems more like something my mom and her friends would like... I may have found her next birthday present ;)
Not to get too off topic, but awesomely, I was thinking the same thing about my mother.
: Re: General Feedback
: x4000 April 22, 2010, 09:42:17 PM
:)
: Re: General Feedback
: The 9th Sage April 22, 2010, 10:09:36 PM
By the way, I have no idea why that block that eats other blocks has a sailor hat on, but I like it. :P
: Re: General Feedback
: regnared April 22, 2010, 10:19:26 PM
Haha! Glad you like it, I think it's some sort honor to Popeye. ;)