20 replies to this topic

[Piemaniac]

A mobile puzzle game in the works!

Rundown
Solve each puzzle by locking the rings into place, rotating and flipping them to their correct orientation.

Controls
Left Click to select rings, Mouse Scroll to rotate, Right Click to flip
The in-game instructions only refer to the upcoming mobile controls, but these mouse controls are still active and recommended.



Give it a try!
Download Rotary 0.7.3.2.rar (4.21 MB)

Edited by Piemaniac, 11 August 2012 - 11:39 PM.

[chance]

This is an interesting concept for a puzzle. Definitely something new, so +1 for that.

I worked the first 3 puzzles... but didn't find them particularly challenging. Unlike a traditional jigsaw puzzle, this puzzle has very limited degrees of freedom. Each ring is already placed correctly, so the player just needs to rotate it to match up an edge. This reduces the challenge considerably.

I'll try to think of ways to add some variation and challenge, and then post again later. But I think this has promise.

Edited by chance, 14 June 2012 - 11:14 AM.

[Piemaniac]

I worked the first 3 puzzles... but didn't find them particularly challenging.

Thank you for the comments, chance. I agree that it is currently a bit too easy, but this can theoretically be solved by choosing different photos. I have been working on the next release which features a more difficult set of pre-loaded puzzles. But any additional suggestions are more than welcome. I think in general for puzzle games, the most important feature is replay-ability, which will partly be helped by the user-loaded puzzles which I'm almost done coding.

[gm_user_tronic]

very nice, you might want to add things and more detail to the backgroundss, so theres things to see back there.

[Piemaniac]

very nice, you might want to add things and more detail to the backgroundss, so theres things to see back there.

That's a good idea. Thanks!

As a general comment I have just uploaded the latest version, alpha 0.3, which adds some new features that I think people are going to like. See the original post for details.

Edited by Piemaniac, 16 June 2012 - 03:09 AM.

[shroomz120]

I have several suggestions for you.

try and make alternative buttons for switching between the rings and rotating them. I know some people don't have a mouse wheel on their mouse especially if they are using a laptop.
Perhaps the arrow keys. Up to move a ring outwards, Down to move a ring inward, Left/Right to rotate.

Assassins creed 2 had similar puzzles to this. What they did to make it more difficult was have rings that would turn other rings with it.
Here is an example. Ring 1 when rotated would also rotate ring 4 in the same direction, if ring 2 was rotated then ring 3 would rotate in the opposite direction, if ring 3 was rotated then ring 1 would rotate twice as fast, if ring 4 was rotated nothing else would happen... etc. To balance this huge difficulty increase the rings could only be rotated about 30 degrees minimum (12 possible positions per ring).
I can imagine this may cause some puzzles to be unsolvable if the parts are just randomly rotated into their start positions so you will need to make sure they start in a solvable position. You would also need to be able to select rings even if they are in solved position because you may need to turn them again.

You could have different difficulty levels with easy mode being how it is now and harder difficulties using more and more of the above mechanics. Maybe even an option for how many rings the picture is divided into.

I hope this helps you.

[Piemaniac]

Thank you, shroomz, those are good suggestions.

I was considering adding alternative controls for the reasons you mentioned, so that will be implemented in the next version. Good call on the difficulty - I actually added that last night, so that will also be in the release. The current default difficulty is between what Medium and Hard will be.

It's interesting to hear the Assassin's creed take on this concept. I will have to toss around the idea for a bit, because the way you described it isn't necessarily the direction I want to take this (especially if a major game has already done it) however I'm glad you mentioned it because maybe there is a way to develop a similar yet different gameplay mechanic. I'm the first to admit that the game needs something like that.

[Piemaniac]

The newest alpha build, 0.4, has just been uploaded. This version includes alternate controls, different modes of difficulty and more. See the original post for details.

[Piemaniac]

Rotary 0.5 is ready for your testing pleasure!

