what about icons floating besides the tile?
Only a brief comment for now. But anyway, cool game, definitely a new concept, interested to see how this final product will turn out. Very playable already (though I haven’t tested it extensively) and pretty well implemented it seems.
As for the budget issue, that bothered me slightly as well. What if you just had a visual rectangle bar thing (or if you want to be fancy, a circle or something) that shows your proportionate amount of money from the beginning of the stage? Or, better yet, the bar somehow has a grid in it where each “unit” in the grid corresponds to one block moving point (or is this not a one-to-one transformation? sorry, lin alg joke :P).
Experiment with that maybe? Also, apologize if someone already suggested this, I’m lazy and didn’t read all the posts.
TheAnalogKid, those sound like good changes. How about for the other tools, if you hold the space bar (or maybe the mouse left click), a “pie chart” menu appears around your cursor, and you move the mouse to a nearby section and release for the appropriate tool. If you do that, it seems intuitive and I can’t see it taking more than half a second or so to switch tools. As long as you’re only using one keyboard button, that shouldn’t be a big deal.
Demonpants,
yes I’ll implement the single key control to open the translucent popup window containing the tool icons to select. Considering your last post, I don’t think that holding a key (like space bar) to maintain the popup open and selecting the tool is really intuitive. In my opinion, it’s better to just hit a single time space bar and then click the icon. For me, it’s a more common way of interacting with UIs for the majority of people. What do you think?
Why not forget about clicking icons. Spacebar toggles tool. Simple, no ?
hum! well… 
I’m not sure it will work that well when a level will allow 3 or 4 different tools to choose. Let say, the level is designed to alternate the tools from stick, hand and bombs. I’m not saying that I’ll implement all of them but there’s a high chance that multiple levels will imply alternating between 3 or 4 different tools. So, to pass from tool 1 to tool 4 the player would need to press space bar 3 times. It’s the same mechanism as alt-tab in Windows right? It’s not dramatic but is a bit cumbersome I guess.
Nevertheless, greate idea. Thanks!
Well it shouldn’t be too hard to try both, should it? ;D
I was thinking the holding option would be nice because it would allow you to release it immediately if you didn’t mean to press it. If you must select a tool before it goes away, then that might create a moment of confusion.
Well, isn’t that essentially the same type of technique as used in Crysis for changing your armor mode? And I thought that worked fairly well.
The two advantages of this are, as someone said, hitting spacebar by mistake shouldn’t cause any problems, and the selection will always be in a specific direction. That is, if you have 3-4 tools available and you have a toggle, you may have to hit it once or twice to select the correct thing, a process which might require you to stop and think for a second as to how to switch to what you want. With the spacebar thing it’ll always be top left, bottom right, etc.
Also if you do implement this and end up putting like 3-4 tools on level 5+ but only 2 tools for level 1-5, I think you should grey out unused boxes rather than filling the entire thing and then changing the spacing as you add more.
Hello, I’ve uploaded a new version that contains improved controls. No more right mouse button, you use only the left button to rotate the falling piece and you hold space bar while selecting the tool you want. Once selected release space bar. Also, there’s a new button to the left to drop the falling piece and you can accelerate the piece by pushing it down with the stick tool. I didn’t implemented the double click to drop the piece as I wanted to do in the first place but the new double click feature in slick causes to many issues in my game. I’ll see how it evolves in slick forums… Also, there’s no more undo function on the cutter tool to deselect the selected blocks. If you made a mistake in your selection then you simply put the selected blocks at their initial place.
Some small graphics changes were done. I would have liked to implement a tutorial but I didn’t have time and it takes a significant amount of time to implement.
Please play the game and tell me what you think.
Next planned step:
- Game presentation and menu.
- some sounds and maybe music
- tutorial, if I have enough time
Hi,
there’s a new game version:
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the tool selection window works differently now. When there’s only 2 available tools in the level, pressing space bar only will switch to the other tool. In levels that have more than 2 tools the user will have to hold space bar, select the desired tool and release space bar. The 3 or more tools behavior works exactly as explained in my previous post.
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the money amount now displays a percentage of money left. This should help to figure out the proportion of available money to complete the level. Note that how it is displayed is temporary. I plan to display a gage with the money amount inside the gage.
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I updated the help text to reflect the control changes.
Please try and play the game. Any feedback is appreciated.
Thanks
You shouldn’t change the behaviour of keys during a game. If you want this behaviour, make the spacebar cycle the tools like alt-tab cycles processes in windows. With each space press you select the next tool, but you can also select another desired tool with the mouse before releasing the space bar. This way you have a consistent behaviour in both cases.
Good point, thanks!
