Aztec

[Art]

That 3D option is a good idea and it's very well done.

[RMartins]

That 3D option is a good idea and it's very well done.

Thanks.

It still needs a major overall, to be more efficient.

But the fake 3D works as expected.

However, Some people have a hard time seeing it in a proper way.

I believe it's because they focus their gaze on the blue background and not on the parts themselves.
The background is behind the parts, but some people perceived it at as being in front of the parts and that brakes the 3D illusion, when it seems to be rotating in different direction than the parts themselves, because of perceiving it to be in front.

But it's a reasonable compromise.

I might try to tweak it more, to see if I can fool those brains too

[Art]

It's true that it can be a bit confusing sometimes, but I don't know if the 3D effect can be better on the Spectrum. Maybe the cubes could cast black/blue checkerboard shadow on the backgound, but maybe it would be confusing, too.

[RMartins]

It's true that it can be a bit confusing sometimes, but I don't know if the 3D effect can be better on the Spectrum. Maybe the cubes could cast black/blue checkerboard shadow on the backgound, but maybe it would be confusing, too.

I don't think so, because you can't see the ground.
Always side way views.

But I have been experimenting with casting shadows on the walls.
And eventually may try casting self shadows between blocks.

But I'm pretty convinced, that the issue lies with the dual shade of the background.
Most people brains don't like to see 2 things, perceived as distinct (background and pieces), rotating in apparent different directions.

I initially had a hard white line in the middle like in the edges, but it was too distracting for the effect to work properly.


EDIT:
Sorry I miss read what you typed.
You did refer "background" and not "ground".

[RMartins]

Besides the rendering speed an hence glitches, one of the key aspects that I would like to improve, is to move the pieces one char at a time, instead of a cube at a time, since a cube is 2 chars tall/wide.

This will provide a nicer flow for pieces drop and movement.
But it will complicate the control logic and game state.

Not sure if it is worth the extra hassle and complexity.

It also brings some side effects, like duplicating the amount of "click" sounds when the pieces moves.
Although I could keep it playing only when aligned to the cube grid.

[RMartins]

I'm actually quite interested in feedback, on the game play itself.
If someone cares to share.

[Art]

But I have been experimenting with casting shadows on the walls.
And eventually may try casting self shadows between blocks.

Yes, I thought that something like this might help a bit, but I am not sure. 3D coloured options are rather limited on the Spectrum.

But I'm pretty convinced, that the issue lies with the dual shade of the background.
Most people brains don't like to see 2 things, perceived as distinct (background and pieces), rotating in apparent different directions.

For me it's quite hard to imagine how other people can see our designs, but maybe your are right.

Besides the rendering speed an hence glitches, one of the key aspects that I would like to improve, is to move the pieces one char at a time, instead of a cube at a time, since a cube is 2 chars tall/wide.

This will provide a nicer flow for pieces drop and movement.
But it will complicate the control logic and game state.

Not sure if it is worth the extra hassle and complexity.

It think it's not really necessary, but if it's not too complicated, why not. Maybe it will feel smoother.

I'm actually quite interested in feedback, on the game play itself.
If someone cares to share.

I tried it and it was quite hard for me. I couldn't get to the 3D part.

[RMartins]

I tried it and it was quite hard for me. I couldn't get to the 3D part.

I need some extra info.

Have you ever played Lumines on a PSP ?
Do you know the game mechanics ?

Was it hard the 3D part or the game play itself ?

Spoiler

TIP:
Both Totems start lower then at the top.
This was done to block user from rotating at the beginning, since they might become too complex for starters.

So when the Totems rise, by making matches in a combo type of way, it means the player is starting to get the hang of it, so Totems start to rise when player accomplishes this, eventually, unlocking the 3D view.

This was the goal.

But apparently I have a bug somewhere, and at least one of the Totems, unlocks one of the rotations, from the beginning, and that breaks havoc n players, if they press one of 2 key combos (out of 4 key combos possible) that allow the scenery to rotate.

So that is my fault, in doing last minute changes that broke quite a few things.
I managed to fix a couple, still in time, but that one remained.

[RMartins]

There is quite a lot of "depth" in terms of gameplay (no pun intended), that may not be obvious at first.
But for someone that already played "Lumines", it will mostly come as natural or intrinsic.

Obviously the board is a lot more constrained in terms of space then Lumines.

