Being able to draw in perspective is a huge improvement. Thanks to that option I spent much less time trying to connect lines from different cube sides, than in previous version of the game. I just kept toggling it on, and I wish there was an option to keep it on by default, because every stage I started with enabling it.
There was one time when I kinda finished the stage, but the ball did not go to the exit, and after replaying, the cube had no collision on that side (I was not able to draw on it, and the ball was going through it). Not the worst thing that could happen. I just needed to exit to the main menu, and re-enter the stage. That's when I realized you don't actually show stage names when you go from stage to stage, which made is hard to find which stage I was on.
The mechanic with rotating the whole cube felt much better, than just rotating single wall. Still kinda hard to wrap your head around, but I enjoy the challenge. What makes it unnecessary difficult is on some axis the cube doesn't rotate (as in the camera doesn't move) the way you would expect. I think one way you could improve it is if you had some ui buttons in corner for navigation.
Another playthrough of Cubenomics, this time doing the desert levels. The feel of the game has most certainly improved since last DD. All the negatives from last time have disappeared and I think we're left with a really nice entry! Your doing great work with the new levels and I look forward to the next zones you add in. What themes are coming next?
Got very close to beating the puzzles, but the final puzzle, sector 5 mechanic test 3 finally beat me, I kneel, gravity-change-button.
But wow, what an engaging puzzle game, great design! The freeform line drawing also leads to a great feeling of freedom when solving puzzles. That feeling that you're kinda finding a solution that might not have been 100% intended is always wonderful. Probably not really that common with traditional puzzle games, I think that is a great strength of your game.
Only two bugs I encountered was one: the menu sometimes seems to keep returning to the first sector (even though at that time I had already beat it), and two: the music playing twice (not sure how I managed that, I think it was frantic clicking while having the first bug).
Music was very nice. I found it calming and relaxing while solving the puzzles. All in all a very good game you have going here.
Thanks for the feedback I'm glad you enjoyed it! I'll be sure to add in a quit button, I'm so used to playing it using the Unity editor that I completely forgot about it haha. Physics was a problem last DD too so I'll keep working on it. What specifically was weird about the physics? At some point some of these things become hard to spot since you just get used to it so I would really appreciate it if you could point out what was wrong.
Whoops, seems I accidently deleted the qualifying part of that statement, to clarify:
When making angled lines to turn a vertically shot ball 90 *, and adding a line to keep it from gliding further up than wanted, sometimes it would get stuck in that corner, and others it would work as intended, if nothing was changed(like, for two individual levels this happened, while in other levels is always worked). Though to be fair, it probably can't be fixed since lines are not straight + slight variance in physics simulation is to be expected. To illustrate:
Also, there was a time where the ball reached the exit, but flew off the cube instead of entering the hole. Though to be fair, it counted it as a win and moved me to the next one. Besides that, there's mostly cosmetic oddities which didn't affect the puzzling,
I'm happy to see you took my suggestion to make it easier to draw a line from off of a cube. However, the lack of a line tool makes it difficult to draw straight lines. Add to the fact that it's clearly frame dependent, meaning if the mouse is moving too quick, drawing from off of the cube will start it further in than desired, it can be difficult to create the lines you want as opposed to merely solving the puzzle.
I'll definitely spend most of my time on continuing to make drawing solutions easier for now. I like the idea of a line editing tool so I'll be working on that for sure. I'm currently thinking of a line move tool (Move the whole line around) and a point edit tool (A mode that will let you move around and delete individual points that make up the line). Not sure what to do about the frame dependency issue but I'll try to hack a workaround together to make sure that the line starts on the edge of the cube if you start off of it. Thanks so much for playing my game again your feedback really helps me out!
For the line starting off the cube issue, you could easily start watching the input when the player presses the mouse button, and then watch the distance between the coordinates one frame to the next, using that. Also, I dunno if I missed keyboard controls, but lacking a button to swap between draw and erase on the fly was annoying. I didn't like having to click the button at the top left of the screen.