[quote]You shouldn’t change the behaviour of keys during a game. If you want this behaviour, make the spacebar cycle the tools like alt-tab cycles processes in windows. With each space press you select the next tool, but you can also select another desired tool with the mouse before releasing the space bar. This way you have a consistent behaviour in both cases.
[/quote]
I’ve uploaded a new version that has this behavior, which is the ability to cycle the tools via space bar press or select the desired tool with the mouse while holding space bar.
Thanks
Wow, those are excellent improvements!
My next critique is probably that the push tool is a bit finicky. Sometimes I’ll want to push down and it will go sideways, etc.
Also, it would probably make sense to have a rotate tool - seems more intuitive.
Thanks Demonpants!
[quote]My next critique is probably that the push tool is a bit finicky. Sometimes I’ll want to push down and it will go sideways, etc.
[/quote]
Critique? I realize now that when you push down the piece too fast you have the issue. It’s an issue I know but is the push down feature really a major feature? I’m wondering. Too me, the drop feature is much more important. I’m just asking.
[quote]Also, it would probably make sense to have a rotate tool - seems more intuitive.
[/quote]
Well, in my opinion clicking left button is better because you can rotate the piece much faster, and this is a game where you need to think fast so switching to another tool to rotate the piece seems to slowdown too much the operation. Unless you mean that using a tool to rotate would be just fun. It might not be intuitive but I keep saying that a good way of letting the player learn the game like a tutorial would solve such an issue.
Yeah, I think the rotate tool would be a lot more fun, and would further separate your game from Tetris. I’ve had the most fun with your game while scrambling to cut up blocks when I need to quickly switch to the slider tool for the current descending block. Frantically switching between tools is where the magic is, I think.
As for the push down, it may have to do with me going too fast, but it also felt like the functionality was just a bit off. Like if I’m mostly above the block but still to the side only a little bit, it would still get pushed to the side when I wanted it to go downward. You should just make it so that if your mouse is above the top half of the block it goes down, and you’re below you push it. Of course experiment with that. Also, maybe a quick flick downward with the mouse (when above the block), should send it immediately to the bottom or something like that.
[quote]Yeah, I think the rotate tool would be a lot more fun, and would further separate your game from Tetris.
[/quote]
Hum…I’m not that convinced that using a tool to rotate the piece would be good. As I wanted to explain, the piece is already falling down fast enough. I’ll keep the rotate feature as is for now and keep thinking about that. And, why do I need to separate my game from Tetris? Any game these days is created from a know game or genre right?
[quote]As for the push down, it may have to do with me going too fast, but it also felt like the functionality was just a bit off.
[/quote]
I’ve fixed that. It will be part of the next version.
[quote]Also, maybe a quick flick downward with the mouse (when above the block), should send it immediately to the bottom or something like that.
[/quote]
That is not intuitive to me and would be really hard to implement well.
Well I’m looking forward to trying out the next version, then.
Hello,
it’s been quite a while since the last version of Incredibuilder. There’s a new version that contains a lot of changes/enhancements:
* 2 tutorial levels
* sounds
* no more concept of money. It's been replaced by a limited time to build the construction.
* the existing levels were changed to adjust to the game play changes.
* game menu
* the next pieces are now displayed half the size
* the plan now shows the construction background.
* the "level completed" and "level failed" events now look better
* some bug fixes
There’s 2 known bugs in this version:
- during the tutorials most of the sounds are shut off by the simulated typing sounds. It seems to be a Slick bug but I’ll have to further investigate that.
- In tutorial 2 when you have to paste the cut blocks in some circumstances if you don’t paste them at the expected location then they will disappear forever when you retry the step.
If you face these bugs while playing please report them to me with details.
Also, I’d like to know the followings from you:
- are the tutorials easy to understand. Are they too long?
- is the game fun with the game play changes?
- are the levels too hard, too easy, just ok?
Thanks for playing and giving me your feedback!
Played through the tutorials and a couple of levels.
The tutorials are easy to understand and explain the game well. They feel just about perfect in terms of length. I knew how to play afterwards, so thats got to be good
The levels I played were very easy, I didn’t see a way to fail to be honest. The take a while to complete, maybe a bit too long for something that is presumably for casual players. I need quick fixes!
The primary problem I’m having with the game at the moment is it’s not fun for me to play. I stopped playing only because I wasn’t interested to see what comes next. The drop button and bin feel really clunky as a control scheme. Maybe keyboard control would be better for this game?
It needs more surprises, combos, explosions - ok, maybe not, but you know what I mean. Eye candy and feedback from operations. Make the levels into pictures or something also - that’d be cool
Kev