I've not been able to get a ta review or mention for Scrambleface. You yourself pretty much said what would you write 'it's a sliding puzzle with video'. I gave you a number of things a reviewer could write. Since then I got. A t u a w feature. My app is unique and trying something different. Is what I did easy? No as there'd be lots of clones by now. It was very debatable if the system would be able to manage that app. I suppose I've got a chance with my free version as it's free, redesigned with tutorial/easier levels and will probably be the 1st game to take advantage of the ipad 2s cameras.
All the technical wizardry in the world doesn't change the fact that it's a slider puzzle, and there are thousands of those on the App Store.
WOW! Hodapp, you are really knocking out free advice here, but the whole point of the thread was to talk about my game :-o . The reason I bought it up was that there was this asteroids/breakout game featured yesterday and the review was how cool those genres have been mixed. Well, we released Arkinvade which is a mix of breakout/space invaders, but never ever got a mention. Then I remembered, we never told anyone about it ;-) Still while you are being brutally honest about games, are you gonna let me know what we did wrong with ours? I would appreciate the feedback..... Did you ever try it?
Thanks for taking the time to give me some feedback on the game. I'll definitely be thinking about these posts while working on the first patch.
I heard that doing a few "favours" for Hodapp is a good way to get your app reviewed on TA. Either that or I wasted many late nights for nothing... But seriously, as Hodapp did say earlier they check out any game that looks appealing. If you make a game called Doodle Hop or something else that has done many times before don't expect to be noticed. You don't need a big budget either, I see many games that have been featured and are rewarded by TA for releasing something new and interesting.
there are many different theories of what does and doesn't work in game design, both traditional and mobile. What's sure is that you have a very short time to "hook" the player, particularly in the case of a mobile game, seeing as how they are considered so disposable (how many times have you booted up a game, played it once, and then thought "uh whatever" never to check it out again - all of this in the span of under one minute?) Holding up to this logic, many traditionally popular games never could have passed the test. Imagine if you didn't walk into that first cave in Legend of Zelda, got killed in a minute by the monsters, and that was that? Such is the scrutiny that mobile games are held up to. That's why games like Bejeweled and Doodle Jump have caught fire so nicely on the platform - their mechanics are bone-simple, a person who is half-playing-attention can grok them instantly, and there is enough polish/character to keep a player's interest. Yeah, by now the rest of us are beyond tired of those games, but there's a reason why they keep satisfying so many new customers every day. It's on the designer to come up with a simple technique and then find a way to structure a game around that, and then add polish/"meat" around all of that as much as possible (honestly, if your game can't truly look like a SNES game these days, or some cousin of one, then it does get difficult to attract attention). But here's the thing - if you can make a game that's simple and pick-up-and-play, but still well-designed enough to pace properly (this only comes with ridiculous fine-tuning and heavy testing), you can still have a strong degree of subtlety and depth of gameplay beneath a seemingly simplistic surface. This is the holy grail of design, something that can satisfy the hardcore players after repeated plays, as well as the casuals with the initial impressions. It's probably best expressed in Tetris, cliche as it is to mention, or something like Drop7 (I know,I bring that game up way too much, but with good reason!) And again, I'll stress that this is not something that is very hard to do, it just requires careful and constant testing and adjusting. At every plateau of development, you need to get feedback from virgin players to see how the receive your game; they need to be disconnected from you (so they won't "hurt your feelings") and they need to try the game without you telling them how to play. We never did this with iFist, and suffered greatly for it. We did it exhaustively with 180 and it helped considerably, although our lack of a properly-presented interactive tutorial still hurt us a lot. __________________ twitter - HeadcaseGames.com Puzzling has Evolved - Enter the 180 Hi-score Facebook contest! FreeAppTracker.com Win ANY app you want, daily!
some nice advice in this thread. the "hook" in ios games are one of the most important things if you want to shoot up the charts. like hodapp said, the pigs in angry birds keep you coming back for more. i for one actually dont like angry birds but keep going back to try and beat the whole game. cut the rope has that little monster thingy that has the coolest animations and personality. i also remember a game(don't know the name) on this forum that had the same type of gameplay as fruit ninja, but it existed before fruit ninja. the game never really took off. my point being it missed that extra layer on top of the gameplay, the layer that makes you like the game before you really even got into the meat of it.
hmm, would be very interested to know what that game was.. __________________ twitter - HeadcaseGames.com Puzzling has Evolved - Enter the 180 Hi-score Facebook contest! FreeAppTracker.com Win ANY app you want, daily!
