Pipler + DragonKid - puzzle games

Dev diaries
1

hello everyone.
I’ve almost finished my first game on defold. Currently it available only online, need to setup vertical layout and it will be ready for mobile devices

please try your skills on http://pipler.in
you can also check android build

my personal record right now is 1 cleared board and 2d board with uncleared 2 tiles.

Screen Shot 2016-09-25 at 03.45.57.png802×600 20.6 KB

if you are interested in this reply I shared strategy how to reach ninja level

6 Likes
2

Interesting puzzle. Is it original gameplay? I have a feeling that too much depends on luck, but may be it’s just me not having skills.
Executing is very nice.

3

2016-09-24 22_57_38-pipler.png793×597 31.1 KB

First attempt.

How are you setting up your fonts? Maybe too small?

If you are holding down on a piece I would not snap it to a direction until its far enough from the center of the piece. This way you can maybe avoid some of the glitchynes that seems to happen with adjacent pieces as you attempt to make moves.

2016-09-24 23_02_05-pipler.png366×141 9.86 KB

These icons are not crisp and appear to have some bleeding. Expected?

4

About icons. I’ve added these icons to the font as vector image, and then used distand fonts. I have a deadline today so didn’t have time to fix these glitches properly. fonts is small. so need to increase the font size and then change scale on every text node in gui where it used.

About movements - you need to drag tiles to the side direction at least for 0.5TILE_WIDTH otherwise it come back to original position. If match is not possible so you will be locked somewhere at 0.2TILE_WIDTH distance.

1 Like
5

yes it depends on luck, but gameplay is the same as in tetris. every move you need to check what’s appeared next. and because it’s a pure random you need to count what is on board to prevent situation when you have bunch of square tile (4 pips in the corner) and just one cross.

I tried to make it original, i was inspired by 2048+match3+tetris and finally by super hexagon when i added 3 color schemes for the case when you totally clear the board.

1 Like
6

Yes. Distance field fonts can give artifacts when you create a small one, so try making the font bigger.

7

2016-09-24 23_26_01-pipler.png132×130 1001 Bytes
2016-09-24 23_25_41-pipler.png137×131 1.1 KB

This is what I am talking about in regards to distance from the center. If I put my mouse cursor at the center and then click down it will begin to snap in a direction immediately. It may improve polish to have a dead zone at the center so that a user must have a certain distance from the center to begin to snap.

8

Thanks for screenshots, now i understand and see.
There is another glitch with tiles which doesn’t match with tiles below - in this case after click it immediately move down.

1 Like
9

Quite challenging but fun! Best so far:

Screen Shot 2016-09-26 at 06.22.39.png1604×1196 136 KB

I also managed to get into a weird state where no new tile spawned. It happened new mouse button was released outside game area:

Screen Shot 2016-09-26 at 06.24.55.png1592×1188 131 KB

1 Like
10

thanks for bug. It hard to reproduce. but i’ll try to fix it

yesterday i finished vertical layout and released game on android store

3 Likes
11

Sweet game :slight_smile:

I’ve played it a little, but I’m terribad at 2048 so I gave up.

Some small things I noticed:

  • Autocorrect will change “pipler” to “poppler” so you might have a discovery issue there.
  • GPlay will show “piper” before “pipler”; I had to scroll a little.
  • The blue on blue icon doesn’t stand out so I kinda scrolled past it the first time; noticed it after the dot pattern thankfully.
  • The icon seems to have some edges showing like it isn’t crisp enough.
  • The slanted video thumbnail is good but the video is really long and not juicy.
  • The short description is “puzzle game”; It should be something to give me an idea or to entice me about what the game is.
  • The long description has a typo: “next rang”.
  • Use the authoritative tense… something like (just a rough copy):
    "Very simple and addictive puzzle game. Can you master the unique gameplay?

Combine the dotted tiles to obtain the king 9-dot tile.

Clear the board and you can become king also!"

  • The in-game tutorial is a little short; a few more steps should be enough for people to get the hang of stuff.
  • Make the game juicy: sounds, animations (the hint one is too short) , notifications; differentiation between tile ranks using colors or something similar. An example: Juicy Breakout
  • It’s too hard from the get go (ignoring the mechanics): fast XP progression at start then it should slow down.
  • No stuff to buy? I got stuck (maybe game lost,wasn’t getting tips and no game over screen) and wanted a hint or something to allow me to progress.
  • Allow back to exit the game.

Hope the feedback helps your game because it feels nice but it needs a little polish.

4 Likes
12

I like it! I also got the same bug @britzl got where no new tile was spawned.
I played it on the web and didn’t get a tutorial but I figured it out eventually.

Screen Shot 2016-09-26 at 10.03.43.png813×614 34.4 KB

2 Likes
13

Thank you very much Fuscy for this detailed feedback.
All of this will be fixed within a week.

