excellent game! only thing this needs is a proper tutorial, as it was confusing at first. but once i got the hang of it, the puzzles were extremely enjoyable. great work!
4 years ago (+1)
Thank you so much! :)
I usually try to omit an explicit tutorial, but try to "teach" the concepts through basic levels first. Did you notice the "How To" Button on the bottom right, and if so, did it help at all? I'm experimenting a bit with the way i can give more explicit help ingame, without frontloading it.
Was the tile flipping the confusing part, or anything else? Can you tell what made it confusing? Sorry for the many questions, but it would help me out a ton :)
4 years ago(+1)
i didnt see the how-to button, but ill check it out after posting this to see if it would have helped. what was mainly confusing for me at the beginning was understanding the objective of getting the microphage to the bacteria. because the microphage and bacteria (at least on the first level) were colored similarly, i thought they were two different types of bacteria and i was trying to prevent them from getting to the agar (which i thought was the microphage, i guess?) in retrospect, it's obvious how the game works, but in the moment i had no clue what i was supposed to do. after reading the game page and some experimentation i was able to figure it out, though.
4 years ago(+1)
Thank you very much for the detailled explanation! This is perfectly valid and makes sense. I should have made at least a minimal intro screen, maybe in-level, to show the goal of the game and explain the elements you can see, at least a little. I'll keep that in mind, thank you :)
I was also not sure on how to handle the How To. Having it open in each level might be annoying, but on the other hand, players might miss it - and its content changes from level to level, depending on what i thought was relevant. I have to think about that :D
4 years ago (+1)
update: tried the how-to button and yep, would've set me up well to understand the base mechanic of the game. my recommendation would be to have that screen that pops up be an overlay the player sees the first time they attempt the first level (and still have it accessible from that button), OR make the button a lot more obvious (you could even have it flash if the player fails the first level many times in a row). because if i had known it was there i would have absolutely used it. from my perspective, i think based on the size of the agar grids for most of the levels you definitely have room to at the least make the UI buttons larger.
ive included this screenshot to show how your game looks when it first launches. i didn't think to maximize the window all the way, and as you can see the bottom buttons are getting cut off by my task bar, making it hard to see them. thought this might be valuable to know as well. when i maximized the window i could see them, but in my first playthrough i didn't maximize the window because i didn't think i had to.
edit: didn't see your newest comment so some of this info may be repetitive, feel free to ignore anything that's been repeated here
4 years ago(+1)
Oh i just saw the comment now, thank you again! That was really helpful, i didn't know this was the case, so i should lower the resolution or start on full screen :)
And i'm very glad to hear the how to probably would've helped!