I feel like I'm too much of a brainlet for this game. I managed to beat it, but it was mostly trial and error. The only levels, where I had an idea what I was doing were levels 6 and 7. I went back to level 1 and couldn't beat it again. Complex cascading behavior, like in level 3 seems difficult to predict for me.
I tried the game out, beat all the introduction levels and a couple of the challenge one.
I like the game idea and have been following your posts in the /agdg/ threads, this was one of the first games I wanted to try out!
The game was fairly easy to understand in the introduction levels and I had a sense of what was going on while playing them, but the challenge levels made me feel lost really quickly. Maybe it was just the difficulty spike being brutal, but I had no idea when I was advancing in a puzzle. There is no sense of "this is the correct move" until all moves are spent. Some kind of lead or way to know real progress is being made would be welcome.
On the same note, it is too hard to know how a single move will affect the board. You aren't just telling cats where to move, but what will they do when they arrive and how they will retreat to their old place if they break something. And you are not moving one, but sometimes all of the cats in the entire level with just a single move! This results in a playstyle which is more poke the playfield and see what happens rather than picturing the reaction in your head.
I understand why you need cats to be confused when they have 2 or more possible moves, but at the moment it makes the game feel unresponsive.
I really like puzzle games and this one has a lot of potential, so I hope the advice you get here will be helpful for you and your game. Good luck!
Thank you for your kind words! It was actually your frog touching game that inspired me to try making a puzzle game.
Difficulty spike is really big, especially since I'm pretty much missing "medium" difficulty levels. I'll definitely try to make it clearer what will happen on moves. I've received a lot of great feedback so I have some ideas to try out for addressing those issues.
A cat with nothing to do and a cat with too much to do should look different. Like a confused sprite. Maybe the confused cat will even look back and forth between its options.
Controls are annoying:
When I see a cat moves into an adjacent square, I click somewhere else, but it doesn't do anything. Then I realize I have to wait for the moving cat to slowly go the last few pixels. Then I can make another click. For a puzzle game like this, the time it takes to solve a puzzle should be limited by the player's ability to think and click, not how long animations take. An easy fix: If an animation is running, clicking to place another house will instantly finish all the running animations and then place the house.
Make Z and R do undo/restart
Make undo history carry across restart, so I can undo a restart.
There's animation speed in settings which kinda helps with the speed, but click to skip would make a lot of sense, I'll add that. Thanks for the suggestions
my only thought is that you need to work on visual clarity of movement and how you are introducing gimmicks. there's a lot of new things coming fast to the player that is expected to learn. which either makes you frustrated or go "uh i have no idea why these cats just moved". for instance i still dont understand why the kitties are chain reacting lol. Dont be afraid to let gimmicks breathe for several levels, it wont ruin the flow or make it seem simple.
Sorry, I think im too dumb for this. I did the tutorial and that was all fine but the first real level already outwitted me. I think I understand the mechanics im just having trouble piecing together how to use them to get those cats into those boxes.
It's neat. The tutorial needs some work as the push cats aren't fully explained with how they interact with certain other cats. They vary in difficulty where some are pretty hard and some are extremely easy. It's pretty fun and engaging.
Nice little puzzle game. It's cute and pretty well designed too. I was a big fan of The Witness, which was pretty much a perfect puzzle game imo. In that, there was no "tutorial" levels. The whole game was basically a tutorial. I think that approach is a good idea here, too. There's no reason to have a special tutorial section, that just makes the player feel a bit defeated that all they did was complete the tutorial. If you hadn't labeled them in that way, a player who completed all the "tutorial" levels would be feeling pretty spiffy! And they'd probably keep going with the game.
As for making tutorials, it's too rushed! Every single level is about a minute or two of play with an entirely new concept. That adds up to an extremely high density of concepts. Overload. You can try smoothing things out a little bit. Players learn by experimenting and doing things, not by reading text. Make the puzzles just force the player to interact with the new concept to solve the puzzle. The act of figuring that out and solving the puzzle is really satisfying! Being told the rule, then just executing it, is much less fun.
