Took a small detour from my Devil Dungeon game to work on a card puzzler. Those with a keen eye may understand where my inspiration comes from.
So far I have the movement and grouping logic working. The next part will be creating the picture for groups. The somewhat messy but direct way of doing that will be to create unique objects for every possibly configuration. I could maybe do something with shaders, but that’s above my pay grade.
Moved forward with this. There are 10 levels now. I have a good structure in place for adding images and displaying them correctly based on the grid size. Now working on updates to make the game feel and player better — aka game juice.
Latest build
One issue now is load times. I’m doing as much as I can to keep file sizes to a minimum. At 20 levels, the size of a zip is 32.6 mb. I now have to look up how to improve this.
The game now has 50 levels. I have a script that helps make level creation less tedious, but 50 is enough to see how many players stick around that long.
Preview the latest version.
Other features added:
Future updates will include unlocking more levels from watching a rewarded ad. I also have a build ready for Android. I’m unsure how well that will do considering mobile games are near impossible to get users for without paid acquisition (ads).
The game is now in web fit testing (10k players).
Give it a try. Feedback appreciated.
I’m not sure if it will past the test because for the first 24 hours a bugged version went live instead of the latest. Fortunately, someone from Poki was available via Discord who helped make sure the test ran the latest version.
I played it for way too long 
I really like, that I could drag and drop connected pieces all at once, really convenient 
That’s the idea 
So far with event tracking, many players are reaching the max level of 50. I will be adding more levels soon.
There are other minor adjustments to make, such as sound effects, settings, and languages. Those will come in time. I’m very interested to see the final result of the 10k test.
The only Ui stuff I suggest is that I tried to click on levels in level selection screen and was sad I couldn’t select them, only play X level. Those looks like buttons, so if you are locking levels make them visibly locked (icon or greyed out)
That’s a good suggestion. Thank you!
The game was also recently approved for Android.
Web fit test done. Waiting for a review from the Poki team about my results. The web site test was played at least 13,000 times. Many bugs were found, but nothing major. Working on fixing them while I wait for Poki’s decision.
I made a significant change to the loading of levels. I was previously using a collection per level, but now I use a single level loader with a dynamic factory that updates the main game object that changes per level – the card with a level-specific atlas.
Latest update will include more sounds and smoother animations.
Still waiting for a decision from the Poki manual review. The overall process has taken over a month, probably due to a slowdown from the holidays. Ideally the turnaround time is faster than multiple weeks once a better relationship is established.
Funds for my yacht are still on hold (I haven’t received Poki’s manual review decision yet).
In the meantime, I added AdMob to the Android version and set up a rewarded ads to skip a level. I ran into a few issues when setting up AdMob.
Android version will be updated soon. Just need to fix a few small things.
Still waiting for the manual review results. I found a site that tracks new game releases on Poki. New games are coming out every few days. I suppose they’re clearing the backlot from the holidays. I also think they’re going with more “polished” games first.
Interesting, I don’t think this has anything to do with the official Game Analytics. I wonder how they got that data. It looks like they are scraping the ratings. As far as I know, Poki doesn’t have a New Games section at all (which is a shame, by the way).
The team has carefully evaluated the game’s performance, and while they appreciate the effort put into the game and going through our testing stages, they’ve decided that comparatively it does not perform strongly enough at this time to move forward.
In particular, engagement metrics would need to improve further for the game to be reconsidered. We do encourage you to keep using our playtesting and player fit test feature to see how this metric can be improved. Also be sure to check out our Developer Guide for further tips and best practices.
When you feel like your game is ready again, feel free to request another web fit test.
Not the response I was hoping for, but it is what it is.
What I could have done while waiting was launch on other platforms such as Crazygames or Playgama.
I also plan to add more content and features to increase the time played.
Oh, and I got my first written feedback.
Level 50 is the last level, so in a way this is a good thing. It means they played the full game!
Probably scraping but nothing private, I don’t think. The new games and reviews are all public.
What kind of engagement metrics did you get on the version you submitted?
Would you still be able to release to Poki then? You should give Playgama a try if Poki doesn’t pan out.
I always thought jigsaw puzzles weren’t much fun. But I played your game long enough. Nice work!
Foe the web fit test with 13000+ plays.
I admit the game could use more content. I’m tracking events and hundreds of people made it to level 50. Adding more features to improve engagement like daily challenges would help.
If the feedback was more specific, that would have helped too.
Yes. As far as I know Poki is the only platform that requires exclusivity. It wouldn’t hurt to launch on playgama in the meantime and then compare numbers when and if I’m able to go exclusive with Poki.
