Hi all,

so finally we reach near-completion of our first project under the Purplenose banner: Plummit.

We'd appreciate any feedback on the game itself, especially any thoughts on difficulty, demo size, which mode you liked most etc.

You can get the Plummit demo at Plummit Demo (http://www.purplenose.com/plummit/PlummitSetup.exe)

and screenshots and info from Purplenose (http://www.purplenose.com)

Hope you enjoy!

Thanks.

Carrot,

I just tried the demo for a few min, but I had a hard time playing. There was no tutorial, and when the pieces fell, I felt like I should of been able to rotate them like Tetris?

Besides that game looks great.

Thanks for trying it out.

You should be able to rotate (default key is left-ctrl) in all game modes except the puzzle mode.

We'll probably change the default rotate key to the space bar.

We avoided the tutorial route for the 'arcadey' mode because we felt that the gameplay was reasonably obvious for a tetris player (like you said), instead we went for the hint screens.

Whether this was the right choice, we'll have to wait and see!

I played the puzzle-mode tutorial and free levels. I thought they were really good. Here are two small things I noticed that interrupted the otherwise smooth experience I had:

For some reason it was not clear to me in the magnet tutorial that tiles could be attached to magnets and "float" without something beneath them. I actually had to look at the solution to this puzzle to finally understand how it worked. Putting the solutions in the tutorials was a good idea in my opinion. Since it was a tutorial level, though, I felt that somehow I was cheated out of solving that puzzle because the tutorial text was not clear to me. I don't point this out as a flaw, it may just be that I read it wrong.

As a professional in advertising/visual communication, I recommend that if you can find a way to do it you should not break sentences across tutorial text screens. This is a point of interference that makes the text more difficult to understand, especially when the text is explaining something that is unfamiliar. The sentences may need to be read more than once and flipping back and forth between screens makes it harder. It would be even better if concepts themselves weren't broken up across screens, but that is more difficult to achieve.

Nice game. :)

-Tom

Originally posted by Tom Cain
As a professional in advertising/visual communication, I recommend that if you can find a way to do it you should not break sentences across tutorial text screens. This is a point of interference that makes the text more difficult to understand, especially when the text is explaining something that is unfamiliar. The sentences may need to be read more than once and flipping back and forth between screens makes it harder. It would be even better if concepts themselves weren't broken up across screens, but that is more difficult to achieve.


Thanks for playing Tom.
We were concerned with this too, but given the space required it was difficult to achieve non-breaking sentences. Maybe just changing the text a bit might help.

All: If you find some of the island-hop levels are missing, you'll need to download the game again. Sorry! Screwed up on the installer, but its fixed now.

Carrot,

Nice game. The water pipes through the tetris blocks is a cool idea. Tetris was one of my favourite games of all time. I really liked the liquid backgrounds on the menus. Took me a couple of tries to figure out what to do on the Island Hop game,. Didn't like having to go back and select an island every time I lost a life though. Gamers are an anxious bunch, and don't like to be kept waiting when they're playing. Couldn't quite figure out what to do with the puzzle games. Tried a few times and then gave up.

This is a good game, which has the potential to be a great game with a bit more tweaking. Keep up the good work.

This is durned good game; I don't often find myself playing puzzle games, but this one hooked me. Here are some comments in no particular order:

- The music is nice, but the sound quality is low enough to have detreacted from my experience. It sounds (!) like you lowered the quality in order to save on download size. A good idea, but I think you squeezed too much from the pieces that are played repeatedly.

- The graphics are nice, and the animation looks good. I did not, however, like the backgrounds -- they appeared grainy, as though they were resized from smaller images. Contrast that with the crispness of the foreground graphics.

- Puzzle mode seems to be the strongest style of play, given the amount of work you have put into creating each level. Playing through the puzzles also gives you a tutorial on how to play, while Island Hop does not. When I first played the game, I went in for the Island Hop mode, which gave me a negative impression, since a) it was too tough for me, as a newbie, and b) there was not enough about that playing style that was different from other games to compel me to play further. Had I downloaded the game as a consumer, I'd have dismissed it as being nice but too similar to other puzzle games, and would not have played further. However, as I downloaded it to rip it into tiny pieces (not really), I gave it another try a few hours later, this time choosing the puzzle mode. This is more unique, and very well done. I think you should push that for your players' first impression.

- As Mr. Cain says, breaking

the

sentences

up is

somewhat

disconcerting. One approach to solving this would be to make the font smaller, (it's on the large side); another would be to increase the size of the dialog box. Also, after reading the first paragraph, I hit the big checkmark, thinking that that's what the program wanted me to do; what it really wanted me to do, the first time through, was to hit the smaller right-arrow on the left, in order to read the tutorial.

- The tutorial was great. I'm not sure why it kept telling me that I had "only N more to go!", as though it was work to be plowed through. I was having fun.

- In the text describing the cyan tiles, there is a typo: it's left -> its left.

- The overlayed water does not line up with the tubes. It looks like it's a pixel off.