Updates in this build
▪ Redesigned, icon-based GUI
▪ New achievements, now referred to as "stars"
▪ Earning stars can unlock new default photos as well as difficulty levels (separately)
▪ Clicking the Star button lets you view your achievements
▪ New fifth difficulty level, "insane"
▪ Your progress is now saved between game sessions. Delete the rotary.sav file to reset.
▪ Default photos are new but will be replaced again in the next build
▪ A photo credit appears upon completing a default puzzle
▪ Music button is intentionally locked, for now


See original post for download link!

[Koaske]

Nice game! I could see this is a fun downloadable mobile game that people would play to pass time. The sounds and graphics were smooth.

Some comments:

*Sometimes I had hard time making the rings lock when I had rotated them the right way. I'm pretty sure I rotated them in the right way in at least some cases. Do you have to do them in a certain order?

*I'd also like some descriptions to all the buttons, but you will probably add some information about those later.

*Opening the game, closing it, and then opening it again will result in the following error:
ERROR in
action number 1
of Create Event
for object obj_ctrl:

Error reading real.

[Piemaniac]

Thanks for the feedback! The more outside opinions the better.

Sometimes I had hard time making the rings lock when I had rotated them the right way.

It's currently set up in that you need to be rather precise with your angle. If you roll back and forth over the right area it should lock. While I could allow for slightly less precision, a lot of the feedback I've gotten from friends is that the game is too easy, so I'm still fine tuning the ring controls. That's actually something I will be working on refining a bit for the next release.

I'd also like some descriptions to all the buttons, but you will probably add some information about those later.

I wasn't planning on it, since I figure the player can discover for him/her self what the different functions are. But if it's too confusing maybe I'll throw on some tooltips or something.

Opening the game, closing it, and then opening it again will result in the following error:

Oh wow, thanks for catching that. I can't reproduce the error but looked it up and realized that it happens when trying to read decimals using [.] on computers with a language setup that uses [,]. I will work on a fix right now and will release a minor update as soon as I can. Edit Fixed!

Edited by Piemaniac, 24 June 2012 - 08:14 PM.

[Mr B]

This game looks great, but maybe one of the rings could be fixed at the start of a puzzle since many pictures do not have a clear orientation

[Piemaniac]

This game looks great, but maybe one of the rings could be fixed at the start of a puzzle since many pictures do not have a clear orientation

Thank you, Mr B. On that subject, I am addressing the difficulty curve for the next build as that seems to be a concern for most people.

Tonight I come up with an idea to add dimension to the game in a very simple way. As always when puzzles are generated, the rings are dispersed at random rotations. The new addition I'm supplementing to this is that the image on any particular ring may also be reversed, so along with finding the correct orientation you would also have to have the image facing in the right direction before the ring can be locked. I've attached an image to help get the point across:

Now, this can either be the added gameplay aspect that Rotary has needed for a while, or it can simply make it impossible for those who already consider the game too difficult. I realize it's not easy to tell without trying it out firsthand but in theory how do you guys feel about this direction? I'm thinking that with this added dimension of hardness I can lop off at least one of the harder difficulty levels, if not two.

[Piemaniac]

Hey guys, I've been working hard to make this newest build a very solid one! Please check it out and let me know what you think! (download link in original post)

Important updates in this build
▪ Thanks to several generous contributors, a brand-spanking new set of 32 pre-loaded photos!
▪ New gameplay mechanic called "flipping." The image on certain rings may be reversed, and must be flipped over as well as oriented.
▪ User-loaded images are no longer stretched! The algorithm now resizes the image uniformly and centers it.
▪ Newly designed Help and Stars screens.
▪ Smoother ring control
▪ Removed fifth difficulty level, "Insane"
▪ Revised achievements
▪ Various graphic improvements (and logo!)
▪ The music button is functional, but there is no music (yet!)

Edited by Piemaniac, 05 July 2012 - 09:46 PM.

[laffertyrh]

This game is quite fun!

