Hey, remember slide puzzles? Those infuriating little toys you would get at street fairs with 8 pictures that form a big picture? Hands up, everyone in the room whose experience with those toys didn't end when you threw them into a tree and watched them shatter into a million pieces. What's that? Nobody? That's because they're pretty much the most obnoxious things ever conceived. Toys like these have their place in gaming history, but it perplexes me how someone aiming to make a "relaxing and positive experience" would choose this as their central mechanic.
I will say this, though: this is probably the best one can make a game about slide puzzles. It is very clear where each block is supposed to go, the difficulty curve is fair and challenging, and the visuals are pretty enough. The only criticism I have in the aesthetic department is that the sound track is a tad annoying. You can, of course, turn off the sound and just run your favorite song in the background, but you can't turn off the music without turning off the sound effects as well, which ruins the atmosphere of the game somewhat.
The only other criticism I have is one that I make all the time, but it's especially apparent in a game like this. Why, why, WHY is there no save feature? I'm just gonna go ahead and say it, this game actually made slide puzzles relaxing and positive. I enjoyed playing around with it, but a game like this is best suited as a stress reliever, and being required to start from the beginning every time you fire it up is not a good quality for a stress reliever to have. At least throw in a level select or something, jeez.
All-in-all. Eh. 'Sgood. If you're having a bad day, give it a shot, but it's only good for one 5-minute relaxation session. That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay slidin'
Links
Slippidy do-da: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=18574
I think there is probably no save feature in many of these games for a few reasons:
ReplyDelete1) It it can be hard to implement. It requires you to create your own way to store data, and can be quite time consuming to implement once you have enough choices in a game. It's actually a two part job because then you have to make a way to load the data as well.
2) It's probably not required. Based on the number of projects without saves, it seems as though you won't get a much higher grade for having a save implemented. As such, adding in a save might take away time from working on more "important" things in the instructors eyes. I'll see if this is true once I'm actually in the school.
3) It reduces flexibility. Being student projects, I'm sure there are some major hiccups when it comes to planning. If you don't do it just right, save features can be finicky beasts. If you decide to change some little detail after it is built... you might just break the save!
So while if you're making a "real" commercial game it would be ridiculous not to include a save, I can understand why students who are pressed for time might decide to scrap the feature altogether. Anyway, that's my take, and thanks for continuing on with these reviews. :D
As much as I hate to admit it, you're probably right. I do appreciate how many of these games include a level select, though. That's just as good. I'm still not going to stop complaining about it, though ;)
ReplyDeleteAnd hey, thanks for continuing on reading :D
As one of the creators of Runeshift, I can tell you that Yose is exactly right on all three accounts. Despite our somewhat lengthy credits, we were a three-person team in our Junior year. We had a tech guru working through a lot of personal stuff throughout the year, our designer was working to transfer from the computer engineering degree into the game design program, and I was not technically confident when we began the project. Our goal for the project was to make something we could be proud of, something beautiful, compelling, and polished. To that end, we feel great about our finished project.
ReplyDeleteSaving was not a requirement, but it was something we wanted to implement. It was cut due to DigiPen's heavy curriculum and the technical requirements (not so much of a scheduling issue as a lack of manhours). Looking back on it, there are a few ways we could have added a save feature, but these are tricks you think of after another four years of experience. Level skip would have required less work, but more than we could give without destabilizing our final build. Implementing either system would have fallen to me, and it just was not possible in our time frame without sacrificing some elements of polish (my "totem" of the project).
Since I was also the primary tester for the game, I didn't realize how long it would take other people to play through Runeshift entirely (I averaged 10-15 minutes, whereas we realized our instructors might spend up to three hours on a single play-through when only a week remained in our schedule).
I guess what it comes down to is it's my fault we weren't able to implement saving or level skip, so sorry about that...
As for the decision to focus our game on slide puzzles, it was a very early and deliberate decision. We formed our team of three and sat down to brainstorm what we wanted to make over the year. Slide puzzles had come up, and we ran away with the idea, "Hey, what if you had to solve smaller puzzles as part of a larger puzzle, kind of like sudoku?" We had our base gameplay, then wrote out everything we wanted to see in the game, ranging from water and fireflies to polish and "addicting" gameplay - the last of which we refined to compelling gameplay (an addicting game is one you play for hours and regret once you walk away, while a compelling game makes you feel like that time was well spent). We knew that puzzle games could become quite frustrating and strove to keep the difficulty low to help alleviate that. We had originally planned to add a timer, but realized that woild be stressful. Instead we only added the total number of moves used to solve each meta-puzzle, specifically for players looking for a score or some competitive aspect. Other features also grew organically during the development process, including the decision to add poetry to aid in the story-arc told by the environments.
All in all (TL;DR), thank you for playing and writing about Runeshift. I really appreciate your feedback and if ever the day comes that I break the code out again, I'll be sure to add saving/level skip and a toggle specifically for sound effects.