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Greenlight Production: Hexology's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #1 | 4.250 | 4.250 |
| Interesting Gameplay / Fun | #2 | 4.091 | 4.091 |
| Likely to Release | #3 | 4.636 | 4.636 |
| Bug Free | #5 | 4.364 | 4.364 |
| Aesthetic (Art & Audio) | #6 | 3.909 | 3.909 |
Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
I am absolutely loving how this game is turning out!
I think it was easier with the colored numbers hahaha, but is it so much smoother and nice.
Can't wait to see the final version, congrats!
>What was the most frustrating moment or aspect?
I found the difference between the purple shapes and the sectioned/outlined shapes occasionally difficult to grok at a glance, especially as they seem to be a slightly darker color than the other 2 shape types. A brighter 3rd color for the sectioned shapes would be appreciated.
>What was your favorite moment or aspect?
I like the attempted differentiation between shapes and colors, and the removal of the walls from the prototype version.
>Was there anything you wanted to do, but couldn't?
I wanted to be able to finish a section or full game, but especially with the timer going I simply couldn't plan ahead fast enough to avoid dead-ends. My highscore was 68230.
>If you could change, add, or remove any 1 thing, what would it be?
Assuming the game isn't already broken into sections (I didn't get very far), I'd break the game down into sections to help with a sense of progress and allow for easier difficulty scaling.Thanks for the feedback.
The color palette and line styles are definitely a work in progress. I actualy have 9 shapes and 9 styles. I limited to these set of 3 for this phase, as it made the rudementary grid generation I use fairly simple with a decent challenge.
But one of the interesting phenomena of the mechanic is, IMO and my experience, the player gets 'blind' the more they play. e.g. if you start focusing on the oragne double line shapes, alot of times you can't see the other matches because your brain tunes the rest out, and a form of tunnel vision occurs. Part of the challenge is to keep your mind open and resisting that tunnel vision. I agree the colors and shapes are not ideal at the moment, but I would be curious how much of your experience was due to the failing of the design's chosen shapes/styles/colors, or how much is that psychological effect is responsible. Not sure how to even measure that.
I have thought about different types of progression and possible levels or specific patterns. However, what I am currently going for is something closer to classic Geometry Wars style, specifically Pacifism mode. Where the game session should be short (60-180 seconds) and its more a sandbox that gradually increases in difficulty and the player sees how long they can last; Ideally where they sorta zone out and let their brain unconsiously play. Unknown if I'll be able to achieve it as well as some other games have, specifically Pasifism, but that what I am currently going for.
Currently my main concern for difficulty is avoiding making dead ends during the generation. I only want dead ends to exist due to the player inadvertently creating them themselves and then running into them. Currently dead ends are created during maze generation.
As far as your score; due to how the multipliers keeps stacking, it actually doesn't take long to go from 60k point to 500k to 3000k points. Sometimes its a matter of 10 seconds longer just to get a much higher score. i.e. the score is compounded so the natural tendendcy to compare the scores linearly is deceptive. e.g. You may have gotten 60k points one run, then the next run 500k and the only difference was you went a littel faster and lasted 5 seconds longer. I plan on exposing alot of stats on the game over screen. I am always a fan of stats and letting the player choose what they want to be judging thier progress on.
Thanks again for the feedback. Later this week I have it planned to address some of the things you brought up.
I got better at the noticing the differences between shapes the more I played. I didn't have any trouble grokking the orange vs the purple shapes, it was only the 3rd shape type that faded into the background for me and most especially at the start.
Very cool! I was hesitant at first cause I'm color blind, but you I realized you'd included different outline styles in addition to color which I super appreciate, so thanks for that!
The gameplay at first was pretty overwhelming, but I started getting a hang for the movement itself. Currently my record is 89 moves. Some feedback:
- There is a lot of pressure with the inclusion of a timer (I think? I lost after not making a move for several seconds), I didn't feel like I was ever able to actually plan a strategic path, I was just going for what I could see in the immediate vicinity. I was never super cognizant of whether or not I was heading towards a dead end. I don't know if this is something you get over with practice or not.
- In addition to the above, I felt like the bonus tiles disappeared too quickly. I was barely realizing they were there and starting to make a plan to get to them before they'd disappear. Perhaps a difficulty setting which increases the amount of time they stick around for.
Overall very clean and fun experience. It felt super good to get a bunch of tiles in a row that you could clear through, and the sound and performance were great. I'm secretly hoping you'll add inordinate amounts of juice in the polish version, but I wouldn't blame you if you kept to the super clean presentation.
