For the reasons explained here (http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=22224#post22224), we decided to do an ultra-casual-market ready game after Betty's Beer Bar.

So here it is. FaceIt, a match-three-thingies variant. A vaguely original variant, I'd say. Take a look at this beautiful screenshot (http://www.mrio-software.com/faceit_beta1.jpeg), or play the Beta1 here (http://www.mrio-software.com/faceit-beta1.zip) (just 1.7 MB)

Limitations of this beta : No title screen, no sound or music at all; some (very little) of the graphics are placeholders; incomplete gameplay (the special pieces, like hair dye, aren't implemented); the High Scores don't work; no tutorial; and a couple of minor details you may never notice.

This is mostly a compatibility test... let me know if this works OK. It uses the same sprite engine as Betty, somewhat evolved and optimized.

By the way, it passed a very important test, IMO : my mother (the stereotypical "50 year old female"!) spent five minutes figuring out how to play, but once she "got it", she loved the game!

Anyway, let me know what you think. Thanks!

By the way... I had the idea for this game 27 days ago, so I'd say it's coming together really fast, thanks to a high level and high-productivity development environment : text editor and a command line C++ compiler :)

In these 27 days I also took an exam, corrected an exam, defended my thesis, graduated, had a hard disk crash, tried to market Betty, celebrated christmas, new year and my birthday, worked full time in my day job and lived a little. So, as you can see, C++ and a text editor is a RAD environment :)

You need to be the son of columbo to figure this one out, i couldn't find a single match.

too hard.
pat.

You couldn't find three adjacent faces with the same hair color?

I'm color blind. :cool:

More seriously, it's graphically too heavy so I think i couldn't concentrate on matching things.

pat.

I've had difficulties matching things too. At start it was _very_ hard, afterwards I got better, but only after reading the help screen. I still can't match all the features at the same time - I look for faces with the same hair for instance - then for faces with the same eyes.

It is a pity though, I think the faces idea is brilliant - faces can easily instill emotion as easy as ;) Can you change the mouths to have smiling faces, sad faces, :P faces and the rest of the smilies? Likewise, the eyes could be more expressive: either open, winking, closed, wide open. The hair styles could be more different from each other.

Other than that, I've had some trouble with the user interface. It's hard for me to deselect the currently selected pieces I expect clicking on the last piece I have selected to deselect the whole set - right clicking or clicking on the whitespace (only in face falling mode) should do the same. Clicking the mouse, holding it down and dragging it over a number of faces should likewise select them all. I've had no problems with Beesly's Buzzwords - you can check on that game's user interface.

I still can't match all the features at the same time - I look for faces with the same hair for instance - then for faces with the same eyes.
That's a probabilistic impossibility :) That's NOT the point of the game! It's OK to play by matching only one feature at a time (the examples in How To Play show exactly this). In fact, there are big bonuses for matching more than a feature at a time (the actual words are missing - sorry, beta)
Other than that, I've had some trouble with the user interface. It's hard for me to deselect the currently selected pieces I expect clicking on the last piece I have selected to deselect the whole set - right clicking or clicking on the whitespace (only in face falling mode) should do the same. Clicking the mouse, holding it down and dragging it over a number of faces should likewise select them all. I've had no problems with Beesly's Buzzwords - you can check on that game's user interface.
I did. It actually works the same way, as far as I can tell. You're right about right-clicking and clicking on an empty spot. Thanks!

Like everyone else, I love the idea but find the game incredibly difficult to begin with. Perhaps if the game started with less possible feature to begin with and added more and more as the game progresses? I'd also quite like to have it confirmed what I scored for - just a little message like '3 x beards' or something.

I also struggle a little with the controls. Both mouse buttons are selecting but I find I try to clear with the right button because of previous games like Beesly's BW.


SC

One more vote for "really difficult to match". :( I agree that reducing the number of possibilities for the first few levels would really help. Sometimes it wasn't even quite clear to me why a match was made - I think maybe the mouth was the same, but it seemed to have a different beard on top (or maybe it was partially covered up by a funky hairdo).

Maybe a simpler graphics style would work? Alexey P. (Tetris-Guy) did a game called Faces in 1990 or so. Different idea (constructing faces, not matching them) but maybe their visual style could help. Unfortunately I googled and could only find one picture link:

http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?name=Faces%3A+Tris+3

Just an idea. Feel free to ignore. :)

Neat concept and great art. It hurts my brain but it's fun.