There was its 'X'. But it's only mentioned on the itch page and never in the game, nor is there anyway to change the controls in game. Its something I need to add into the tutorial or somehow let the player know, but all the buttons on the top left have a key assigned to them. For the line I don't want a line appearing off the cube so I'm thinking of adding a point before the first one gets added where the edge of the cube and the path you took from off the cube to the first detected point on the cube intersect. The only issue is I haven't figured out how to determine the position of the edge of the cube especially since you can now draw while the cube is rotated but nothing a few google searches and banging your head against a keyboard can't solve
Thanks for the feedback. I'll add your eraser suggestion to the list of things to develop before the next DD, although I doubt it will come out as nice as you hope since the line you draw is made using points so I imagine it will just be deleting a point and splitting the line into two. I might just incorporate this into a line edit tool instead. Currently I'm thinking of just adding more levels and mechanics, I think a challenge mode might be interesting to do in the future but I think I'll just focus on the core gameplay for now.
I've only played for a little bit of the first and second sector, like the other guy said it's a good concept with a nice execution. I might play more of it in the future. It does suffer from the physics puzzle curse of having the right solution but needing to get the lines just right which can be infuriating.
A few points that I found:
The lock/unlock face icon seems to be inverted. Maybe it's just me but having the icon for locked be free rotation seems weird
The lock/unlock face keeps getting reset in between levels which is annoying
Escape isn't working from the starting screen but is when playing a level
When changing audio/video settings there is a [esc] close button, the hitbox isn't working properly. You need to be in a very specific location for it to work. Also the functionality of pressing the button and pressing esc is different.
Thanks for the feedback. I didn't know about the [esc] button in the audio settings so I'll check that out and I'll definitely change it so that the lock/unlock doesn't get reset every time it was just something I didn't have the time to get to yet. The escape button doesn't work in the start screen because its assigned to the back button I was on the fence about that one so I'll probably change it to be the settings button there as well. A Lot of the feedback seems to still be around the difficulty or how annoying it is to actually draw out the solution so I'll be spending most of my time on creating more tools to hopefully make it easier.
Might want to make the eraser more obvious or its own button, made it pretty far thinking the undo button was the only way to delete single lines. City backgrounds can be a bit hard on the eyes. Otherwise good concept, good execution. Once there's more music, levels, etc you should have a winner.
Comments
Being able to draw in perspective is a huge improvement. Thanks to that option I spent much less time trying to connect lines from different cube sides, than in previous version of the game. I just kept toggling it on, and I wish there was an option to keep it on by default, because every stage I started with enabling it.
There was one time when I kinda finished the stage, but the ball did not go to the exit, and after replaying, the cube had no collision on that side (I was not able to draw on it, and the ball was going through it). Not the worst thing that could happen. I just needed to exit to the main menu, and re-enter the stage. That's when I realized you don't actually show stage names when you go from stage to stage, which made is hard to find which stage I was on.
The mechanic with rotating the whole cube felt much better, than just rotating single wall. Still kinda hard to wrap your head around, but I enjoy the challenge. What makes it unnecessary difficult is on some axis the cube doesn't rotate (as in the camera doesn't move) the way you would expect. I think one way you could improve it is if you had some ui buttons in corner for navigation.
Another playthrough of Cubenomics, this time doing the desert levels. The feel of the game has most certainly improved since last DD. All the negatives from last time have disappeared and I think we're left with a really nice entry! Your doing great work with the new levels and I look forward to the next zones you add in. What themes are coming next?
Got very close to beating the puzzles, but the final puzzle, sector 5 mechanic test 3 finally beat me, I kneel, gravity-change-button.
But wow, what an engaging puzzle game, great design! The freeform line drawing also leads to a great feeling of freedom when solving puzzles. That feeling that you're kinda finding a solution that might not have been 100% intended is always wonderful. Probably not really that common with traditional puzzle games, I think that is a great strength of your game.
Only two bugs I encountered was one: the menu sometimes seems to keep returning to the first sector (even though at that time I had already beat it), and two: the music playing twice (not sure how I managed that, I think it was frantic clicking while having the first bug).
Music was very nice. I found it calming and relaxing while solving the puzzles. All in all a very good game you have going here.
Great visuals and presentation, good UI as well.
Finished the first world then a few levels from the others, I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Only issue is either not finding, or not having a way to quit besides alt+F4. Well, besides the usual occasional physics weirdness.
Overall, great game! Possibly my favorite puzzler this DD.