I have not found a reasonable way to animate the formation of new matches in 3D, to guide the new comer.
Lumines does it excellently well in 2D by showing the formation of squares, but this is not really transferable to 3D, since we can now also do matches in depth and hence matches can be face squares or cubes or be matching from behind that you can't see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv4sCM5X96o

So I haven't found a way to represent this in a suitable way to help the player grasp how the matches work.
But after a while I presume it becomes obvious.

Another factor I have found, watching others play, is that some people bring expectations that it should work like Tetris.
This generates a lot of confusion at first, since they expect to match a full horizontal line (which in 3D would be a complete plane in the extreme).

The Light Beam is also a completely alien thing, for players expecting a Tetris like gameplay.

But bringing the wonder of Lumines to the ZX Spectrum, was one of my goals with this game.


I just didn't go exactly for Lumines because it would require making the game integrated with sound to reach synesthesia, like Lumines does so well.
That is hard to achieve, since it requires player actions, music and SFX to be all integrated with each other.

Soon enough, I realized that to be impossible to implement in 2.5 months !

And then I went for 3D, ... and that opened a different can of worms

[RMartins]

But I'm pretty convinced, that the issue lies with the dual shade of the background.
Most people brains don't like to see 2 things, perceived as distinct (background and pieces), rotating in apparent different directions.

For me it's quite hard to imagine how other people can see our designs, but maybe your are right.

And you are right.

But I believe this is more of a brain perception kind of thing.
I have very easy understanding of 3D space with simple cues, but not everyone is like that.

But I'm able to understand, when the "magic breaks", because I can see it, but I can also perceived when it's not quite right.

Besides the rendering speed an hence glitches, one of the key aspects that I would like to improve, is to move the pieces one char at a time, instead of a cube at a time, since a cube is 2 chars tall/wide.

This will provide a nicer flow for pieces drop and movement.
But it will complicate the control logic and game state.

Not sure if it is worth the extra hassle and complexity.

It think it's not really necessary, but if it's not too complicated, why not. Maybe it will feel smoother.

The big issue is that the rendering engine (built from scratch), is aligned and works by horizontal slices, to resolve the depth of things and determine what is drawn over what.

If we put something that doesn't fit the rendering grid and hence can be half in one row and half in another, that generates complexity.

One option is to break the grid in half, hence duplicating it, but that requires more memory and support processing of half cubes and a lot of handling of special cases for matches and similar.

Another solution, could be to handle the only moving part (player controlled), to be an exception to the rule.

This would work fine for navigation and matching, but would wrack havoc on the rendering, because then it will be hard to determine what is behind and in front of the moving piece, if it doesn't belong or is not physically within the 3D grid data space.

Making the user controlled piece a special case, also adds processing time to each and every cube we process in the grid, since we need to check if i's rendering impacts or is impacted by the moving piece.
That alone, can throw the game off into the NON interactive refresh rate and make it too slow to play properly.

So either I come up with something that solves all these problems at once or it will be a hard problem to solve.

[Art]

I tried it and it was quite hard for me. I couldn't get to the 3D part.

I need some extra info.

Have you ever played Lumines on a PSP ?
Do you know the game mechanics ?

Was it hard the 3D part or the game play itself ?

The game itself was hard enough for me, because I've never played or saw Lumines. I think I understand the rules, but for the present I wasn't able to get to the 3D part, so I don't know how hard it is. If I understand well, the 3D part begins after I am successfull enough. By the way, how do I rotate in 3D?

Some remarks:
Wouldn't be more comfortable to make the key "down" to fall cubes instead of "down+fire"?
When I press "left" or "right" (maybe other keys too - I am not sure), there is a little pause before the cube moves, so the moving feels a bit "heavy".
I often over-rotate the cube - for example when I press "left+fire", it often rotates twice.

[RMartins]

The game itself was hard enough for me, because I've never played or saw Lumines. I think I understand the rules, but for the present I wasn't able to get to the 3D part, so I don't know how hard it is. If I understand well, the 3D part begins after I am successfull enough. By the way, how do I rotate in 3D?

Are you sure you want to know, before you are able to play 50 or 100 pieces without losing ?

Some remarks:
Wouldn't be more comfortable to make the key "down" to fall cubes instead of "down+fire"?

There is a reason for that and it' is related with all the moves I need to handle, and making them make some sense, without provoking unwanted moves by mistake.

The following moves are available:
- Move Left/right
- Rotate piece ACW/CW
- Accelerate piece down.
- Rotate scenario ACW/CW

NOTE: ACW = Anti-clockwise; CW = clockwise )

So in all, 2 + 2 + 1 + 2, that's 7 distinct actions, that we need to handle with just 5 keys ( Left, Right, Down, Up and Fire, to be able to support Joysticks).
Try and find a set of key combos that make sense for all these and you will se that it's not that easy.
I tried 3 different sets, and settled on the current one.

