itch.io

29th of March 2024

Good evening!

Today I didn't get much progress on the game. I did manage to do some minor changes, and I did spend _massive_ amount of time to fix some longstanding bugs, but as something to show, it's not that much. 

What I did tho is decide that yes, the new version numbering is even numbers "stable", and updates are bugfixes and minor improvements, and even versions are feature implementation versions, where they start probably janky, and get updated until the next "stable" one. As such, the version has been bumped to v0.4

I managed to fix the flipping gems problem, and the way I'm doing the check now actually will help me in the future implementing puzzle mode and edge rotations. These won't happen until v0.7/v0.8 tho. I also fixed the floating gem problem, as well as added a mute button to both main menu and in-game. This has the added bonus that a player might realize that "hey, this game has sound!", as I think many mobile players play without sound. I've also tried to mix the volume of the sounds better so that they aren't too jarring.

For v0.5/v0.6 I'll start implementing the needed account handling system, which means a settings menu and ways to delete account data and disable online features. I'll also add sound configuration and linking to android device id as well as google account. 

In the meantime I've been fixing the "accidentally to production" fudge-up I made, and soon I can start using closed testing again, or the alpha track. At that point I can ask people to join the testing on Android phones.

I've also been thinking of changing the way the current RUSH game mode plays. I like that it gets progressively harder, and I like that if you spend too much time on a level, you are kind of "forced" to either game over or the next level, but I do also want the possibility for a good player to just continue leveling up "indefinitely". So, I'll be implementing a "difficulty level cap" to around level 8. You can still go to the next level, and your level multiplier will increase, but that's the cap for increased difficulty. I'll be testing and fudging around with it to have a good cutoff point tho. Also some values might need balancing as well. ALSO also, maybe I'll change the constant multiplier from x10 to x25?

28th of March 2024

Good evening!

Yesterday I wanted to fix the outstanding, since day 1, bug where sometimes the gems that you rotate flip around to wrong positions on release. I have an inkling that I know what causes it, but all my previous fixes have not been successful. The current version checks the closest hexagon empty hexagon cell to attach the held gem to, and then in a round robin fashion does the same for all the others. If the gems happen to be on the edge of the cells, some of the intended cells get to be filled before the correct has it's chance to get attached to it, and the gems "flip".

It's very difficult to reproduce, so I opted to figure out some debug visuals to help me understand the problem. I figured out a way to go thru the gems so that everytime the gems cross the cell threshold, the assigned cells just rotate around. This works well, in theory, and actually, when testing practice, it seemed to do the trick too! 

...however. If the change isn't from one cell to the next, but for instance, from top to bottom (which you can do if you go through the center gem fast enough), it goes haywire. 

So yeah, that's a problem. I think I could fix this method of handling the gems too, but I feel like this one is a lost cause. So, the next idea: First, when starting rotation, get the vector from the anchor gems cell to the next cell. Then, when I am calculating the correctly assigned cells, rotate that vector with the same rotation that has been done to the rotating gems. Now, get the anchorgems cell normally, by just translating world position to cell position. This is gem 1, or the anchor gem, or the one gem you are "holding". Now, get the world position of this cell position, to get the cell center position. Now, add the vector to this center world position, and get the cell position for this position now. This is gem 2. Then rotate the vector by 60 degrees (360/60). Rinse and repeat.

I feel like this is a lot easier to implement and also would result in a definitively zero amount of position-flipping gems. I'll be trying to implement this today, and maybe fix some other bugs too.

Oh yeah, I'm going to be making a change to my versioning. Currently I have X.Y.Z where X is either 0 or 1, 1 meaning release, Y is the current development milestone, and Z is the build/commits since version number. Well, I'm not actually going to change that, but how Y behaves: currently I've been adding new features to the same Y version, and then when I feel like it's "done enough", I'll increase Y to the next level. However, that feels a bit like I can't "trust" the Y version number to really mean anything. For instance, a 0.2.1 is a LOT different from 0.2.90. So, going forwards, I'm trying to have an odd Y to mean "we are implementing new and possible experimental features", so basically what is happening now with all Y version, but even would then mean "the features we introduced in Y-1 are now 'good enough' and this is the 'official' release". 

