itch.io

Hello Grinder!

Thanks for your kind words, I'm very pleased that you liked my game! As you might imagine any fundamental changes to how the mechanics/physics of Abysm works is not going to happen at this point, when the game is essentially complete, as too many puzzles depend on these exact details. I played Boulder Dash as a kid on my C128 and when I started building Abysm for a game jam those memories were essentially what I went by. For better or worse I might have forgotten a detail or two :-) In some ways they now help make Abysm it's own thing, meaningfully different than what came before. At this point though, having spent a lot of time since looking at other games in the same genre, and talking to people who are very much experts, I'm acutely aware of these differences :-)

Let me adress them and my thoughts on them one by one:

1. This is the obvious starting point, you cannot outrun falling boulders in Abysm, they fall far too fast. This was a case of me being unaware, but today I tell myself that this fits well with the general vibe and "realism" of Abysm. While I certainly don't think it's strictly better, I do think it's a valid and interesting point in the design space, which certainly affects how puzzles are constructed.
2. This is another thing that I had simply forgotten about, but that I've not added for two specific reasons:
   1. I like to keep the controls minimal, and in Abysm you only need to know how to move, nothing else 
   2. There actually is a mechanic which is a bit harder to use, but doesn't violate (1):  in Abysm you can turn around while entering a tile, thus removing the dirt, while not ever fully leaving the tile from which you came. This mechanism is absolutely used in later puzzles, and in the end I didn't like the redundancy that would be introduced by having both of them.
3. I had never played Supaplex or essentially any other game of it's kind, so I was unaware of this option and it's ramifications. However, this is another case where I (chose to) believe the general sense of threat present in my game is better served by the current design, while readily acknowledging that it's in no way objectively superior. In any case, can't be changed at this point.
4. Very fair request, but I would essentially have to rebuild the code of the game from ground up to make this happen. If I were to build a new engine from scratch I'd make it with this as a core aspect of it, but alas, that's not going to happen. My actual "solution" to this is to focus on fairly short single-puzzle levels, over the more sprawling levels of Boulder Dash or Supaplex. The levels generally do not get harder by getting longer or by requiring tighter timing as the game progresses, but by introducing new mechanics and harder puzzles.
5. This is a good idea, and already on the list of things I hope to introduce before the full release! Given that I already have slow motion functionality, I think it should be fairly trivial, though there are some worries, but I hold out hope.
6. You're right, not technically difficult, but a fairly work-intensive given the need to source the translations, and then make sure the UI layouts can handle the result. For this to happen is realistically contingent on the game selling to a certain (unfortunately unrealistic) level.

Thanks a whole lot for your feedback, I value it highly! I hope you understand the place Abysm is in, and why it'll remain a somewhat errant child in the Boulder Dash family tree when it comes to these features. If you have further questions you can ask them here or join my Discord, I'll be happy to talk more about this stuff than any reasonable person might want to listen to :-)

M'