He also had a thread about it right here: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=52403&highlight=sale
ah yes I remember that one. Released just about a week before Fruit Ninja, so you can not really knock them for ripping it.. __________________ twitter - HeadcaseGames.com Puzzling has Evolved - Enter the 180 Hi-score Facebook contest! FreeAppTracker.com Win ANY app you want, daily!
yip finger cut. thats it. wasnt saying that fruit ninja ripped them off, was just pointing out that even though finger cut released first with a comparable gameplay mechanic it did not stand a chance against fruit ninja. fruit ninja just has the theme and look nailed and also did great promotion with the youtube vids.
this thread is pretty amazing thus far...i can see how hooking the player from the get go is a top priority and how using attractive and personable methods to add character and flair to your game is an amazing tool for captivating audiences...but what if your game simply does not lend itself to utilizing this style of development? for instance...our game: call me a cynic, but i feel it'd be difficult to cram character into this type of game without it feeling like a cheap gimmick.
That's pretty interesting, actually. I felt the exact opposite about World of Goo. For me, all that cutesy "stuff" just detracted from the actual gameplay. And then, once you get down to the actual goo-construction, the goo wiggles and moves in a somewhat random and unpredictable fashion. Contrast that with BridgeBasher, where the entire focus is on using strategy and logical thinking to design the strongest structure you can using a predictable, RNG-free (or minimzed, at least) toolset. It's all about the challenge of the game, not the eye candy. I totally understand what you're saying, though, and obviously a lot of folks agree with you. However, the fact that you and I can come away from these two games with such diametrically opposing views suggests there are at least a few gamers out there who have a totally different concept than you (and the majority) about what makes a game "fun.". Isn't that reason enough to at least give some of these games a short comment? In fact, your critique of BridgeBasher is perfect -- why not post "mini-reviews" like that to complement the more in-depth reviews that TA does? If I hadnt heard of BridgeBasher before, that review would probably have piqued my interest, specifically because of the qualities you found undesirable... and the folks who wouldn't like it because it lacks everyhing that WoG has would have plenty of warning to stay away. And if you need even more incentive... I don't think there are any sites currently catering to the "long tail" demographic when it comes to games like this. Besides, it's more fresh content for the front page, right?
i can see how it can be difficult to put a character in that app. if it was any other game i would tell you to get some kind of theme going with a lot off personality. an example would be fruit ninja. no characters in there either. but i must say your app already looks very nice and polished and i dont think any other look or theme would work really. have you tried doing a lite version off boom boom gems? i would personally not buy the game without trying it out first even if that video has me intrigued.
Hmm yeah that's actually a great idea. We've been so caught up with trying to improve the game with more modes, better multiplayer, etc. that the lite version kind of slipped our collective minds. Thanks for the reminder
not to keep going off about my own app so much, but as it is relevant to the conversation: I felt it was crucial to have characters in 180, especially as we were releasing an app into a market already wayyyy overloaded with puzzle games of any type by that point. What made our app special was the game play mechanics, but no way to tell that by looking at a screenshot (and even watching the video, the "feeling of it" wouldn't come though, it was one of those things where someone actually needed to try it). I took a cue from Bust-a-Move and put 4 different selectable characters in the game, hoping to maximize them in the marketing and having some kind of strong in-game presence where their character/personality were very noticeable at any given time. I must stress that I feel this was one of the strong things Bust-a-Move really pushed when it appeared originally (and in successive incarnations) over the years, the gameplay was rock-solid but the characters helped bring eyeballs in. Unfortunately it backfired, not to a large detriment but the actual implementation didn't "get" us much. People complained that the characters didn't "do very much" or look very good (this was due to time and memory constraints, so ultimately they were half-assed in there). Ironically I am now dealing with this exact issue (and trying to do a better job) as I still feel having characters in a game like this, while not adding anything to the gameplay, can still help sell your game in screenshots and get people's initial attention. It's up to the rest of the game to have captivating enough gameplay (again, following Bust-a-Move's model) that the gamer will be sucked in enough by that to not really care about the relative "uselessness" of the character. Without going on too much more here, in this post-Puzzle Fighter world, people expect "if there's a character in my puzzle game, they better have some pretty serious exposition and have some effect on the gameplay" and this is something you'll face strongly if you chose to go this route. (some day I will write a bonafide post-mortem and go off properly about all the nuts and bolts of this stuff - if people want this, let me know) __________________ twitter - HeadcaseGames.com Puzzling has Evolved - Enter the 180 Hi-score Facebook contest! FreeAppTracker.com Win ANY app you want, daily!
we spent a lot of time and energy getting a lite out. I never regretted it, but it never really got much downloads (on its own) and it never seemed to have a huge positive impact on our game either. I am just one dev saying this, but I will propose that we may be past the point where doing X amount of work to release a lite may no longer really be worth it, when you could spend that same time either tightening up the main app, or working on something different altogether. since our big December promotion, our lite has been inactive and I notice zero difference (positive or negative) on sales of our 99c version. Your game has a better aesthetic than mine, so take that for what it is worth. __________________ twitter - HeadcaseGames.com Puzzling has Evolved - Enter the 180 Hi-score Facebook contest! FreeAppTracker.com Win ANY app you want, daily!