- The magnets confused me; while I understood that they could be attached to (wooden!) boxes, and to each other, it would never have occurred to me to attach one to the stone wall, since it's a magnet. Perhaps you could demonstrate how they work by starting the level off in a configuration where they're randomly attached to each other; to boxes; and to the stone walls.

- The music becomes repetetive on long levels -- I had to mute my speaker during the magnet level, for fear of going batty.

- On the magnet level music (level_2.ogg), the bass line and melody both get cut off on the last note of each measure, (i.e., it sounds like you are using loops for the bass line and melody, and starting the loop again too early each time).

Minor points aside, the game's attractive and fun.

The gamma in the game is so low that i can't hardly see anything. ( i couldn't finish the first level it was too dark )

The menus were fine gamma-wise,

The music quality is hmmm very low and distracting.

pat.

Thanks for all the feedback guys.

The gamma in the game is so low that i can't hardly see anything. ( i couldn't finish the first level it was too dark )

What graphics card are you using?

radeon 9800.

pat.

radeon 9800.

Thanks for the info, thats the second time we've had issues with a Radeon card. The first issue (layering problems) we wrote off as out of date drivers. We'll look into it.

After discussion over lunch we've decided to change the island hop simplex levels to tutorial and give away the rainbow set since they're more interesting.

Originally posted by MiceHead
[B]- The music is nice, but the sound quality is low enough to have detreacted from my experience. It sounds (!) like you lowered the quality in order to save on download size. A good idea, but I think you squeezed too much from the pieces that are played repeatedly.


yeah, you're right - it was to save download size, but I think we could get away with a notch or two higher bit rate and still get away with a sub 10MB game.

Originally posted by MiceHead
- The graphics are nice, and the animation looks good. I did not, however, like the backgrounds -- they appeared grainy, as though they were resized from smaller images. Contrast that with the crispness of the foreground graphics.


right again, they are smaller images, but I'm not sure how we can improve on this and keep the demo as small as possible. Maybe we'd get away with just improving image quality instead of image size.

Originally posted by MiceHead
...when I first played the game, I went in for the Island Hop mode, which gave me a negative impression, since a) it was too tough for me, as a newbie, and b) there was not enough about that playing style that was different from other games to compel me to play further.


The later levels in the Island Hop mode are actually much better than the demo set, which was in effect the tutorial for that mode of play.
We're thinking of including a second set in the demo (Rainbow) which gives a better feel for the way the Island Hop mode plays, and making the current set totally tutorial based ie. easier!

Originally posted by MiceHead
- The magnets confused me; while I understood that they could be attached to (wooden!) boxes, and to each other, it would never have occurred to me to attach one to the stone wall, since it's a magnet. Perhaps you could demonstrate how they work by starting the level off in a configuration where they're randomly attached to each other; to boxes; and to the stone walls.


Yeah, we'll do that. Nothing beats a visual example.

Originally posted by MiceHead
- The music becomes repetetive on long levels -- I had to mute my speaker during the magnet level, for fear of going batty.


Can't think of a way around this short of making the pieces longer, but then the size increases. Maybe change tune instead of looping. That could get annoying too though!

Originally posted by MiceHead
- On the magnet level music (level_2.ogg), the bass line and melody both get cut off on the last note of each measure, (i.e., it sounds like you are using loops for the bass line and melody, and starting the loop again too early each time).


We use Audiere to play the ogg files, and don't deal with low level mixing, so its just told to play a loop and repeat. I'm not sure why there is a skip, because the original WAV file loops perfectly. I'll look into altering the mixing buffer sizes to see if that helps.



Originally posted by SunAndGames
Didn't like having to go back and select an island every time I lost a life though. Gamers are an anxious bunch, and don't like to be kept waiting when they're playing. Couldn't quite figure out what to do with the puzzle games. Tried a few times and then gave up.


Maybe if we asked the player if they wanted to replay the level immediately after dying?

Also, I'm going to add a gamma correct slider to the Visuals menu.

Thanks for the feedback fellas, keep it coming!

Ciaran.

We use Audiere to play the ogg files, and don't deal with low level mixing, so its just told to play a loop and repeat. I'm not sure why there is a skip, because the original WAV file loops perfectly. I'll look into altering the mixing buffer sizes to see if that helps.

I think it's an issue in the original wav, rather than in playback; the piano sequence goes like this:

A C C D C B
G Bb Bb C Bb A
(Repeat)

The final B's and A's get cut off by about 50ms in each measure, so the piano bit sounds like it's starting too soon each time. It may be that I'm only aware of this because I tune loops; and that I'm just nitpicking. :)

...it was to save download size...

One way to increase quality while retaining file size would be to switch to a mono stream and double the bitrate.

Hi,

so we've been looking into making some of the changes mentioned from the feedback from this thread, but a couple of quick questions to you guys that played the demo:

did anyone play the head-to-head game mode? We're thinking that maybe this should be disabled for the demo.

Also, did you think that the puzzle mode had enough (too many?) levels in the demo?

Cheers,
Ciaran.