TIP: You can rotate the scenery using a quarter-circle like movement with a joystick.

So Down/Up are being used with other keys as a combo, which means a player would unwillingly press Down for accelerating down, without actually wanting it. Hence Accelerate Down had to be a combo. FIRE is being used as a Shift key to access other functionalities.

When I press "left" or "right" (maybe other keys too - I am not sure), there is a little pause before the cube moves, so the moving feels a bit "heavy".
I often over-rotate the cube - for example when I press "left+fire", it often rotates twice.

The game feels a bit slower tp respond in places, due to the delay and because It moves 2 chars at a time, related with the frame rate currently being used, but also because I never loose a key press, since I read them every single frame and keep a queue of key presses.
If I speed it up, then it gets too fast and becomes harder to control. So currently is a kind of a compromise.

However, for piece rotation I wanted to implement a press and release kind of thing, to avoid unwanted multi step rotation if the key stayed pressed for too long. But I didn't find the time to polish that bit until the deadline.

I won't do this press and release it for other actions, like acceleration or board rotation (maybe for move Left/Right I'll aso implement), but for rotation seems necessary to be more deterministic.
Although currently, I can do rotation and acceleration at the same time. It comes with practice.

Still lots of things still to be improved and polished over.

[Art]

OK, I understand your logic about controls. I finally made it to the 3D part once, but I couldn't really test it, because I could rotate the game board only in one way using left+up or right+down. I tried other combinations, but without any success. In any case, it looks good. Sometimes it's a bit confusing when some cubes overlap, mainly when I see only one face of all cubes, so I don't know which one is in front of which one. Maybe some dithered shadows could help.

I think my main problem is that I often indend to do some move, but I am not able do it properly as I want and then it's too late. Maybe it's hard to control for me (for example the cube rotation or the board rotation), maybe it's too fast for me (I mean short time to place each cube when the board is half-full) or maybe I am just not experienced with this type of game. But I like it, it's a good game! Probably I would need to play it more to get used to it.

[RMartins]

OK, I understand your logic about controls. I finally made it to the 3D part once, but I couldn't really test it, because I could rotate the game board only in one way using left+up or right+down. I tried other combinations, but without any success. In any case, it looks good.
...

OK, I'll lay it out in clear.

To rotate the scenery / 3D board, you have 2 choices. And this is mostly to address different preferences for someone using a joystick, but also using a keyboard.

Some people will se rotation differently, i.e. some people think of rotation by looking at the axis of rotation from a Top -=> Down view, while
others look at it from a Bottom -=> Up perspective.

If you think about it the same axle, rotating in the exact same direction, will have a different interpretation of Clockwise or Anti-Clockwise, depending on which end of the axle you are looking from.

Having said that, I decided to support both views at the same time, because of the way I encoded the movements with the key combos, that make this possible.

So from a Top -=> Down perspective regarding (ACW or CW)
TOP + LEFT = rotate ACW
TOP + RIGHT = rotate CW

This is very easy to see if you do the movement with a joystick, starting from TOP, and either moving LEFT or RIGHT in a semi-circle motion.

Alternatively to reverse the rotation direction (Still from a Top -=> Down reference point of view, to define ACW and CW), we can use:
BOTTOM + LEFT = rotate CW
BOTTOM + RIGHT = rotate ACW

This is very easy to see if you do the movement with a joystick, starting from BOTTOM and either moving LEFT or RIGHT in a semi-circle motion.

However, Each of the Gods/Totems, controls the ability to rotate in one of the directions only.

Spoiler

- Left Totem controls ACW rotation enabled or not
- Right Totem controls CW rotation enabled or not

So the fact that you can only rotate in a single direction, means only one of the Totems unlocked.

Spoiler

NOTE: For a Totem to unlock, it needs to be fully extended up, so his feet must be showing.
However remember that I mentioned that there was a bug in these flags somewhere. So sometimes, the flag might be in the wrong state.

But I'm kind of revealing most of the tricks of the game, which should be something that a good puzzle player would like to discover by himself.

I hope this helps.

[Art]

Thank you for the explanation and I am sorry if I spoiled the game secrets! I didn't know if I was doing anything wrong when I tried to control the rotation and didn't know that it was a part of the game to figure it out.

[RMartins]

Thank you for the explanation and I am sorry if I spoiled the game secrets! I didn't know if I was doing anything wrong when I tried to control the rotation and didn't know that it was a part of the game to figure it out.

