HI Everyone, we’ve just added our first UI elements into the game, all controlled from the assembly code. These are notification windows and can have their icon and horizontal size changed to suit. As the puzzle grid border is black we chose a white border to these windows which seems to make them pop out much more. The slight transparency allowing the background to be seen is nice.
We’ve also completed the hinting system. The hints image below shows all the hints turned on. When a tile is in the correct position you’ll get a little gold notification, if not, you’ll see blue indicators for the direction the tile needs to move up and down or left and right. The hint levels are as follows, 0 = no hints, 1 = Gold indicator on Hover, 2 = Always show gold indication and show movement indicators on hover, and finally 3 = Everything always displayed. Your bonus multiplier is reduced by a set percentage based on the highest hint level you used during solving the puzzle. Multiplier is also reduce by an additional 5% for each quick reveal you’ve used.
We also updated our logo image which is still inspired by the original, but it has a lot more colour and really makes our website pop, as our website is mostly black and white. The original pewter figurine which was purchased by our lead developer and senior partner way back in 1986 from ‘Royal Selangor’. Droofus as the figurine is affectionally know has now retired, but still sits on the desk below our dev’s monitor.
HI there, thanks for checking it out. Yes there are further mechanics we haven’t yet implemented, but you can always switch to easy mode as well where the blocks are twice the size..
Solving the grid in hard mode is one of those rare achievements you could unlock, we’re not taking movement count into consideration when calculating the final score because given the size of the grid it seemed unfair.
We also don’t use time taken to solve, because we want people to play for a bit when they have a few free minutes then come back later and the grid would still be in the same arrangement. Sure we could just add the time while the game is running, but if someone left the game running and went off to do something else then that too would be also be unfair.
Bonus multiplier is calculated as follows:
-25% if easy mode used, - an additional 20%, 30% or 40% depending on the highest level of hinting used, then -5% for each quick reveal used, like looking at the picture on the front of a physical puzzle box.
It would be nice to take move count into consideration, though the value for each move would probably be something like grid size / some value, so in hard more each move might cost 0.01% and in easy mode it would be 0.025%
But then the problem is we allow people to switch between easy and hard modes at will, though this does cause a grid reshuffle. In such a case we’d need to reset the move count to zero on change. But still move count is pretty erroneous as it all depends on how lucky you were with the initial shuffle.
Maybe the game doesn’t need scores? It could be as simple as a star for each unused hinting level
You could also introduce other ways of scoring, like say tiles randomly light up as bonus tiles after a player move, but disappear after x moves / minutes. The player has to reach it before that, to earn (purely optional) points. That’s pretty simple and unintrusive.
True, we have lots of ideas to try out, in the end we’ll go with the most enjoyable, the next system to implement is the drops system, which occurs when you move a tile. There is a random chance for a helpful item to appear in the black square which will help greatly in grid solving..