It’s a raw version because I made this game for games jam and yesterday was the last day for submission so I submitted it as is.

2 Likes
14

You need to SEO your Google Play description a bit more so it shows up in search. Here is a suggestion you can use if you would like:

Pips often describe dots on dominoes or dice. In the new game Pipler, you will find an enjoyable, additive puzzle gameplay experience which is easy to quickly learn, and will test your wits as you play toward mastery. The goal of Pipler is simple: combine pip tiles together in order to create 9x pip tiles, which, once formed, clear themselves along with areas of the active game board layout. Once you clear all of the area of a game board, you will advance to even more challenging layouts.

Remember these simple allowed formulas:

1 + 1 = 2
2 + 2 = 4 (2 pips are allowed to overlap, but produce different 4 pip results)
4 + 4 = 8 (4 pips are not allowed to overlap)
1 + 8 = 9

The first 160 characters of your Google Play description are very important. You should use your primary keyword multiple times. I also put dice and dominoes at the very beginning to both explain pips and also for SEO reasons as people looking for dice or dominoes games may be attracted to this one and will be able to find it via search thanks to the terms. Search rank is based on terms used + people actually playing the game so the more people playing the better the ranking…

8 Likes
15

Thank you very much Pkeod. I’m not a native speaker and don’t have experience in game publishing. With defold community support I can focus on development and it’s just awesome.

Thanks to everyone in this thread who supporting me by this useful info!

7 Likes
16

Great work, couldn’t stop playing for a while. :slight_smile: Is it impossible to get to the second stage or do I just suck?? :sob:

2 Likes
17

i shared best strategy on games jam russian page. so let me translate it here

  1. We have following tiles which Random(RNG) give us (1, 2(vertical), 2(horizontal), 4(cross), 4(square))
  2. we have 2 more tiles which only be combined from another source 4(cross)+4(square) = 8(perimeter), and finally 8(perimeter) + 1 = 9(Full)
  3. Goal in the game to make 9(Full) tiles in every field of the board. if you clear the board you will be promoted to the next rang (actually you will just get points, and board will be uncleared again).
  4. RNG give the same number of the the tiles (like 100 times 1, 100 times 4(square), etc.)
  5. you can see that this sequence (1, 2(vertical), 2(horizontal), 4(cross), 4(square)) give you tiles which could be combined to 9(Full) tile (4+4+1) and 2(vertical) and 2(horizontal) will remain on board
  6. because of previous step you need to avoid combine 1 with 1. because this game has the end it’s a real small chance that RNG give you enough 1-tile at the end of the game
  7. Because of RNG you need to control the board and avoid situation when you have more 4(square) types than 4(cross)
  8. Main steps is combine 4+4+1, but most of time it’s not possible. you need to avoid situation when you create 8 tile and don’t have 1(tile) beside. You need to make 9(full) tile as soon as you make 8(tile).
  9. Because of previous point if you don’t have 4+4+1 moves y need to make 4(cross) or 4(square) with respect to rule from 7step
  10. And final rule, after you reach master level you need to remember which tiles appeared next (you see that this game as tetris show you the tiles which appeared next). and make your moves and predict where new tiles appeared and think about what you will do with them next
4 Likes
18

need an opinion from everyone.
2 days ago with community help I noticed an issue, that the game is more complex on mobile. e.g. on browser people make 30-50 tiles but on mobile they even can reach master level (clear the board 1 time). So what i did is changed math.random function to another pseudo random And now game is hard on mobile and on browser. this is not what i want.

So what you think about following logic

  1. We have 3 levels (Novice,Master,Ninja)
  2. Each level is 25 board tiles which must be clear
  3. This means we need 25 single tiles for sure to clear the board
  4. We need 75 single tiles at least to pass the game
  5. I want to give 5 more single tiles as spare turns (when player make 9pips tile on already cleared board)
  6. we have 80 SINGLE_TILE in deck
  7. More than half of this full tiles must be created using SQUARE_TILE and DIAOND_TILE
  8. add 50 SQUARE_TILE and 50 DIAMOND_TILE to the deck this will give 50
  9. remaining 30 full tiles must be create using VERTICAL_TILE and HORIZONTAL_TILE
  10. add 60 HORIZONTAL_TILE and 60 VERTICAL_TILES to the deck

so finally we will have 80+50+50+60+60 array which just need to shuffle and give players. so any internal random function will work just in one place (shuffle_array).
And surely i’ll add additional tiles, but with the same proportion.

3 Likes
19

Pipler won special prize on games jam defold.
Result was announced today at white night conference. Also i collected there some useful and sometimes positive feedback.
In week or two I will prepare a new build with one really core and useful thing.

11 Likes
20

Congratulations. Pipler was, IMHO, the most interesting game on jam from the game design point.

6 Likes