Thank you very much for the feedback.
The intent of the different styles paired with color was to aid recognition for color blind people. Did it help? Was it adequate? Was there anything specific that was difficult to differientiate?
Great aesthetic, simple, elegant game.
The font is a little small and hard to read, but it's very easy to tell where to go visually either by shape or color. I mostly played quick because of the timer and was seemingly rewarded for going quick instead of planning, though my most successful run was my first one where I was playing very slow, just figuring it out. Love the idea. I think the level generation may need a bit of a tweak because you can get impossible starts, but since it's a quick restart and a score attack game you can just assume they will be back at it immediately.
Cool game! The core gameplay and overall game feel was really good. I got the hang of the game quickly, and found myself mapping out paths in my head. So good job with the gameplay system and communicating the same to the player. Probably 5 seconds was a bit on the lower side. But this also kept the tension in the game. The timer and background music makes you want to keep going. Visual feedback for hovering on cells would be good.
The color-based movement helped a lot. It's easy to quickly spot large snake-like paths of the same color, which I then tried to get into. And after that try and spot the next one, etc. Got a high score of 539k using this technique mainly.
This was one of the starts I got. Not sure if I can proceed beyond the three center tiles. But this could happen due to randomness I guess.
Good job overall!
It's good! I think it'd be good mobile game. Sometimes the sound effect of moving seems to play multiple times, and I agree that the 5 second timer should not be a lose condition. Getting a dead end or having tail catch up to you is good enough of a lose condition. Maybe add a boss that you have to dig out the tiles around to spice things up?
This was really fun to play! I liked moving around the map and quickly selecting a path through the hexagons. I ended up playing this for a while. The sound effects and music were nice too.
Do you die if you take too long? I tried playing to let the tail catch up and snatch up the bonuses. Having the tail completely catch up and having no empty cells didn't immediately end the game sometimes. At other times, I'd get game over when playing like this even though I had a valid move.
For me, the text size was a bit small, but I can see how larger text could also clutter the screen.
Thanks for the reply.
Yeah there is a bit of a clutter of mechanics at the moment, as I was trying out several things.
There are three ways to get a 'gameover.'
Most likely I am going to remove the move timer and just have the tail catch up. How it is set up now, half the time the tail will catch you almost the same time as the timer. So the timer is a bit redundant. I'll probably turn that timer into a multiplier timer. It is probably not obvious atm but the faster you move the more multiplier you gain, and that is based on that same move timer. If you move when the timer bar is green you gain the biggest mutliplier.
I've been trying to promote the style of play where you can sit an wait for a bit and plan a route, and then depending on how fast you execute that route and how long you keep it up, the bigger the reward.
The design goal is to balance the risk/reward of giving big rewards for moving very fast, but that of course limits path planning and increases risk of a dead end. The tail also reinforces that as the faster you move the longer your tail gets and we get the old school snake game mechanics of risk making our own dead ends. The timer was initialy to punish being too slow before I got the tail implemented.
I am a fan of those sorts of mechanics where, to some degree, the player controls the difficulty by trying to get as close to failure as possible without failing. So as they approach that failing line, they find the biggest rewards. And they can also play 'zen' and casual like by just not pushing so hard.
Its a WIP for sure.
I appreciate your feedback.
Well done! It's really interesting to see the progression of this game from the Prototype jam to now. My notes are:
In terms of positives:
Thank you very much for the feedback.
I agree with your critique as well. The confusion from the 'Highscore' and 'Highscore this run,' comes from there is actually an 'endless' mode where there is a total score that is accumulated over many back to back runs, there is no game over, you just sprint out a run and then do another uninterrupted. In that mode it track stats per run, and then also per 'session.' But I felt I didn't have that in a good place so I just pushed this 'one run only' mode.
My biggest disappointment is the lack of UI/UX feedback and 'juice' for the mechanics to the player.
Like you mentioned the multipliers dropping at the end of the tail are time based. Essentially alot is based on how fast you move. Depending on the time between your moves you gain more or less multiplier. There is a 'super move' (less than half second) that provides the maximum multiplier per move. But also increasing the timed multiplier pickup that is dropped when the cell is regenerated. Addtionally when you move into a cell with a super move the cell is upgraded to a higher tier. If you keep going back to the cell and continue to 'super move' into it the tier continues to upgrade and the multiplier can get very large.
Anyway, I have to figure out how to communicate all that over the next week.
Thanks for playing. And I appreciate the feedback.