General Feedback

[Fiskbit]

Thanks; I'll mention that in the bubble special block tutorial, and will try to make things more clear for metal grille and stone.

[Doddler]

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.

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.

[freykin]

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

[Fiskbit]

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.

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!

[The 9th Sage]

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).

[x4000]

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?

[keith.lamothe]

Yep   Been really tough to get down to work today, but that shouldn't take long when I get to it.

[x4000]

Sweet -- much appreciated!  Some days have more non-Arcen-coding stuff going on than others, I fully understand.

[The 9th Sage]

Awesome, thanks for that.

[x4000]

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.

[keith.lamothe]

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

[Ixiohm]

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 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

[keith.lamothe]

Thank you for the trying the game and for such positive feedback.  Glad you like it

Welcome to the forums

[Lamerstein]

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.

[x4000]

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?