I have spent months trying to draw the concept of a good puzzle game, and another month turning it from scratch to a finished product. The game is called: "Save the Meeklits!", you can download it from here: http://www.blueteagames.com/Meeklits.exe . Please comment or leave suggestions about this game? Thanks!

Amazing music, a good concept as well....

But there just doesn't seem to be enough registration incentives... :(

I just played your game for about 15 minutes. Here are some quick comments before I head off to bed:

1. I like the overall look and the music. It makes a good first impression. (Reminded me of one of those cute Popcap games. If you haven't seen them, you definitely need to check them out. Go to www.popcap.com)

2. You need more animation and special effects! The most notable deficiency was the lack of a "pop" animation. How could you do a game with bubbles and not include a POP animation??? ;-)

3. I often had to click the mouse more than once to fire the bubbles, or to rotate them into a new position. This is really frustrating and is my single biggest complaint. I have two theories about this:

a) The bubbles can't be fired until the Fade In transition is finished. Unfortunately, this isn't obvious to the player. The bubbles are MOSTLY there so people expect that a button press will cause something to happen. I really like the look of the bubbles fading in, but if there is no way to fix this then I'd definitely take the effect out. If you were using the effect to limit how quickly the player can fire, then you should find another way.

b) You need to treat a "double click" the same as a "single click". (This might be affecting the right click rotation mechanism.)

4. I was playing along and then suddenly the game was over. This really confused me, as most puzzle games keep going until you lose. To make matters worse, I wasn't sure how to get back into the game. If you aren't going to let the player keep going, you definitely need a "Play Again?" prompt.

NOTE: While on this Game Over screen I clicked the Difficulty button and changed to a new Difficulty level; but when I clicked on the Main Menu to start a new game it reset the difficulty to the previous level.

5. The gameplay feels a little "off" to me. (After only a few tries. Perhaps I just need to give it more time.) Because the danger bar was constantly dropping there didn't seem to be much incentive to "think" my way through the game. I just starting clicking my button as fast as I could. This was an effective (but not very fun) strategy for the easier skill levels.

The overall look and music are quite good. But it still needs a bit of work to realize the full potential of your design.

Nice game.
I think it needs more visual effects.

Also think about removing the mp3...
http://www.mp3licensing.com ( it's quite expensive )

Ogg is a good replacement for the mp3.

pat.

Originally posted by patrox
Nice game.
Also think about removing the mp3...
http://www.mp3licensing.com ( it's quite expensive )

Ogg is a good replacement for the mp3.


Sorry to get off topic for a moment, but aren't MP3 distribution-licenses covered by Windows media player?

I was under the impression that as long as te software doesn't included its own encoder/decoder for MP3 files then it was okay to distribute software with them.
Is this correct?

http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/games.html

For games, it is only an issue if more than 5000 copies are distributed. However, if demo downloads count as distribution, that a pretty small number, and most any game would surpass that eventually.

I thought there also used to be a per-song charge for distributing encoded content. That would have applied to games, however, it looks like they dropped that fee in their new licensing scheme.

Pretty darn fun, music is great too. However I found having to only connect 2 bubbles to make them pop was a little easy. 3 would be more challenging ;)

Originally posted by LordKronos
For games, it is only an issue if more than 5000 copies are distributed.


As far as I know, unless your game distributes the CODECs with the game everything should be okay as Microsoft has already paid for the license.