What this means is that I'll be promoting the current version to 0.4, and once I start working on something like improved account handling and some menu stuff, or Android ads, or puzzle mode, I'll increase the version number to 0.5, implement them within that version number and once I feel they are good enough, I'll promote that to 0.6, which denotes that "it's preliminarily done" but I'll keep fixing bugs on it.

To put it short: Odd ones (like 0.5) are unstable, and even ones (like 0.6) are stable - not that stability has anything to do with (or well, maybe a little).

27th of March 2024

Good afternoon!

I fiddled around with the time progress bar functionality and graphics yesterday a bit, and opted to implement the feedback that player control is disabled and time is frozen with, well, frozen graphics. I also added a minor "burn" visual to the active time bar. 

At least for now it seems to work quite well, there's a lot less confusion on when you can manipulate the gems yourself. The update is currently live with v0.3.19 and up for testing! There's a weird discrepancy tho, between built versions and in-editor, as in the timing is mildly wrong on the builds. I will have to figure out why that's happening and fix that.

I've been pondering my next steps, and I think the biggest step is to implement and improve account management. The game automatically creates a PlayFab account with a custom UUID that's created at first play. For Android, this means that if you uninstall the game, you will lose access to your account. So I'll probably start there, add linking to this customID with AndroidDeviceID so that the account won't be lost on phones on uninstall. For Google Play and GDPR compliance, I also need to have a method of deleting all player data and account, so that's going to be implemented after that. This account deletion will be in the WebGL version too. I am also thinking about adding a Link To Google Account, for the ability to get back to your account from another device, tho it would require some specific pondering and planning to get it properly working and have the correct workflow.

In the meantime, I'll keep trying to fix outstanding (and newly introduced bugs), and fiddling around with the leaderboard implementation. After the account management has been handled, I'll be going for ads for Android (WebGL version won't have ads, but also won't have all the features either - for example, push notifications on stuff like winning a daily, or being a top 3 on a monthly or so on leaderboards probably won't be there). I'll have decide in the future how and what I'll separate between the versions, but I will be keeping at least some version on itch.io with WebGL version. 

26th of March 2024

Good morning!

I was thinking about how to give the player some feedback on when the controls are blocked, so that one wouldn't keep trying to move the gems around even tho there is stuff happening around. My first idea was to modify the whole board in some way:

The effect is subtle, yet still somehow distracting. If you make it more evident, it's definitely distracting, and if you make it more subtle, it doesn't really work. So hmm. Other ideas? Maybe just change the color of the time progress bar when it's inactive:

I mean hmm sure I guess? Just make the color transition a bit smoother, I guess it could work... it feels a bit boring tho.

How about just an icon?

Hm. Not sure I like that. The icon would need to change at at least. And feels a bit lazy. But in the end better than nothing I guess?

How about instead of just color, make an image/effect to overlay it? Like, you know, it's frozen?

Hm. Maaaaybee? I'll try out some or all of these 3 ideas after the work day. Currently I'm leaning towards the "frozen" time, either with color, image, or maybe eventually some juicy effects. The icon and board darkening feel both distracting and/or lazy, tho at least both of them would be better than nothing. But I can get the time progress bar color change implemented just as quickly as the board color change, so I'll probably start there.

A match-4 puzzle by spinning in a hexagonal grid!

HEXvolver is a Match-4 hexagon based puzzle game. By grabbing a gem and moving to neighbour gem, you can orbit the other gems around to line up groups of matching gems. Match 4 or more to gain points and more time to play. With 5 matches, you get a fire gem that explodes on match, and with 6+ you get a lightning gem that destroys rows of gems in all 6 directions. Get a good high score and win the leaderboards!

HEXvolver | A Match-4 Spinning Hex Puzzle

A bit of history and some ramblings

Originally started as a solo gamejam with the intention of getting a game out quickly on Google Play - just to get more familiar with the whole process. The very first version was uploaded in September 2022, with ~24 hours on the work hours clock. It was a very barebones prototype of my idea, and I was confident I could use the remaining 24 hours to fix any bugs remaining, slap ads on it, and push it to Google Play store. 

Oooh boy.

Every now and then I have put some hours in the game, and it's finally starting to look and feel like, well, an actual game. The current work hours tally? ...110. A smidge over 48, heh. And there's still a lot of stuff to be done. Especially as I'm also trying to get the game to Google Play...

As a mini-postmortem (even tho we aren't even there yet), the biggest timesinks thus far have been CI/CD related, or other metawork like setting up and managing PlayFab and Google Play. If people are interested to hear more how I've managed to waste hours upon hours with these, I'm up for explaining more (it's mostly my own incompetence paired with stiff policies and systems), but for now, let's just leave it at that.

Biggest gamedesign issues thus far has been how to make the game interesting. Early on I noticed, both by playing myself and seeing others play, that yes, the basic premise itself is interesting, but after a few minutes the gameplay... is just dull. Originally the game had a bigger board (btw. which I will be bringing back, or, well, at least the second iteration of the big board, so, yeah, medium board), and a timed 60 seconds to make matches, and getting some more time on each match, with the global score multiplier increasing every 10 seconds.

This tho might result in an "endless" gameplay, and with no other pacing, yeah, it could get a bit hairy.

For 0.3 (the currently just released version), I made the board one-layer smaller - this makes the game both easier and more difficult: it's easier to keep track of the gems as there are less of them on screen at once and they are bigger, but it's also harder to just willynilly maneuver the gems whichever way you want in multiple steps - and added "levels" or "rounds": once you get to full time, the board shuffles, and your global multiplier increases only at this point. This imo makes the game more interesting and the pacing feels a lot better.

To make it more interesting, the re-up of time per match/gem decreases slightly per level, and to prevent from getting to a difficulty level that forces you into an endless loop once again where you just hover around the midpoint mark in time, every first match of a combo the player makes increases the "time scale" - both time left and time gained are increased slightly. This increases the "risks" but also the "rewards", forcing you to either game over or go to the next level. 

This tho, might have the unfortunate side effect of making the game impossible to go forward to the next level after a certain point. I have yet to figure out how to make sure this doesn't happen - I kinda want it to be possible (but difficult) to basically go indefinitely if you are so inclined, but needing something like laser focus at the most difficult levels. Maybe just limit the maximum difficulty increase (you'd still progress to next round and get the next multiplier, but the game wouldn't get any more difficult?)

One of my personal pet peeves is the fact that when you have a match, you start to immediately try to set up the next match BUT there is actually a combo coming, and you don't realize it's still going, and then you don't also realize when you have control back again. The only thing I can think of fixing this some kind of visual and audial feedback/indicator that you have/don't have control, but I don't really have any good ideas what that could be. Maybe just darken the whole gemboard a bit?

Design issues aside, for completely transparency part of the reason I'm writing here is to get more traffic and eyes on my game. It's not _necessarily_ just because of that, but part of that want/need is that I really could use some feedback, bug hunting and testers in general, and all ideas are welcome - like mentioned before, I have some design issues still to figure out, and I'd appreciate it a bunch for any help people can give. 

As you might have guessed from the timeline presented, I might forget to develop the game for a day or a few months, but I'm currently very close (even if I'm only at 50%) to my first real Android release (currently in internal testing) for Google Play, which I kinda denote as 1.0, so I'll try to be at least somewhat active here as well.

Thanks for reading my long wall of text, and in advance for any eyes you can give my project, every little bit helps! 

Oh and btw, not that it matters anymore, but I forgot to put in the description that there's a "respawn at last checkpoint" -button, F9. I've updated the description now tho...

Alright thanks, I know exactly what's going on. There's another place on the horizontal opposite of that where you can do that too, I'll get them both fixed for the post-jam update!

Can you elaborate what happened? I'm making a 1.1 after-jam version to fix some rough edges, I might be able to fix that bug too.

Maybe I should've not used the word optimization. The point was that a related search, very much so, wasn't showing up my game. After the changes it now shows up tho, so all's good.

Well, maybe I worded myself wrong. The point is, that I wanted my game to show up on the list when someone searches for "hex puzzle", and it didn't show up on the list. Now that I changed the title to what I mentioned earlier, it does show up. So there in fact was something I could do - call it optimization or not.

Thanks for trying it out and reporting the broken link. Fixed now. 

The controls were a doozy to figure out, I tried out a few things in a preliminary testing period before even the proof-of-concept version, and this method came out as the "easiest". There's been a lot of feedback on maybe making some tutorial or in-game help for the controls, so that's something I'll try to do in the future updates - actually QoL stuff like that is roadmapped for 0.3.

Your suggestion about better soundfx, more animations and background music I'll take to heart. If I may ask, about the current sfx, were they too loud (ie. requires better mastering and normalizing), or doesn't fit the action? Or possibly both?

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for all the tips about the tags (and how to see them in other games) and screenshots and devlogs! I went thru the tags again, and now have the full allowed 10 tags, and I also added screenshots and even video and I'll keep on making devlogs when I update the game. 

I also tested and changed the Title to "HEXvolver | A Match-4 Spinning Hex Puzzle" and it immediately showed up on the search when I search for "hex puzzle". I'm pretty sure someone who comes to itch.io and uses the search "wrong", not knowing any better on how it works (just like me), might search for something like that. And I mean, on the off chance, 1 event in 10 years, I'd hate that someone would search for that and didn't see my game (which they _might_ enjoy) on the list even as the last one. Oh and just to clarify, it was never about getting my game higher up on the search for "hex puzzle", it was about _showing up_ at all.

Now the last question remains, is this kosher for itch.io? I've seen other games use descriptive words in their titles too, so if it's not, it's not at least enforced? I'll leave it like that for now as I _think_ it's okay (tried to read the docs and guidelines and quality stuff, and didn't see anything about it), and no-one here objected to it _specifically_...

Anyhoo, thanks again for the help!

Ahhh there the tags are! The "More Information" box! How did I miss that? 😅 Thanks!

I don't understand what you mean by "It doesn't work that way"? You mean the changing the game title to have more information about the game? I'm pretty sure I saw some games in the search that did that and were hit exactly for that reason. Or did you mean something else?

Thanks! I've gone thru and added as many tags that I think fit properly without much stretching the imagination as well as add screenshots (which I was missing). I've tried to make a devlog at least on the major changes (tho only two bigger updates) and even small devlogs on the smaller fixes/updates too.

Yeah, the point isn't to rely on the search or anything. To be fair I don't even _want_ LOTS of traffic, just a bunch more eyes on the game would be useful. Eventually, sure, but for now I thought I'd see what steps I could take to improve visibility on itch.io itself to get those few more eyes on the game. When the time is more ripe I'll start looking for better avenues to drive traffic to it, but that ain't right now.

Yup, like said I understood the search is for title searches. That's why my question about the title - should I change it to show up in searches more, is it even allowed? Or should I just leave it as is? I'm a bit on the fence on this, both for purity's sake (I mean, it's not the game's name if I add stuff to it), as well as not completely understanding what is and isn't kosher to do here on itch.io...

I'll be checking some other games taggings if I could optimize the tag usage, as I currently have only four tags and even those might not be the best ones to use.

 Thanks for the help!

EDIT: Wait... how do I check what tags other games use?

Hey there, I've recently activated development on HEXvolver (https://zment.itch.io/hexvolver) again (also made a post about it on the release announcements for version 0.2 release) and I'd like to have more eyes on it for feedback and bug reports etc. to help with development and well, to also promote the game. 

I'm currently having a bit of a bind with searches - and yes I've read the "Getting Indexed in Search & Browse". My game is found just fine if I search for the exact name. However, the name isn't that generic, and if people search for stuff like "hex puzzle", HEXvolver doesn't show up at all. I'd like that to be not the case - if people search for "hex puzzle", for instance, I'm pretty sure they might like my game or at least get a chance to try it out.

I've tried setting up all the relevant tags I can think of "hexagon" "match" "single-player" "hex-based", but it doesn't seem to matter. Should I just leave things as is, or is there something I could do to help discovery? I understand the search function is mainly title-based, so should I change the title to something like "HEXvolver | A Match-4 Spinning Hex Puzzle"? ...or wait, is it against the rules or something? At least I haven't seen anything disallowing that.

Any help or tips regarding search discovery would be appreciated! Thank you in advance!

HEXvolver 

https://zment.itch.io/hexvolver

Henlo everyone! I "recently" (read: 6 months ago) finally decided to make a PoC version of a game idea that had been bouncing around in my head for years. After that short burst, it was on hiatus for a few months, and now I'm back at it, with a 0.2 release which is starting make it be more game than not. As the development is starting to pick up steam again and the game is more and more playable, I thought I'd share it here to get more eyes on it! I'd appreciate all feedback and/or just trying it out and sharing with friends! Thanks everyone!

HEXvolver is a Match-4-or-more-Gems game, played on a hexagonal grid. Gems are moved around by selecting a midpoint gem, and then draggin outwards and rotating all the neighbouring games around that midpoint gem. You'll get a combo multiplier on successive matches without input. When matching 5 gems, you get a Fire gem, that explodes on matching. With 6 or more gems, you get a Lightning gem, that catches all gems in straight lines around all axes when matched. The game is currently playable on WebGL with desktop and has been tested to work with many mobile phones, and eventually targeting Google Play Store.

Yeah, the parallax took most of the development time too! I know, I was planning to have time to implement the sweaty hot sauna action, but weirdly plans are prone to failure. 

Thanks for playing it and commenting! :)

So cute! I love the polish put into this! 

Loved it! Looking at that corgy run makes me smile. Fullscreen would've been nice tho. The mechanics were nice too!

Great platforming! The camera might need some work (even zooming out or positioning the camera so that you can see farther in your look direction and down might work, even if it is locked). I had fun with going thru the levels! The dialog story really gave it a nice atmosphere too.

Thanks for the in-depth feedback!

Simple tutorial at first play is planned, but hadn't really thought of a tutorial level or challenge levels Might not be a bad idea? 🤔

I'm currently in the process of updating the gem graphics and making special gems, and after that only the rest is missing - lots of juice need to be added, like audio and combo counter indicators and animations and screenshakes to special gem activations etc. + of course the app store incentivized ad monetization. 

Currently the bare minimum idea for that is when time is up, you can get +30s without losing progress by watching an ad.

Thanks

Thanks for testing it out!

Yeh I have no illusions of success, but I've been thinking about making something ad supported for mobile for ages and decided that now's the time. As long as I have something there, and hey you never know until you try, right?

A good idea! Might work on mobile too. Thanks!

GG! Yeah, juice and QoL stuff are coming, making it clear when you get more time could be a good thing to add, didn't even think about it earlier. Maybe either a floating "+<amount of time gotten>s", or a value shown on screen that actually goes to the timer progress bar... But yeah a good idea to let the player know that they've gotten more time to play! Thanks!

The select and spin is the meat of the game so I'm not changing that... tho there might be some ways to make it feel easier, and maybe even make it understandable from the get go? Perhaps an overlay animation of a finger pushing a specific spot, then moving up, and then rotating? Idk. Any ideas welcome!

Thanks for the good feedback!

Good: The graphics, the art, the sound, the music, the story

"Bad": Some stiffiness in platforming, found a few bugs, sword reach could be further, could use some more juice

Overall: What a great prototype, feels already like a finished game if it wasn't so short. Waiting eagerly for the rest of the game!

This was fun to play and the jokes were fun too :D

Thanks for trying out my game!

My personal major grievances that I'd like to have had time to improve are floaty controls (they were a lot floatier in the beginning though so I did manage to get some progress in this area), the claustrophobic levels (I was thinking that even a simple player character minifying from current a height 32 to 24 might change the available manouever area enough to have major impact) and the enemy behaviour, or rather, the unfairness of it.

Nothing impossible, but would've required a couple days of massaging to get to something a bit more reasonable. Might or might not revisit postjam.

Thank you for the feedback!

I like the simplicity in both the visuals and gameplay in this game. As you search the world, you are always excited to find a village (ie. a bunch of enemies around a fireplace) and then subsequently raid them. The theme and restriction (strange influence and 3 items) are worked very nicely into the core gameplay itself. 

Ideas for improvement
I felt a bit lost at times. Even if I found a village and I accidentally exited it, it's totally possible that I won't find it again. Though, there's always one if you just look more so not a big problem per se, but made me disoriented more than once. Perhaps a map of some sort?

Also, I felt no sense of progression. I raided a village, and, well, that was that. I think there is a score display on the main menu, but stats on player activities on HUD, like kills, villages raided, distance traveled etc?

All in all a solid submission, definitely one of my favorites. 

Tried my best, but unfortunately can't get it to run. The Main menu loads, and I can check the about text. When selecting Start, I get a progress bar that loads to 100% but then subsequently crashes. The screenshots look interesting, my phone just doesn't play along, unfortunately.

Anyhow, as I can't really comment on the submission itself other than, gz on participating on the jam and getting something done!

Thanks for trying my game out!

Did you figure the game out eventually though? Tutorial or easier levels first to teach the player how to play it was planned, but you know how it is in game jams. Time always runs out. I might revisit this later, fix the audio, make some animations, and either do some easing in or tutorial or something, I'll have to think it through Post-Jam.

Suggestions for making the goals clearer are always appreciated and will be taken under advisement!

Good start! I feel like there's already a lot of game in there, but I couldn't get past the starting area. For some reason the arrow keys are SUPERFAST, like if I don't tap really quickly, I get turned around superfast, and with no automap I got confused where I was all the time. If that fast turning was fixed, I'm sure I would've enjoyed more of the game, I mean, who doesn't love a Dungeon Crawl?

Edit: Wait, there was a Dungeon Crawl on itch.io at nearly the same time. Is it possible you accidentally submitted here instead of there?

Game runs now fine! I was a bit annoyed at the postage stamp size screen, but Alt-Enter to fullscreen mode worked, so that's not a biggie. Awesome sound and graphics and a great idea! I got stuck at level where there is more level to be seen on the mirror side player, but I couldn't figure out how to either a) change the camera to the mirror player, or b) figure out the correct movement patternt without seeing the mirror player. Maybe the 3rd item would help with that? The black dot? However, I couldn't activate it so maybe I'm not understanding the game mechanics correctly.

A solid submission nevertheless, good work!

Thanks for testing out the game! Yes, I can totally see how it would be confusing at start. I'm not even sure how I would go about making it less confusing while still maintaining the same micro/macro-loop mechanic...  🤔

If it's a language issue: if it helps my system language is Finnish.

Unfortunately can't run the game, crashes for me with a 

as per the instructions, made sure all the files were downloaded and extracted properly, and made sure windows doesn't flag it as a virus. 

Yeah I thought as much, and totally understandable. It happens to me on Vice 3.5 on the release and the dailies as well, mainly on PAL. Maybe VICE doesn't like my computer and lags the audio sometimes when jumping and the high-pitch pops are from buffer underruns etc.? Who knows, well anyhow I can play it enjoyable on NTSC though.

Thanks for the reply! I can try to replicate the sounds glitch I'm talking about and record it for you, if you want, though I don't know how much you wanna spend time on it (if at all) if you can't replicate it yourself, and I'm the only one who has mentioned it, and it's on an emulator no less. But I can try to investigate and record some evidence if you want it?

Running this on VICE and I'm loving it! I had some stuttering problems with GTKVice, but fortunately realized that there is a daily build link available, from which you can download the SDLVice which at least for me, works almost lagless. There is still some fairly rare random stutteringings but I almost quit playing because of the stutter on GTKVice, and with SDLVice I don't mind it at all so...

Anyhow, are there any recommended settings to use? C64 vs C64C? PAL vs NTSC? etc.

EDIT: I noticed there's this weird, high pitched pop when jumping around and it happens prominently when emulating PAL, when emulating NTSC it happens too but rarely.