Slide 0.18 Alpha now completely playable

Hi Everyone, here is a screen shot of slide in its current state. It is now completely playable but there is lots more to add.

The drop system is partially complete with at least the red, green and blue gems working. Blue allows you to swap any tile on the board with the zero tile containing the blue gem. Green allows you to scroll the whole row left or right depending on which side of the gem you click and red is vertical.

As part of the user definably difficultly settings, you can choose to dismiss the gem by clicking on it or pick it up for later use as shown on the right. There are far more drops than just these three and obviously the background and puzzle change to suit each location. Even at the same location the puzzle may be slightly different as the algorithm chooses the largest random square it can cut from the source image.

Along with the hinting system there are also tutorial messages like the one shown. Standard informational messages are shown for three seconds and tutorial 10. All can be immediately dismissed with a keypress or mouse click. Tutorial message are only shown for the first occurrence of an event, but can always be turned back on.

Would love to know what you think of the look so far. I’ve pretty much decided now that a 5x5 grid will be the default. I like the simple look so far. Sure yes they’ll be some other navigation controls.

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It looks a lot less intimidating with fewer tiles :slight_smile:

A couple of thoughts:

I don’t think there’s any reason to auto-forward / auto-hide the tutorial text - that would make it more likely that a player misses the message, and there isn’t really any reason to do so. Just have it forward on click, as stepped tutorials generally do, or when the player performs the action the tutorial step describes.

The drops could be made readable and distinguishable by using shape as well as color, especially if there are going to be many more. Shape can also suggest function more clearly than color (ie <> = horizontal, is more intuitive than green = horizontal).

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