I think a good goal, is to avoid text explanations entirely. The genius of the witness was that every puzzle you solved just advanced your understanding of the rules a little bit. Just an inch. But every subsequent puzzle relied on that knowledge, so before you knew it you were doing really complicated puzzles. And I think your ruleset has enough nuance to accomplish that same thing. Good job!
Thank you so much for the thorough comment! Those are very good points that hadn't occurred to me. I'll try to see if I can move away from the "formal" tutorial style to a more natural one.
I completed the introductory level and i still don't fully understand the mechanics. I think the cats go back in the direction they came from but will move into a house if they end up next to it.
I guess i have some confusion i'll explain with the challenge level 1. (Letters are Horizontal, Numbers Vertical)
Warrior cats can't seem to push the diagonal cat twice. Placing the fish underneath that cat twice only seems to cause 1 push if done by the same warrior cat. Moves where Fish C4 and Fish C3 afterwards. Fish C4 and Fish B2 also causes no second push while Fish C3 and Fish D4 causes a push. I don't understand why it works sometimes and doesn't work in other times.
I also don't get why Fish C2 doesn't get the diagonal cat into the box but placing a Fish B2 causes the interaction to happen.
Thank you for trying it! Those moves don't work because warrior cats have two choices: pushing and going to the house. I'll try to improve the tutorials and visualizing why things are(n't) happening.
Thank you so much for taking time to record this! It was very enlightening to see how unclear a lot of things were and what your thought process was while playing. You were also absolutely on point about cat stacking coming as result of game breaking problems. I'll be sure to try to implement your suggestions. Thank you!
Comments
i got filtered by challenge 2..........
good shit, very solid mechanics
I feel like I'm too much of a brainlet for this game. I managed to beat it, but it was mostly trial and error. The only levels, where I had an idea what I was doing were levels 6 and 7. I went back to level 1 and couldn't beat it again. Complex cascading behavior, like in level 3 seems difficult to predict for me.
I had far more fun with this than I should have. Somehow the music manages to not get on your nerves and be endearing.
I tried the game out, beat all the introduction levels and a couple of the challenge one.
I like the game idea and have been following your posts in the /agdg/ threads, this was one of the first games I wanted to try out!
The game was fairly easy to understand in the introduction levels and I had a sense of what was going on while playing them, but the challenge levels made me feel lost really quickly. Maybe it was just the difficulty spike being brutal, but I had no idea when I was advancing in a puzzle. There is no sense of "this is the correct move" until all moves are spent. Some kind of lead or way to know real progress is being made would be welcome.
On the same note, it is too hard to know how a single move will affect the board. You aren't just telling cats where to move, but what will they do when they arrive and how they will retreat to their old place if they break something. And you are not moving one, but sometimes all of the cats in the entire level with just a single move! This results in a playstyle which is more poke the playfield and see what happens rather than picturing the reaction in your head.
I understand why you need cats to be confused when they have 2 or more possible moves, but at the moment it makes the game feel unresponsive.
I really like puzzle games and this one has a lot of potential, so I hope the advice you get here will be helpful for you and your game. Good luck!
Thank you for your kind words! It was actually your frog touching game that inspired me to try making a puzzle game.
Difficulty spike is really big, especially since I'm pretty much missing "medium" difficulty levels. I'll definitely try to make it clearer what will happen on moves. I've received a lot of great feedback so I have some ideas to try out for addressing those issues.
A cat with nothing to do and a cat with too much to do should look different. Like a confused sprite. Maybe the confused cat will even look back and forth between its options.
Controls are annoying:
When I see a cat moves into an adjacent square, I click somewhere else, but it doesn't do anything. Then I realize I have to wait for the moving cat to slowly go the last few pixels. Then I can make another click.
For a puzzle game like this, the time it takes to solve a puzzle should be limited by the player's ability to think and click, not how long animations take.
