Ok, submitted for flames... Flip Panic! 1.0 has escaped screaming and kicking from my development machines onto the website (though there is no 'sales page' for the game yet - having a hard time describing gameplay.)

It can be downloaded from

http://www.midnightryder.com/

I'll have a couple o' screenshots up sometime soon so you can at least take a peek before downloading it ;-)

(Donning flame retardent undies - letting other professional indies look at my work is always a scary concept! :-)

Game works fine until I alt-tab. Then it crashes with a "Run-time error '-2005532222 (887601c2) Automation error" You might also want to put some rollover effects on your buttons. They seem kind of static. I'm not much of a puzzle game player so I can't say too much about the gameplay itself as I don't care too much for the genre to start with so you can take what I say with a grain of salt. But I had two thoughts about it. The gameplay is horizontal and vertical rows. Why are the tiles diamonds instead of squares. It's easier seeing diagonal rows that don't anything rather than the vertical and horizontal lines that do. It would be much easier on the eyes if they were squares bumped up against each other. The other is a time attack mode would be a nice addition. As it is I can just sit there and flip rows and columns indefinately (it appears) without any consequence.

Finally, the web site could use some a little more flash or color. I didn't see any pictures or screen shots. Its rather boring. At the least some screenshots and a description. When I click on any of the games' names it goes to a blank about page. Also it would be really nice if links were a different color than the regular text.

Jack

Try the 'Small Blitz' for timed games. Also when you get about half way though the Expert levels you get timed levels, and later you also get levels with Time Bombs on them, making it even more difficult to keep up with.

Hm - thanks for the bug report. Somehow, that slipped through the cracks. Wonder what's causing that? Time ta' do some research!

Thanks for the website mention too - the website is ALWAYS a problem with me. I've never made one I was happy with. Oddly enough, I do consulting side work doing website development, and have not problems with getting things to look good there - just problems with my site ;-) I'm getting ready to upload the 'sales pitch' page for Flip Panic!, and have to do the same thing for Tile Panic! and Boulder Panic! 2 DX (the last two titles were 'canceled' for a while, one due to picking up a publisher, and the other due to appathy on my part - no longer wanted to sell or support BP! 2 DX.)

I noticed the font was very hard on the eyes - I think you should consider brightening the font or losing the stone effect.

On a sidenote, can you explain to me how the game was meant to be played? It might just be me being dumb but whenever I grouped light and dark in 3's nothing seemed to happen half of the time - maybe a more hands on tutorial would be something to consider?

EDIT: I just figured out it only worked with light tiles - my bad :)

Wow - that's a REALLY good point. I'm not sure if the Tutorial intro mentions that you can only match LIGHT side tiles!

Aw, man, I can't loose the stone effect - I went though too much effort doin' it ;-)

Ok, a few bugs and other comments.

I get the same bug JackNathan mentioned with the "Run-time error '-2005532222 (887601c2) Automation error".

I can keep restarting the level over and over again to rack up lots of points. :)

I can pause the menu screen.

This really seems like it should be a windowed and not a full screen game. Especially with no music.

The title screen background blends in with the button backgrounds and makes them hard to read. The fonts/background combination also makes the help screens really hard to read.

Why is there an X on the upper right corner of the main menu if it doesn't work.

The playfield is too static. Maybe adding some sparkles to the tiles like bejeweled does would help (which this game is very similar to).

Can't really comment on the difficulty as I lost interest after the first few levels.

The graphics overall just seem unfinished. Perhaps you just need to have some type of theme like bejeweled has.

A scoreboard is sorely missing from the game. People like to compete with their family and friends on games like these.

Your website also needs lots of work.

Works on my machine, except after a short while playing the background flickers maybe once every 5 seconds or so, almost like the video buffer is being updated mid resynch. It's a little odd, I've got a GF2 MX 400 on an Intel machine running XP.

I really tried to read the instructions in tutorial mode, but I just couldn't force myself. I agree the font has to go, maybe just a very simple animation of lighting up 3 adjacent diamonds and having them disappear.

An extra indication of what way the blocks are going to flip might be nice too, maybe just a transparent overlay on the top "triangle" if the mouse is over the top half of the diamond... Make it a little more obvious. (or maybe highlight the column or row based on the mouse position to show what's going to change)

The gameplay is fun, but I keep getting to a point where It doesn't seem like there's any more combinations to be found. But the game will let me flip rows and columns to my hearts content. A bejeweled style "Hint" would be nice in this case, or just ending the level telling me to "stop searching, it's over buddy" or some such courtesy :)

Good concept though, it's a nice puzzle game.

Well, I hate it when bugs get missed! Looks like 1.1 is gonna be A LOT sooner than expected!

Reset: Ouch.

Ok, well, gotta do something about the font - that seems to be unanimous so far ;-)

Dan: Because you didn't finish reading the tutorial, you missed the fact both mouse buttons do something - left button flips tiles, right button will grab a tile (at a penalty of score, and in on many levels there's a limit to the number of tiles you can grab.)

Bejeweled: Don't mention that game to me! AAARG! ;-) (I released Boulder Panic! 1.0 right around the same time it was released... and since it was more popular, I was the imitator :-) Personally, I thought it was both similar and very dis-similar all at the same time. *SHRUG*

Nvidia has a driver problem from time to time - there's been two revs of the drivers I've encountered that cause exactly the same problem. Dunno about the most current driver set - I'll have to check on it (my permenant solution was to move to ATI.) I thought that was all behind me - need to look at the game engine again, and see if there's a better solution to it.

I like the direction indicator idea - easy to implement too.

Aggg... dont make me read... it's too painful, I just wanna have fun, nice visual mages showing me what the clicks do :)

And come to think of it, I have very old detonator drivers, so yeah, that's likely the issue.

Well.. a more graphical help pic would fix that. Need to do what I've set up for Tile Panic! - it's litterally a visual 'idiots' guide to playing the game (that rev isn't on the site - it's setting at a publisher, finishing final QA)

Also easily added - just a little work in Photopaint :-)

Odd thing about the detonator driver's issue: I've got a number of (2D driven) games that messed up on the same driver revs, so it wasn't just me - one of them was Total Annihilation (which was written way before the detonator series.) And I could never figure out WHY.

@Midnight Ryder: tip: it would be really helpful if links on your website would be shown as blue - now it's really hard to navigate on your website.

Havent seen the game yet...
Your website is too confusing! :)

This idea just occurred to me, and it's based on my opinion that puzzle games such as these should not require any textual explanation to figure out. It was pretty easy for me to figure out how the rows would flip and that I needed to light up groups of 3.

I think this could be made a little clearer in the interface by having the highlight. Also when a group of three or more have been connected, play the sound, but pause for just a second to outline them (or some other effect to draw attention to them) before you remove them from the game board so that the player can see what they just did. I remember the first time i got a group of three it disappeared so fast that I didn't even get a chance to see what I had just accomplished. It seems that all of a sudden there were exploding pieces, moving scores, and the whole game board was shifting. I think it would be nice if there were more attention drawn to what just happened to cause those events to occur.

Anyway, the Idea I had was when the user gets "stuck" like I ways. If they haven’t used the right click All game and there's no way for them to progress without using it, you could pop up a little messages with an image suggesting they should try right clicking to move pieces. You should also communicate this visually in some sort of tutorial mode, but knowing that a lot of people will skip it or not read it, it makes sense to provide this information to the player when they are ready to have it. A.k.a. When they’re stuck ;)