This is the most addicting game in the jam so far. My highest score was 8450. I loved the concept and the graphics are done especially well. I do have a few thoughts on the gameplay tho.
I definitely prefer the one block at a time approach to dropping than the entire line dropping, because that way I can decide which ones to keep at the top and where to open a hole. At 5000 points, there was kind of a drop rush, where it dropped 3 blocks at a time at a faster rate than the usual game. I really liked that section. The difficulty there was really fun and I liked the little pause everytime I cleared pieces as it let me calculate my next move. After that, it just went back to the same dropping style as the beginning. A Scaling difficulty system in this would be really fun, maybe the speed in general increases and every 1000 or so points there's a rush like at 5000.
The rng feels really annoying because I keep getting higher numbers or numbers which don't mix and I do want to see if a bag system like tetris would work in this game. It might reduce the difficulty of managing all those pieces tho, if your board is just clear all the time, so I'm not sure.
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This definitely feels better than the original build, the blocks fall much more often and there's no annoying blocks which just won't go away because of bad rng and the difficulty actually comes from reacting to the blocks falling.
However, this does kinda work against itself because the blocks fall at an almost constant speed throughout the game. I got till 20000 points but it never felt like the challenge of the game increased. Maybe increasing speed or lowering the pause you get after every clear dynamically might be the way to go? Or having rare double-drops and triple-drops which increase in chance as the game goes on?
Other than that, this feels super satisfying to play. Compared to the original version, which felt like a game jam demo, this feels much more polished and ready to be shipped.
Oh cool!! Thank you for trying it out and letting me know! Very awesome of you!
Admittedly I was being stubborn about making all drops occur on rhythm with the music so eventually that tops out to it dropping 8/8 which is the same block dropping frequency as holding the drop button. So it basically goes from dropping blocks at 2/8 to 8/8 by 10k points or so where it tops out.
I suppose I could raise the bpm speed at that point but I think I like what you were saying about rare double drops and triple drops a lot better!
That makes me want to experiment with block dropping patterns as the difficulty progresses. Also 20000 nice score!! I had a similar experience but have been playing tetris attack/pokemon puzzle league for a long time so figured that was a factor. I think I might need to make the block number balancing a little tougher too.
Anyway, thank you so much for your kind words, insight, and awesome super useful feedback -very appreciated!
Oooooh is the music sync why the pause time is so long sometimes? I'm ngl I didn't notice the blocks dropping to the beat and... I still kinda don't. I definitely think the dropping speed should be increased, increasing the bpm might make the game feel more tense too.
I've played tetris attack once and I was really bad at it (but I'm good at tetris) so I think there's a different skill set required here.
Giving feedback is no problem, it's the least I could do to help a game I think has ton of potential.
It's subtle -i should probably make it more obvious and the pause was to reward combo chains but as the game got easier they became less necessary, I went ahead and dropped the combo freeze in this latest update and instead added occasional frozen block drops that have the same short freeze effect. I upped the difficulty balance by about 1/3 and the speed maxes out at double now too -definitely feels more challenging/ fun i think/hope! Anyway thank you again!! :D
this feels SO MUCH BETTER. It finally brings back that chaotic feel I wanted from the original 5000 drop. I do think it gets too chaotic too fast tho. Is the difficulty based on the score? Because gaining points is getting really easy when it's too fast, probably accelerating the difficulty curve. I was at around 2000 I'm not sure and then everything got chaotic and by the time I looked back at the points screen and I was at 100,000 all of a sudden. I also think the new block types are a brilliant idea. Getting a freeze within the chaos feels really satisfying.