Yes, but can you play it drunk?
Finished up the second gameplay prototype for Primaries. Play it here:
http://code.compartmental.net/primaries/proto2/
I like it. It hurts my head a little to play it, but I enjoy that in a puzzle game. However, I don’t think it’d be very fun to play while drunk. I also don’t think it’d be very fun to watch someone play it, either while they were drunk and you were sober, or they were sober and you were drunk, or you were both drunk. It’s also not very conducive to a five minute gameplay session, even if you already know how to play. Admittedly, the keyboard controls complicate things a bit and it would be a little easier with a 360 controller, but even still.
The verdict?
KISS!
I think I’m going to reduce it to a single grid and do Puzzle Quest style swapping. Color mixing will still be involved, since you could swap two tiles and match two colors with that swap, and I think that will be a nice twist. But it probably also means I will have to come up with a clever way to initialize the board so that you don’t get a bajillion matches right off the bat.
But now, Bioshock calls!
September 13th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
You have a fan for Primaries, the solitary version, Proto04. This is dangerously addictive. I managed to get up to the 80Ks and I stopped because I had to do something else… but I’m usually blocked in the high 20Ks. I hope you’ll keep that version alive somewhere.
I wouldn’t change a thing to the gameplay and the controls, but having played maybe too much of it, I had a few ieas. The active block cursor should be thicker maybe, and it would be fun to keep track of a few things: the highest number of cascading swaps in one move, the highest value of any one swap so far in the game or the White count and the last swap points should remain greyd out…
Have you ever considered putting an Undo move? It would be nice when blocked to be able to go back by one swap and try another move…
Fantastic addictive game! Proto04 would be worth pursuing as a product in its own right, a sort of graphical interactive Sudoku. I just wanted to let you know what I thought.
Michel
September 23rd, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Wow, thanks so much for the feedback. I’m glad you like it so much. I will definitely keep this online and in the same place, so feel free to come back and play it any time you like. Hopefully, at some point I will get a “finished product” out the door that you can download as a standalone application. I expect it will have a play mode very similar to proto4.