Post by OverBern in Hrs-Ttob jam comments

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Ended up with a score of 19500ish (before getting stuck) in regular mode, 50000 (before getting bored) in turbo mode. Reasonably fun, but can't see myself playing more of it.
Games praising me constantly gets on my nerves, so changed from English to a language I don't understand. Changing language in the menu while the game is running doesn't seem to work, so had to restart to do that.

The way passing multiples of 5000 points resets your pieces (I ended up referring to the block shapes as "pieces". It's not really a good name for them.) is theoretically neat. One time I was in a bad position and placed pieces hoping to get enough points to get rid of my last piece. But often it just trips me up / is annoying because I have plans for the rest of my pieces.
Maybe it should give you something else instead of clearing your pieces , e.g. give you a piece with special powers. You just placed a piece, so it's guaranteed that one of your three slots for a piece will be empty.

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ABOGAMER14 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

"Hey! Thanks for the deep dive into the game mechanics. Your feedback on the 'piece reset' at 5k points is spot on—I never thought about it as a potential strategic annoyance until now. I love the idea of replacing that reset with a 'power-up' piece; it sounds like a perfect way to add depth rather than frustration. Also, noted on the UI/Language settings—I'll work on making that smoother in the next update. Really appreciate you hitting that high score, and stay tuned for the changes!"

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OverBern14 days ago(+1)

If you're doing a power-up piece, one idea I had was a piece that removes instead of adding.
There's a lot of games that have like bombs, but this game has the square 3x3 blocks, so blowing up a square area would be a little too strong.

So my first idea was it's a random L or S tetris piece (so it's consistently 4 blocks in a weird shape), and it's holes instead of blocks. No limits on where you can place it. It turns the area you place it on into empty space.

But I think that's a little too simple. Too good at cleaning up messy areas with many small holes. So maybe it's better to have a piece that replaces blocks with holes and holes with blocks. At worst you just play it somewhere with no pieces and it works like a normal piece.
An inversion piece like that should probably have very simple shapes, though. Boxes and lines. So you don't need to think super hard about how to use it.

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ABOGAMER13 days ago

"This is brilliant! The 'Inversion Piece' concept is exactly the kind of strategic layer the game needs. I love the idea of turning blocks to holes and holes to blocks—it keeps the complexity high without making it a 'too-easy' clear-out button. Using simple shapes (lines/boxes) for it is a smart design choice to keep the flow fast. I’m definitely going to prototype this for the next update. You just turned a frustration point into a core mechanic. Thanks for the brainpower!"

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ABOGAMER13 days ago

I have a question regarding the design of the music and the Moroccan atmosphere.

Is it good?

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OverBern12 days ago(+1)

Played a bit more.
The backgrounds are pretty and varied. The blocks are a bit boring, but fine (the high-effort way to make these look good would be to go out and take photographs of tiles to use). The menus don't really have a lot of personality. The Liquid Glass aesthetic can be a little hard to see against some backgrounds.

Sound:
The response to doing removing multiple lines at once is always the same, kinda long sound clip for removing the same amount of lines, which can feel a bit grating.

I like some of the music, but some of it feels too intense for what the game is. Maybe you can measure somehow how dramatic the board is and decide the music based on that.

When you move to a new stage, a new track starts. This can feel a bit jarring, particularly when it jumps from a calm part of one track to a dramatic part of another track, or vice versa. E.g. the track that starts with very loud violin-like sound. Maybe look at how other games do stage or phase transitions that affect the music. It's not something I've thought hard about.

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