uDG: Hexriffic

[haney64]

Greetings! This is the "official" thread for my humble entry into the uDevGames 2004 contest: Hexriffic.

You can download Hexriffic (http://www.johnhaney.com/download/Hexriffic.dmg.gz) now and try it out.

I'd be happy to hear any feedback you might have.

[arekkusu]

Hm, pretty interesting idea, sort of hexagonal Columns.

Problem:
* holding down arrow keys for a while leads to beeping. You should maintain your own keydown boolean array for all the keys you're interested in, instead of relying on the system events (and user keyboard repeat rate etc.)

* resizing window makes New Game and Sound controls float over playfield. Check those sizing attributes in IB!

* little stuff like __MyCompanyName__, Help menu...

[haney64]

arekkusu,

Thanks for the quick feedback. I've polished up the points you made, though I'm not sure about the beeping...

Currently I don't have my own sound effects, so I'm using various system beep sounds for different actions. Do you still get the beeping with the Sound turned off? If so, could you tell me what the Mac is you are running with... I test with an older iBook (600MHz), and it seems to keep up with the keystrokes without trouble...

[arekkusu]

Yes, it beeps with sound effects turned off. For example if I just hold down the right arrow key for about ten seconds. The keyboard is also unresponsive after that, so it seems like the system event buffer is full or something.

This is on a 1.25GHz 15" PowerBook, so I'm sure it's not a CPU problem :) The CPU usage in game is very low.

[phydeaux]

When does the game start getting hard? Of course, with n<=6 different colors only, there is practically no challenge if the speed is low enough- you'd just assign a color for each side of your hexagon, but then maybe pieces could fall so fast you couldn't switch to the right side in time, or new pieces kept forming from the center to make things harder. I got a little bored a bit into level 2- a 'start at level' would be good if it starts getting harder later, or maybe just ramping up the difficulty much faster.

[kelvin]

hehe, I dunno. I got up to level 4 (122 matches/660pts) by simply holding the down-arrow key. :ninja:

[phydeaux]

Haha, I should have RTFM. That feature makes it even easier!

[codemattic]

pretty neat! I love the 'lock' feature and the animation of it being 'pulled' in. But phydeaux is right - its way too easy. I stopped playing it because I got bored. Maybe at the next 'level' you need to connect three together before they disappear?

Also - I like that I can resize the game window - but the 'new game' and 'sound' buttons need to be locked to the top of the screen.

[haney64]

Ok.. thanks everyone for the feedback thus far.

Guess I was trying to make sure it wasn't too hard for people to settle into.

I'll ramp up the difficulty much more quickly in the next version. Then hopefully no one will be making this face :cry:

And the new game/sound buttons will be much more well behaved too... oops.

One thing I was pondering was whether I should put some kind of limitation on the locking of pieces, so you could maybe only lock 2 pieces each level? Things like that.. Do you think this would help balance the challenge, or take away from the gameplay?