An easy fix: If an animation is running, clicking to place another house will instantly finish all the running animations and then place the house.
Make Z and R do undo/restart
Make undo history carry across restart, so I can undo a restart.
Thank you for playing!
There's animation speed in settings which kinda helps with the speed, but click to skip would make a lot of sense, I'll add that. Thanks for the suggestions
love the idea, was really fun.
my only thought is that you need to work on visual clarity of movement and how you are introducing gimmicks. there's a lot of new things coming fast to the player that is expected to learn. which either makes you frustrated or go "uh i have no idea why these cats just moved". for instance i still dont understand why the kitties are chain reacting lol. Dont be afraid to let gimmicks breathe for several levels, it wont ruin the flow or make it seem simple.
Thanks for trying it!
Yeah, tutorial really ended up being way too rushed. I'll work spacing out new mechanics and making it more clear what's happening.
Sorry, I think im too dumb for this. I did the tutorial and that was all fine but the first real level already outwitted me. I think I understand the mechanics im just having trouble piecing together how to use them to get those cats into those boxes.
Good luck with the game though!
Thank you for trying! The difficulty jump is pretty big and the current tutorial doesn't do good enough job to prepare player for it.
It's neat. The tutorial needs some work as the push cats aren't fully explained with how they interact with certain other cats. They vary in difficulty where some are pretty hard and some are extremely easy. It's pretty fun and engaging.
Thank you for playing and commenting! I'll work on the tutorials and keeping the difficulty more consistent.
Nice little puzzle game. It's cute and pretty well designed too. I was a big fan of The Witness, which was pretty much a perfect puzzle game imo. In that, there was no "tutorial" levels. The whole game was basically a tutorial. I think that approach is a good idea here, too. There's no reason to have a special tutorial section, that just makes the player feel a bit defeated that all they did was complete the tutorial. If you hadn't labeled them in that way, a player who completed all the "tutorial" levels would be feeling pretty spiffy! And they'd probably keep going with the game.
As for making tutorials, it's too rushed! Every single level is about a minute or two of play with an entirely new concept. That adds up to an extremely high density of concepts. Overload. You can try smoothing things out a little bit. Players learn by experimenting and doing things, not by reading text. Make the puzzles just force the player to interact with the new concept to solve the puzzle. The act of figuring that out and solving the puzzle is really satisfying! Being told the rule, then just executing it, is much less fun.
I think a good goal, is to avoid text explanations entirely. The genius of the witness was that every puzzle you solved just advanced your understanding of the rules a little bit. Just an inch. But every subsequent puzzle relied on that knowledge, so before you knew it you were doing really complicated puzzles. And I think your ruleset has enough nuance to accomplish that same thing. Good job!
Thank you so much for the thorough comment! Those are very good points that hadn't occurred to me. I'll try to see if I can move away from the "formal" tutorial style to a more natural one.
I completed the introductory level and i still don't fully understand the mechanics.
I think the cats go back in the direction they came from but will move into a house if they end up next to it.
I guess i have some confusion i'll explain with the challenge level 1. (Letters are Horizontal, Numbers Vertical)
Warrior cats can't seem to push the diagonal cat twice. Placing the fish underneath that cat twice only seems to cause 1 push if done by the same warrior cat. Moves where Fish C4 and Fish C3 afterwards. Fish C4 and Fish B2 also causes no second push while Fish C3 and Fish D4 causes a push. I don't understand why it works sometimes and doesn't work in other times.
I also don't get why Fish C2 doesn't get the diagonal cat into the box but placing a Fish B2 causes the interaction to happen.
Thank you for trying it! Those moves don't work because warrior cats have two choices: pushing and going to the house. I'll try to improve the tutorials and visualizing why things are(n't) happening.
Thank you so much for taking time to record this! It was very enlightening to see how unclear a lot of things were and what your thought process was while playing. You were also absolutely on point about cat stacking coming as result of game breaking problems. I'll be sure to try to implement your suggestions. Thank you!