DreamTurtle Software (that's me) would like to announce the release of its first game "Grek's Puzzle Challenge" ..
Grek is a level-based, family-friendly logic puzzle game where you guide Grek (the simple but well-meaning) assistant of wizard Melkor in a quest to escape the deep unexplored regions of Melkor's castle by solving each room's puzzle.

You can get the shareware version here:
www.dreamturtle.co.nz/Grek_1.0_sw_setup.exe

Please d/l and play a bit .. I'll welcome all comments

Blain

Nice game... but very hard!

I'm not a big fan of logic puzzlers, usually because they don't really offer much of a challenge. This one is different :-) I found the demo very enjoyable.

A few small remarks:

In Windowed mode, the music keeps playing even when another window gets focus. I find this a little annoying. There doesn't seem to be a menu option to turn off the music either.

An undo function would be nice. Sometimes you make a mistake -- press an arrow key one time too many -- and Grek pushes the wrong block. It's not nice to force the player to replay the entire level.

At first, I didn't notice there were tutorial levels.

The opening door animation is nice the first time, but it gets tiring after a while, especially if you keep having to replay the level.

One thing that caught me by surprise, is that pushing a whole stack of things from the 2nd "level" doesn't just move that
portion (levels 2 and up), but the whole stack. However, pushing a stack of things with a key on top, does drop the key. I understand that this is a fundamental part of your design, but maybe it can be made more obvious.

That's it so far, now back to level 7!

I helped with the levels on Grek. For those of you that don't know what it is by Blain's explanation... It's a sokoban-style box pushing puzzle game. Only it's in 3D, and it has more than just boxes.

It has crates you can push and pick up, tables you can push, ice blocks that once pushed move across the floor until hitting something else or the edge of the floor, and obstacles that can only be pushed.

We got at a stage to release the game, and yet I feel that we probably needed to get more opinons, sort of a post-beta beta test ;-) So I asked Blain to put this feedback request up.

Matthijs - Thanks for the comments so far.

*bump*

BTW, if there's a reason you're not wanting to try it out, let me know :-)

Keith

Just tried it, worked without problem although I also had some flickering at the top of my window.

A few quick suggestions:

- I second the remark regarding the door animation - it get's tiring very quickly.

- I find the controls a bit slow and sluggish. I sometimes have to repeat a keypress. I think that might be done on purpose (e.g. to stop you from pushing a table when you walk into it), but I find it hinders the game-flow a bit. On the flip-side, the jumping is way too fast (I often jump two fields at once). I think controls and character movement could use some tweaking.

- you use the personal pronoun at lot (contact me, visit my website,...). It might look more professional to use "us" and talk about "our company" - even if it's just you. :)

- Expected to be able to push off the top table of a stack (e.g. put one table next to a stack of two, jump onto the one table, and push off the top table of the stack of two). Don't know if that would be useful in any puzzle designs though - possibly not.

The puzzles look very nice... I haven't had much time to play with it, but they look well thought out.

Cheers,
Patrick

Post some screenshots... that will entice more downloads if folks like the graphics.

We were just thinking program feedback request... but you can see a few small screenies at http://www.dreamturtle.co.nz -- btw, i'll ask Blain to put up links to the pics that look like thumbs to larger pics, and perhaps update the website a bit.

Thanks for the tips though!

Keith

Originally posted by Midnight
Expected to be able to push off the top table of a stack (e.g. put one table next to a stack of two, jump onto the one table, and push off the top table of the stack of two). This is exactly what I meant with my last comment. I noticed that many of the levels depend on this 'odd' behavior (odd to me, anyway). Because of this, finishing the levels can be very frustrating when you finally find out/remember that you are able to push the entire stack (and I make that mistake every time).

Erhm... maybe I'm dumb but I didn't manage to do anything in the first level (apart maybe from pushing the nearest crate).
Also the mouse pointer is blinking. Yes, like in 50% of the shareware games written by Dexterity forum members I've tried. No, I don't want to hear it's because my drivers are too old ;).
(hm, I tried it some hours ago and might not be remembering it very well, sorry. Anyway if you're not drawing the mouse pointer yourself, then it is definitely blinking on this PC.)