No worries.

I haven't uncovered everything yet. There is some stuff still to discover

[RMartins]

Now that the contest results are out, I would like to ask for extra feedback.

What people think of the game, what features work or not, what is confusing or not, etc ...

Any feedback is welcome.

[RMartins]

No takers ?

You can't say that I did not try

[Art]

I played the game with two friends. One of them complained that he had to use a combination of two keys to rotate the cubes. Both of them complained that they are not able to play the 3D part and to see how it works in 3D.

[Alessandro]

I had some tries to the game. I like it - it's not easy to make something "fresh" along the lines of Tetris these days

I still have to make those 3D cubes appear, though!

[RMartins]

I played the game with two friends. One of them complained that he had to use a combination of two keys to rotate the cubes. Both of them complained that they are not able to play the 3D part and to see how it works in 3D.

OK, thanks for the feedback.

But I would ask, what is the alternative solution to the keys ?
I'm asking, because I investigated at least 3 or 4 different ways of going about it.
I see no better solution, using only 5 keys.

I explained the details in a previous message.

Can you clarify what you mean by "they are not able to play the 3D part" ?
They didn't reach it ?
Or they don't know how to rotate the board ?

Have you shown them the extra instructions and tips I posted on this thread ?

[RMartins]

I had some tries to the game. I like it - it's not easy to make something "fresh" along the lines of Tetris these days

I still have to make those 3D cubes appear, though!

Yeah, I think the real issue was mentioning Tetris, because people immediately enter a Tetris mode in their mindset.
But the game plays nothing like Tetris.

Check the Tips I gave on this thread.
You need to unlock at least one of the Totems (make it go up until its feet are visible), to be able to rotate in one of the directions.
Each Totem controls one of the two 3D rotation directions.

Thanks for the feedback.

If you need any further help, after you read the Tips on this thread, just ask.
I'll be glad to help out.

I may have erroneously assumed that players would be curious to explore and find the gameplay details and mechanics.
But apparently, at least to almost everyone I talked too, they just assumed very simple mechanics and just think the game is buggy or similar.

To be honest, not sure how to address this.

I was thinking, on maybe add some status text, when some specific stuff happens, to make the user aware, for example, that a Totem unlocked, besides the Totem moving and reaching top, maybe state explicitly "Totem Unlocked" somewhere !
And do the same for other events, like Score bonus and stuff like that.

But It might feel a bit like taking the user by the hand.

[RMartins]

I initially had planned to make each Totem drop, force a rotation in its own direction.

But from initial testing, I thought it might generate disorientation, since dropping 3 times in the same direction (same totem), without having one of them unlocked, would make it a lot harder to play, since the parts now are spawned depth wise to the player view, but the player doesn't have a way to turn the board until it Unlocks one of them.

Which in a way is part of the challenge, to not get caught in a bad situation.
But you need to first learn what a "bad situation" is.

Anyway, game balancing issues depend highly on the target audience.

[Art]

I played the game with two friends. One of them complained that he had to use a combination of two keys to rotate the cubes. Both of them complained that they are not able to play the 3D part and to see how it works in 3D.

OK, thanks for the feedback.

But I would ask, what is the alternative solution to the keys ?
I'm asking, because I investigated at least 3 or 4 different ways of going about it.
I see no better solution, using only 5 keys.

I explained the details in a previous message.

Can you clarify what you mean by "they are not able to play the 3D part" ?
They didn't reach it ?
Or they don't know how to rotate the board ?

Have you shown them the extra instructions and tips I posted on this thread ?

I don't know either what would be the best control keys layout. It's quite OK for me and I understand the reason. I just saw that it wasn't very comfortable for some people. Maybe an option for using more than 5 keys.

As for the 3D part, they tried to play it, they could rotate the board etc., but it was too hard for them to play in 3D. They couldn't imagine the 3D connections between game elements.

[RMartins]

I don't know either what would be the best control keys layout. It's quite OK for me and I understand the reason. I just saw that it wasn't very comfortable for some people. Maybe an option for using more than 5 keys.

As for the 3D part, they tried to play it, they could rotate the board etc., but it was too hard for them to play in 3D. They couldn't imagine the 3D connections between game elements.

Yep, some people need a bit more visual info to be able to fool their brains into thinking that it's actually 3D.
Granted that the effect doesn't work for everyone.

The fact that is all blocks without an extra recognizable structure, like a building or something like that, also doesn't help.
I have some experiments, where these extra clues help a lot.
But that is probably for another game