Thanks for the feedback I'm glad you enjoyed it! I'll be sure to add in a quit button, I'm so used to playing it using the Unity editor that I completely forgot about it haha. Physics was a problem last DD too so I'll keep working on it. What specifically was weird about the physics? At some point some of these things become hard to spot since you just get used to it so I would really appreciate it if you could point out what was wrong.
Whoops, seems I accidently deleted the qualifying part of that statement, to clarify:
When making angled lines to turn a vertically shot ball 90 *, and adding a line to keep it from gliding further up than wanted, sometimes it would get stuck in that corner, and others it would work as intended, if nothing was changed(like, for two individual levels this happened, while in other levels is always worked). Though to be fair, it probably can't be fixed since lines are not straight + slight variance in physics simulation is to be expected. To illustrate:
Also, there was a time where the ball reached the exit, but flew off the cube instead of entering the hole. Though to be fair, it counted it as a win and moved me to the next one. Besides that, there's mostly cosmetic oddities which didn't affect the puzzling,
I'm happy to see you took my suggestion to make it easier to draw a line from off of a cube. However, the lack of a line tool makes it difficult to draw straight lines. Add to the fact that it's clearly frame dependent, meaning if the mouse is moving too quick, drawing from off of the cube will start it further in than desired, it can be difficult to create the lines you want as opposed to merely solving the puzzle.
I'll definitely spend most of my time on continuing to make drawing solutions easier for now. I like the idea of a line editing tool so I'll be working on that for sure. I'm currently thinking of a line move tool (Move the whole line around) and a point edit tool (A mode that will let you move around and delete individual points that make up the line). Not sure what to do about the frame dependency issue but I'll try to hack a workaround together to make sure that the line starts on the edge of the cube if you start off of it. Thanks so much for playing my game again your feedback really helps me out!
For the line starting off the cube issue, you could easily start watching the input when the player presses the mouse button, and then watch the distance between the coordinates one frame to the next, using that. Also, I dunno if I missed keyboard controls, but lacking a button to swap between draw and erase on the fly was annoying. I didn't like having to click the button at the top left of the screen.
There was its 'X'. But it's only mentioned on the itch page and never in the game, nor is there anyway to change the controls in game. Its something I need to add into the tutorial or somehow let the player know, but all the buttons on the top left have a key assigned to them. For the line I don't want a line appearing off the cube so I'm thinking of adding a point before the first one gets added where the edge of the cube and the path you took from off the cube to the first detected point on the cube intersect. The only issue is I haven't figured out how to determine the position of the edge of the cube especially since you can now draw while the cube is rotated but nothing a few google searches and banging your head against a keyboard can't solve
Really liked the game. UI, music and everything presentational about it was solid.
I kinda wish the eraser could just erase what it touches instead of the whole line to make small adjustments easier.
Besides more levels/mechanics, not sure what else could be added to the game. Maybe a challenge mode with limited ink?
Thanks for the feedback. I'll add your eraser suggestion to the list of things to develop before the next DD, although I doubt it will come out as nice as you hope since the line you draw is made using points so I imagine it will just be deleting a point and splitting the line into two. I might just incorporate this into a line edit tool instead. Currently I'm thinking of just adding more levels and mechanics, I think a challenge mode might be interesting to do in the future but I think I'll just focus on the core gameplay for now.
I've only played for a little bit of the first and second sector, like the other guy said it's a good concept with a nice execution. I might play more of it in the future. It does suffer from the physics puzzle curse of having the right solution but needing to get the lines just right which can be infuriating.
A few points that I found:
Thanks for the feedback. I didn't know about the [esc] button in the audio settings so I'll check that out and I'll definitely change it so that the lock/unlock doesn't get reset every time it was just something I didn't have the time to get to yet. The escape button doesn't work in the start screen because its assigned to the back button I was on the fence about that one so I'll probably change it to be the settings button there as well. A Lot of the feedback seems to still be around the difficulty or how annoying it is to actually draw out the solution so I'll be spending most of my time on creating more tools to hopefully make it easier.
Might want to make the eraser more obvious or its own button, made it pretty far thinking the undo button was the only way to delete single lines. City backgrounds can be a bit hard on the eyes. Otherwise good concept, good execution. Once there's more music, levels, etc you should have a winner.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely change those around.