Hey thanks for playing, and even more for leaving a constructive feedback! Always appreciated.
Scoring is not quite ironed out yet. For now, primary goal is to solve all 20 “puzzles” and win the game.
Scoring is not yet finished because it’s easy to “cheat” endless points by repetitive strategies at the end of each level. The -50 points is a first attempt to counter that. Repeatedly shooting and activating 3 bubbles would give a score of -50 -50 +100 = 0. From this perspective, the -50 points are balanced. It doesn’t solve the problem completely though.
Another way to counter that is to allow scoring only for the bubbles which appear on the board. This would solve the cheating problem.
And yet another thing which is not clear yet is, how to actually make a difference with the score. At the moment, each level gives you around 5000 score. It doesn’t matter too much how you play. I have two different thoughts about that.
First, the game should probably encourage breaking lose a huge chunk of bubbles by scoring falling bubbles much higher than it is now. Normal breaking bubbles make around 30-80 points per bubble at the moment. Falling bubbles make 100 each. So this strategy is already worthwhile. It looks like they should make even more to encourage “good gameplay”. On the other hand, why should the game encourage this strategy over another? What counts is that the players strategy works towards solving the puzzle.
The second thought is to tie score to the amount of shoots you need to solve a level. It would be an accurate measurement of efficiency, and that way the game doesn’t try to encourage one strategy over another. It could be in the form of bonus score at the end of each level. Eg 6000 score with 6 shots results in 6000/6=1000 speed bonus. Should you make it in 3 shots, you’d earn 2000 speed bonus, 10 shots give 600 speed bonus etc.
I think we’d just need to try what works best 🙂
Also, weird stuff happens, and the expected ball color becomes another at random. Seems like a bug.
I heard this before from another player. It might be a bug related to the HTML version, because I never encountered it myself. At some point it is intended to change color in the end of each level when you manage to eliminate colors from the board. But since you are the second person reporting this I think it’s a bug or visual glitch. Going to check this.
About the scoring system, I’d appreciate your thoughts 😉