What I loved:
-The controls are very smooth.
-The menu and interface is very clean. I am quite jealous.
-The logo looks great, simple and stylish.
-The game is quick and not TOO easy.

Some things to think about:
-I had a hard to tracking which ring I had selected, maybe you could add some kind of highlight.
-Seems relatively easy to just turn the piece slowly until it locks.
-It is tough telling what all the buttons did. I just pressed them all to find out.
-What would it look like if you varied the sizes of the pieces? (Wide rings and thin rings)

[Piemaniac]

Thanks a lot for the helpful feedback, laffertyrh. I am especially glad to hear that the difficulty and controls seem to be at a good place, since they have gone through several iterations of tweaking. Originally the opacity difference (highlight) of the selected ring was more noticeable but in this version it is more subtle. It won't be hard to change it back. Others have expressed concern about the label-less buttons too, so for the upcoming build I already have labels appear on mouseover.

I know exactly what you are describing with the variable-thickness rings. The rings are created with blank ring sprites that cut the image into its pieces. Recently I experimented with instead drawing the rings in-game using an algorithm. It worked quite well, but for whatever reason it could only generate one puzzle. When trying to do another, it would still run properly, but the rings were completely invisible. I would love to incorporate rings of slightly random variable widths, however this would only be practical with this algorithm which currently is not functional. Doing it with sprites would tack on a few extra MBs to the file size. I will keep haggling with it on the side in hopes that this can be accomplished

[Piemaniac]

Rotary 0.7.3.2 is ready to play! See the original post for download link.

Requested feedback
While all feedback is certainly encouraged, for this release I'm particularly interested in the following:

▪ How is the performance? The game has been upgraded to 60fps for smoother gameplay. My laptop isn't very fast but it stays at 60 most of the time, although it can bog down after a while.
▪ If you know Español, Français, Deutsch or Italiano, I need people to QA these languages for accuracy.
▪ I haven't thought of a way to select rings for mobile yet, since they will get too thin to touch on small screens. Any ideas? Note that while the game only refers to the future mobile controls, the original mouse controls are still active and recommended (see OP).

Thanks for trying it out!
PS, the music is temporary. A musician is working on an original music piece that will sound similar.

Edited by Piemaniac, 17 August 2012 - 07:27 AM.

[Dangerous_Dave]

FPS for me is a solid 60.

As for selecting rings, perhaps if you tap on one, then drag your finger left or right, it selects the ring next to the one you hit?

Also, what do you think about confirmation dialogues? It's not entirely clear what buttons do until you press them. You don't want people accidentally resetting the puzzle they have almost finished because they don't know what the button does...

[Piemaniac]

As for selecting rings, perhaps if you tap on one, then drag your finger left or right, it selects the ring next to the one you hit?

Interesting idea, but consider Hard mode where each ring is only about 16px thick. On a small screen, it's going to be difficult to select even the initial ring with any great degree of accuracy, not to mention that I think GM Studio makes you define specific regions for "clicking" instead of direct "Left Click" on objects, so basically what I'm getting at is that it doesn't seem practical with the way the system is set up.

It's not entirely clear what buttons do until you press them.

The idea of labeling buttons has been brought up a couple times before. Between releases I added these to fade in on mouseover, which looked rather nice, but remembering that Mouse Enter/Exit functions are useless for mobile, I removed them again.

Tonight I put them back in simply as static labels (LEFT). There will be a button under Help that will let you toggle them (RIGHT).


EDIT Addressing ring selection in mobile, I've worked up a solution. You swipe your finger (or drag with left mouse button pressed) across a slider bar, and your position determines which ring is selected (the left end selects the outermost ring, the right end selects the innermost ring, and everything in between). It's working quite nice, actually.

Edited by Piemaniac, 14 August 2012 - 10:15 PM.

[laffertyrh]

Wow this game is looking very polished!

Everything ran smoothly at 60fps.

Suggestions:
-I would like some effect when I complete a puzzle, or at least a congrats.
-Might be nice to have a timer for each puzzle, with a reward for completing a puzzle in time.