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Fun little game, I like the idea with the special blocks making it increasingly challenging.

Some notes:

  • It's hard, could easily start of easier. And with a tutorial... you know... arrows and text... like "grab the blinking block", "move it away from the tower", "grab the sticky block", "watch it all fall to pieces".
  • It's not particularly pretty, but more importantly... it doesn't communicate very well. Others have commented the outlines, and I agree, but I'd also add that the design of the block probably could be made to communicate the block's properties as well.
  • It took me a little while to figure out that I need to move the blocks far enough away from the tower to get rid f them. This should probably  be mentioned at startup.
  • Controls with mouse+keyboard are fine, but feel a bit... "gamey"? Could the act of removing blocks maybe be made to feel more "physical"? 
  • Music fits well but I perceived them as repetitive fairly quickly.

There's potential here for a fun little time waster, I had fun playing it! I think the upgrades are a good direction for extending the basic game, but I think one could probably find quite a few more physical mechanics to extend the gameplay further. Good luck!

Thank you for the feedback! I agree with a lot of your points, although I am curious, what would you consider doing to make the act of moving blocks more physical? The tutorial and visuals absolutely need to be reworked, so that is definitely on my list.

(1 edit)

Fair question. I think one of the things that feels good about jenga i general, and your game in particular, is the "physicality" of it... the very act of moving the blocks just feels satisfying. I'd want to recreate the feeling of direct manipulation of the physical game as far as possible using the mouse, which probably implies dragging the blocks rather than controlling them with WASD. I can see the problem, but maybe constraining the blocks to only moving in the horizontal plane (same as with WASD) and then mapping the mouse pointer onto that could work? It would also leave the non-mouse hand to do camera panning and tilting during movement operations, which could come in handy. Or maybe WS could be used for vertical movement and AD for rotation around the up/down axis, to be able to perform a clean and careful extraction? I think this would need to be prototyped.

In general I believe that the feel of manipulation is probably the most important thing to get right with this kind of game.

Thanks for the elaboration; it is really helpful. I am definitely going to find some time to prototype it!