The best part about having a game that you work on every week is that you can put a new post on your blog every week and not feel like you're neglecting your loyal readership, which for me is I think 1-3 people, but I digress. The second best part is that you can change the difficulty at a whim, which for me was everyone saying they couldn't beat level 22, 16, 15, 11, 7, and 4. That last person must have had pretty bad luck.
The problem with the previous game was that it was hard. Really really hard. Which, after the beginning being really easy, kind of snuck up on people. The good news is that in the initial trial period, we got a great idea of exactly what was too hard, and realized that maybe our linear difficulty mechanic was a bit too demanding of the player. Here, we made a graph.
So it was clear that something had to change, and the first part was that we'd have to make it a little harder to lose. The mechanic as it stands is that, packed ideally, there are a certain number of dots that fit in the center circle. So, if it fills up to 90% of the maximum, you lose. It's like 51 dots. However, it turns out that Joe's physics code is too good (!), so ideal packing occurs really fast even in normal circumstances, and even faster when there are external dots that also want to be in the center.
In short, as soon as 60 dots were on the screen, 51 dots were in the center circle. So unless you could make pairs in less than 2 seconds, you would lose. As it turns out, only 2 people were able to do this, and even they couldn't sustain it for longer than 45 seconds, which was less than half of the original duration.
So we made it so that once you hit 51 dots, a 5-second timer would start, and dropping below, I think, 48 dots again would cancel the timer. Woo!
This... is probably overkill... by itself. But then we added powerups, which to be fair, we had planned on doing from the beginning before this whole "the warning makes everything too easy" issue came up. So to... even things out? I guess? There's a cycle to powerup introduction, adding a powerup then a powerdown, then a powerup, then a powerdown, so the new difficulty graph has a nice sine wave in it before sort of leveling off.
Almost everyone can make matches during the 5 second timer, so surviving isn't exactly a challenge anymore, and then you've got powerups that you can use if you get into even a slight jam. And we intend to add more powerups later, so we can expect this line to dip even further before it grows at all. With luck, it will fall below the graph, and become some sort of antigame, which I can't even define properly at the moment.
We did some initial playtesting, and were rewarded with a new line for our graph, which, rest assured, we are going to keep in mind for future builds.
So the current build, 0.0.green, is for everyone out there who loves games but really isn't very good at them. For those people who have seen a mouse, but are hesitant to actually use it. For anyone out there who wants to play a game not to accomplish something, but to really spend some time doing something. Anything. Preferably something colorful.
Oh, and in case powerdowns are too hard, you can throw them out of the outer ring to destroy them. That'll come in handy in 0.0.blue, which will probably overcompensate the other way again, making a game that is so hard that you will cry giant blue tears of sadness, fondly remembering the idle bygone days of green.
-s
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