Haven't downloaded the game yet, but you've rekindled my desire to swap artists with you. :D

Okay, here are my observations after playing it for about 15 minutes:
1. It took me a few minutes to figure out what I was supposed to be matching. Even when I used the hint feature, I still couldn't see what was the same some times. The sheer variety of matching possibilities is a little mind-boggling.
2. Some features (noses and eyes) I found pretty difficult to distinguish between. Some of them are just too similar looking.
3. The level where you just have to match pairs is a little out of place since all the levels before it and after it use the "usual" way of matching.

Overall, not bad for 27 days of work. :)

I'll add more feedback beside the one I gave you yesterday in chat.
I agree with everyone saying that's too hard to see the particulars.
The main problem I think it's the graphics. The faces are too detailed and it is really hard to distinguish them.

I don't really know how you could solve this... maybe playing the game fullscreen could be better :P

Or you should consider reducing the detail and make some level based on the particular to find: example, level one, find the matching noses, level 2 find the matching eyes, etc...

If I come up with better ideas I'll tell you, but for now my brain is burned (yesterday finished programming my puzzle game at 1.30 AM and got to work at 8 AM :))

Thanks for your comments.

First of all, I've implemented some of your suggestions : deselecting with right-click, drag-select, many others. We discarded the 11 varieties of female mouth shapes and replaced them with 5 much more differentiable expressions (angry, big smile...). It's much easier to match faces and the faces look much better.

We also added the messages about what have you matched.

About the difficulty... honestly, I don't get it! It just can't be that hard to match three faces with the same hair color! It's supposed to be trivial! (and in my opinion, it is!) Come on, my mother "got it" in 5 minutes! What are we doing so fundamentally wrong?

This is also going to have an extremely fool-proof tutorial (the first time you play, Mr Hint will pop up and say "three blondes! click here", with a big hand pointing at the relevant face). I certainly hope it helps.

Paul : That's a bonus level, so it's supposed to be different, I guess. You can't lose - you just get bonus points if you end with some time left. Now there's a SKIP button if you don't want to play it, too.

Jack : To go fullscreen, press F12 or go to Options.

Midnight : Good idea about introducing features gradually; that's what we're going to do with wildcards and special objects. But how do I gradually introduce features? Let's say I say "OK, first level is match hair colors only". Do I disable other matches? Do I put lots of identical faces which only differ in their hair color?

Many many thanks for your comments! And please let me "debug" this "difficulty" thing.

I haven't played it yet, so this might not apply... but...

Couldn't you have the early levels with less faces, and only use the features that were easiest to distinguish? The more subtle ones could be introduced later.

Have just tried the demo again and it all fell into place. My problem before was that I was trying to match shapes rather than colours. Now that I have played it again and tried concentrating on colour (I found eyes the easiest, then hair) the game is suddenly a lot more playable.

I concentrated on shape because in the 'How to Play' this was the first thing it mentioned and I didn't bother reading on to find out about colour.

I would suggest that for beginners the focus should be wholly on colour, with shape being an advanced play feature.

SC

P.S. Feel free to post the updated version! =)

Originally posted by escotia
Have just tried the demo again and it all fell into place.
Thank god :)
I concentrated on shape because in the 'How to Play' this was the first thing it mentioned and I didn't bother reading on to find out about colour.

I would suggest that for beginners the focus should be wholly on colour, with shape being an advanced play feature.

Thanks. I'll make the How To Play screen more biased towards colors. The mini-tutorial will help in this area too.
P.S. Feel free to post the updated version! =)
I feel free :) I intended to post it today, but two nice 15 minute blackouts affecting only my block and 30 minutes apart got in the way :)

I expect to have an advanced beta or even a RC for the next week. Given that my sister-artist is going on vacation for 10 days, I'll have to :)

Nice game, but very hard at the beginning. To me, the levels with woman seemed much easier than those with men (probably because it's easier to match their hair color), maybe you could start with one of those levels. Also, being able to match skin color would make it a lot easier.

Originally posted by Mike Wiering
Also, being able to match skin color would make it a lot easier.
No way!

As you can see, there are several skin colors, but they are purely decorative - they have absolutely no effect on the game. And it's this way by design - the least we want is to have the game banned for being "racist"!

I don't think that's too far fetched - check the Rocket Mania thread!

You just better watch out you don't get accused of being nose-ist, buddy.