Putty Puzzle

Featured Games
#61

Wow.

You’re officially famous now! ;D

#62

The best bit is, I’d never heard of the site before.

Kev

#63

Holy crap, you got a mention on Kotaku, that’s impressive. ;D

#64

lwjgl applet here, works great. more tutorial levels are quite helpful. only crit i have is i wish the music was more changeable :slight_smile:

#65

Each new version superb-er than the last!

Couple of comments:

  • When Franks says, “Click me for help,” I wasn’t expecting him to give me a complete walkthrough, just a repeat of the instructions screen or maybe one small hint. If he said, “Click me for solution” or “Click me for answer,” it would be more in line with my expectations.
  • It might be a good thing if you only ever had to use one mouse button - specifically if you didn’t need to use the right button to cancel. How about automatically cancelling a move if the pointer moves too far from the selected putty? Or letting the selected area shrink if the pointer moves backwards, perhaps cancelling the move altogether if it moves right back to the initial tile? Or insisting that the pointer needs to click within the final (cyan) outline to complete the move, with a click at any other time or place being interpreted as cancellation?

Simon

#66

Looking at input atm along with a bunch of new mind melting levels. How would you suggest dismantle worked without right button? There’s also some discussion about optimising controls to allow the player to be slopy in selection but I’m really not sure how well thats going to work out.

Kev

#67

Exactly as before. ::slight_smile: I’d forgotten that right button is also used for splitting the putty.

But I do think there could be more intuitive ways to cancel moves. When I played earlier (having been away from the game for a couple of weeks) I kept trying to cancel moves by (left-)clicking elsewhere on the window, which has precisely the wrong effect if you’ve drawn a cyan outline.

Not that you’d want to fine-tune the game just for my brain of course.

Simon

#68

Your brain seems pretty dead on. I’ve just punted the game out to a couple of other forums trying to get enough consistent feedback to work out what to do.

The problem I really have is I have no idea what to do with the game when it is done :slight_smile:

(heh, other than play the levels other people are creating :D)

Kev

#69

Slightly amused at this, on Kotaku site:

“They added 12 more levels, upping it to 18”

You are now officially a “they”. :slight_smile:

#70

You may have noticed recently that I have several personalities, do you think thats what they mean?

Kev

#71

Sit back and watch all the clones appear? :wink:

#72

New version up:

  • Levels filled up to 36. Some might get swapped yet, was just nice to see the board full.
  • 6 new level features to play with
  • White putty is now transparent to help hint it might not be normal :slight_smile:
  • Some visual tweaks to add a little polish
  • Bunch of bug fixes (probably introduced some too :))

Putty Puzzle as Java Web Start
Putty Puzzle as LWJGL Applet
Putty Puzzle as Java 2D Applet

It’s definitely getting closer. Feedback appreciated, but I’ve started to slow down on this one - looking for a new idea :slight_smile:

Kev

#73

nice update, love some of the new level, I can actually complete some of them now :slight_smile:

#74

Kev, I think you should consider not using the right mouse button because on Mac this button doesn’t exists. You can replace it by an icon in the game.

#75

I have a mac and a right mouse button. I agree there should be alternative, but right mouse button suits most users.

Kev

#76

Ho ???

I’ve never seen a Mac mouse with more than 1 button. I can’t argue here since I don’t have one and never checked the features in details.

#77

MacBooks only have one button, but ctrl-click works as a right click (Kev - ctrl-click works in the LWJGL version of Putty but not the Java2D version)

Couple ideas:

  • Sometimes I want to move a putty faster. Like on level 4. Maybe allow many moves at once instead of one square at a time?
  • Java2D optimization: dirty rectangles would be a huge speedup for this game. (My poor old powerbook is getting 100% CPU and lagging mouse input. The LWJGL version is not bad, at about 50% CPU)
#78

Tbh, I wish I’d implemented the Java 2D version in Pulp and got dirty rectangles for free. My first through was to make use of the underlying graphics context of Pulp without picking up the rest of the framework but everything seemed to be tied to the resource management. Unfortunately the way the games written it’s assuming complete refresh of the entire screen every time so I’m thinking dirty rectangles probably arn’t something I can do (it was written in Slick for LWJGL first, the Java 2D version was just a hack I put on over the top). However, I’m sure there are optimisations I can do for Java 2D.

Out of interest, what spec is your laptop? (is it old, or was that just a turn of phrase :)). I don’t want to spend time much more time on the game so if it’s super low spec I’ll probably leave it alone.

(you can now use space to detach blocks btw - ctrl click sounds better but I’m surprised AWT doesn’t handle that for us?).

Incidently, my mouse isn’t an Apple mouse, it’s a plain old USB thing. Like most home users of OSX I’ve seen they simply get a new mouse for ease.

Kev

#79

Hmm, actually you might want to try it again. There was a bug in the first version I uploaded (KappaOne reported on IRC) where the game slowed to crawl in certain cases. Generally it was trying to too much work :slight_smile:

Kev

#80

It’s a 867Mhz G4 - pretty old! I cleared the cache, restarted the browser and tried it again, but I think I still have the old version, because the space bar isn’t working (unless I’m missing something)

It’s not a big deal, though, I can play on my office machine just fine :slight_smile: