Mix'Em Gameplay Test

[mj32]

Hi all,

We have got our first pc game to a playable state and hope that some of you guys would take the time to give it a spin!

It's our first experiment of taking a cell phone game and porting it up to a larger res. The demo will let you play the "Depth Clear" mode while the final build will have "Time Attack" and "Endless" modes as well.

Some of the artwork is still rough place holders (stars and explosios etc) but should give you a good idea of the concept!

Feel free to unload you thoughts and feelings - good or bad ;)

Some screenshots (http://forum.binary-graffitti.com/YaBB.pl?board=win32Mixem;action=display;num=111987 2211;start=0#0)

3.2meg zipped demo download (http://www.binary-graffitti.com/mixem/MixEmDepthDemo.zip)

[soniCron]

The bad:
Couldn't figure out how to play until I found the "Tutorial" item on the main menu near the bottom. This should either be in game or be playing during the main menu. No reason to put it in it's own space.
Music made me want to kill someone. Wretched. Is it MIDI? So passe...
The 3... 2... 1... GO! was annoying. Why not just Ready? Go! Took too long.
Gameplay was too intense for a first-time player. Even after playing for a while I still had a pretty big challenge. How about difficulty levels?
I can't drag to do all the fancy stuff? I have to click, click? Click, click. Click, click. Click, click. Bad. That should be the option, not the sole method of control.


The nitpicks:
Sound effects were subpar to the rest of the presentation.


The good:
Beautiful graphics!
Very polished and pretty!
Very clever concept!


Closing comments: I had some difficulty figuring out how to play, at first. I was expecting the standard match-n gameplay, but was confused when that didn't seem to work. When I finally found the "Tutorial" item on the main menu (which was at the bottom), I learned what was really going on. And to my surprise, was very pleased with the originality! Despite learning how to play, with the click-click control it became very difficult to do what I wanted when I wanted. I even began wondering why not just allow the user to click and drag the pieces wherever they want since it's possible, just tedious. All in all, the presentation WOWed me and I enjoyed the experience. Difficult as it was (and sorely in need of adjustable difficulty), I found a lot of charm and enjoyment in this title. Great job!

The run-down:
Pre-install: hot!
Presentation: hot!
Graphics: hot!
Sound: medium
Music: bland
Gameplay: medium (It could be hot! with control work and difficulty settings.)
Originality: hot!
Entertainment: hot!
Overall: hot!


My recommendation: Very enjoyable game! Great job!

[Abscissa]

Wow, if you can get soniCron to not come down on it HARD, you must have done something very, very right. ;) Checking it out now...

[soniCron]

Wow, if you can get soniCron to not come down on it HARD, you must have done something very, very right. ;) Hehe! :) In actuality, the controls are fatal if not fixed. With correct control, this game is pretty good. For the record, I can't guarantee that everyone will find it fun, but for what it is, it's very well done.

[Abscissa]

Ok, I've just played it now and my overall opinion is basically the same as soniCron's: Very good game, as long as some things are taken care of.

- Installer: You'll need an installer. Zip files won't cut it for casual gamers. (But I assume it's only in zip because it's still beta).

- "mem_leaks.txt": A little bit nitpicky, but you may want to rename mem_leaks.txt to something that sounds less scary to a computer novice. Someone pointed out to me once that the "errors.log" file in my game could scare people, and I think that's a good point.

- Clicking Bug: Problem with clicking in the menus: If I hold down the mouse button, it will register as continuous clicks rather than just one. As an example, go to the tutorial and hold the mouse button down on "Next Lesson". It will cycle through all of the pages really fast as long as you're holding it down. A proper mouse interface will either 1. not go to the next screen until you let go of the button or 2. go to the next screen, but not go to the following screen until the user releases the button and then presses it again.

- Music: I didn't dislike the music as much as soniCron, but he's right: the music could use some work.

- Tutorial: The gameplay is good, but it's extremely unintuitive until you read the tutorial. I tried to see if I could figure it out on my own, but I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I didn't even realize that I needed to right-click.

- Falling Blocks: You should mention in the tutorial that you can make a block "fall" by "swapping" it with an empty space. That's an important thing to know, in order to keep the blocks from getting too high, but it took me awhile to figure out I could do that.

- Dragging: Like soniCron said, you should be able to do all of the moves by dragging instead of having to click twice. (Although it would be good for clicking twice to still work.)

- Difficulty: I also agree with soniCron that the game starts out too difficult.

- Intros: Pet Peeve of mine: Unskippable intro screens. When you start the game, the first thing to appear is a credits screen. Which is fine, but you should allow impatient people (like me :D ) to skip it by clicking instead of having to wait a few seconds. Same thing with the title screen: It's fine to wait a few seconds before showing "Click to Continue", but if the user clicks, you should bring up "Click to Continue" immediately.

- Fullscreen: Another pet peeve of mine: Windowed-mode games. Having a game run in Windowed mode (and default to Windowed-mode) is fine, but I much prefer to play games in fullscreen. So it would be nice to at least have fullscreen as an option.

- Colorblindness: Colorblind people will have a very difficult time playing this. Think about making each of the colors look different in more ways than just the color, so that it's easier for those who are colorblind to tell them apart. Or include an option for a special colorblind mode, like in Chuzzle.

- Flashiness: The graphics are good, but it could use more "flash". Like lots of flashy animations, and some of the ultra-polish that PopCap is known for. Go to PopCap's site (http://www.popcap.com) and check out Chuzzle, Zuma, and Bejewled 2 as examples.

It's a very fun game though. I think you might have gotten me hooked :D

[mj32]

Thanks for the honest comments guys!

The music I agree about - it is the same small (.5 to 3k) midi files we took from the cell phone game and converted to ogg format, what is classed as good on a phone is not good enough for a PC game. :o

The difficulty is probably the usual pit fall of us being so used to it - it seems too easy now, but will look into that and the controls *a lot* more :)

Looks like we got a lot of things to sort out :rolleyes:

[tolik]

Trying to make the Tetris Attack concept (Panel De Pon) much harder hasn't ever succeeded. Check Congo Cube at RealArcade as well as Honey Switch and Cosmic Switch (I think Zylom.nl has them) for TA clones and learn their usability. CC has succeeded in creating a good usability (besides "call new line"), but the game is just too hard for the masses.

Your game is way too harder, there's no swapping animation and it's impossible to drag it.

[mahlzeit]

Just tried it on my PIII 789MHz, 256MB RAM, Geforce2 Go 32MB. When the window opened, I was wondering why nothing happened. Turns out the menu is supposed to fade-in, but it just took very long. Are you doing alpha blending with hardware surfaces? Alpha blits aren't hardware accelerated on many computers. If you are, you might want to consider switching to software surfaces for your alpha blending. As it is, the game is unplayable on my laptop.

[mooktown]

Hello there, I'm one of the guys attempting to bring mix'em to the pc screen.

Thanks for all the insight, we really needed a kick up the ass. They are all great suggestions! I am surprised by people having trouble with the difficulty though as after completing all levels I was starting to think it was too easy, as mj32 stated, perhaps we have been playing it too long, I have been playing it for over a year now :p

no doubt this will be one of the main areas that we will be dealing with in the weeks ahead. The 'Ready? Go!' sounds like a much quicker start than the quite long '3,2,1,go' that's in atm which will be changed too, along with the mouse-drag, I've been moaning to get that added for the past fortnight, maybe mj32 will listen to you guys? Hi mj ;)

I'm fairly new to the casual games market and I was surprised by congocube at how much of a familiarity it has to mixem from the screenshots but I'm certain that our gameplay is fairly different (still waiting on the download, I heart my 56k), with it being a paneldepon style game with Inca style bg's, believe it or not but I was thinking about having a little monkey character at the side of the screen too :(

thanks also mahlzeit, a hardware detect will surely go in there too

more fuel for the fire is more than welcome :cool:

[DangerCode]

It's pretty cool, but insanely difficult. I'd love to give it another try once it's made a tad easier.

[Abscissa]

For the record, I *was* able to get to the third level without losing during the first time I played (Well, the first time after I read the tutorial.) But, it was still one of the hardest "initial experiences" with a game I've had in a while. Mainly what happened was that I would start getting really close to loosing, which made the game really frantic (which is fun, but it's a little too much for the first play), and then I would end up finishing that level just before I lost. That happened on the first two levels (then I closed it and wrote my earlier post).

BTW, I've been in the same boat before about worrying that your own game might be too easy and then finding out it's really to hard ;). It was kind of funny to find out. I guess it really is true that we tend to be experts at our own games.