Messages

1

Skyward Collapse / Re: Care to weigh in on potential logo concepts? Vote here! (Round 4)

« on: April 04, 2013, 11:25:54 PM »

Most of these logos make me think the game is called Skyward: Collapse. For me, 277 and 242 are probably the best, though I don't care for the top of the island in 277. I like the background in 268, but not the text (at all). The W in 276 might be nice for game icons, but stylistically, I'm not a big fan of it and the logo relies on it. 274 and 226 also come across to me as a bit bland, without anything particularly interesting or noteworthy about them.

About 277, I don't like that Collapse casts a shadow on Skyward; it looks messy to me.

2

Shattered Haven / Re: Shattered Haven -- Another Upcoming Project

« on: August 03, 2012, 12:07:17 AM »

Okay, on hearing more about it, I'm definitely behind the idea. Gotta have my time to think. Tidalis just killed me in that way. Any puzzle that I ever had time pressure to make lots of combos or points in, I just lost. I could not get a grasp on that.

I wonder what kinds of traps we'll be able to play with... =D

Well, the other half of Tidalis (brainteasers) had no time constraints and usually no reflex requirements; you'd set it up at your own pace and, if you did it right, watch it clear. Unfortunately, though, I don't think we did a very good job of advertising the brainteasers as a completely different mode of play and an alternative to the action of the adventure mode, so I doubt a lot of players ever found them.


As for Shattered Haven, I enjoyed playing this one a lot back in the day when it was Alden Ridge and am incredibly excited about this revival. I also really appreciate intelligently-crafted levels; I believe a clever designer can do a lot that procedural generation just can't. I'm expecting very good things.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: [FILLED] Looking for artist(s) to develop new style for A Valley Without Wind.

« on: July 06, 2012, 04:15:38 PM »

That's a substantial improvement over the last version, both in terms of gameplay and aesthetics. Definitely a nice style that I think works well with the game.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: [FILLED] Looking for artist(s) to develop new style for A Valley Without Wind.

« on: July 05, 2012, 06:16:36 PM »

Okay, so here's a couple of pieces that Studio G is working on.  More cartoony than I'd like for the characters, but there are some interesting new techniques in here that I think we can make work from a technical standpoint.  Having some depth to the ground layer is pretty cool, although it would require introducing some new rules to the actual procedural generation to prevent grounds that are too small, etc.  That's a substantial amount of technical work, but it would just really be a layer over top of what we already have, so that's not the end of the world.

I've found that this kind of angled ground makes jumps in platformers more difficult because it's hard to tell where a ledge begins and ends when jumping to or from them. In modifications I've played that add this in to games that didn't already have it, I think it has a negative impact on gameplay. That said, with the procedurally generated terrain in A Valley Without Wind, it may not be a problem because the gap distances won't be fine-tuned like they are in a traditional sidescroller.

Also, it looks like it would make it so things can hide behind the left side of a wall because it's angled in front of them; based on the mockup, that's probably big enough to completely hide some things from view.

5

Tidalis Technical Support / Re: redeem on steam error

« on: May 07, 2012, 11:56:44 AM »

Yeah, for those who've contacted Steam support and haven't been able to get any help on this matter, it's looking like BurtonJ is your best bet. He helps out with this problem for AI War, so it should be the same thing here. This is one situation where piracy actually hurts paying customers; it's really frustrating and I wish we had more direct control over it. Hopefully BurtonJ can solve this for you guys!

6

Tidalis Technical Support / Re: redeem on steam error

« on: May 05, 2012, 04:04:58 PM »

I believe this is a mistake on their side. We did get Steam redemption set up (see this post and its replies), but I vaguely recall that Tidalis might not have actually ever made it onto that Retail CD Keys page. From the sounds of it, getting this set up is a very manual process for them, so such a mistake wouldn't be impossible.

I'll ping Chris about this to see if there's anything he can find out.

7

Tidalis / Re: Puzzle 3-3

« on: February 23, 2012, 02:30:23 AM »

I'm glad that was helpful and that you're enjoying the game so much. It's really exciting that you've made it through that many of the puzzles; congrats! The level 5 puzzles get pretty hard, and puzzle series 2 is also very challenging. I hope you keep us informed on your progress! I'd be happy to help more if you wind up getting stumped. Good luck!

8

Tidalis / Re: Puzzle 3-3

« on: February 22, 2012, 02:36:05 AM »

This puzzle is one of my favorites, since it has a really neat trick to it.

You can't start this puzzle with the yellow blocks, since that will get you nowhere right away. So, there are only two yellow blocks that can fall and send out a stream you can use to clear the other yellows, and because the top one is locked in a useless direction, that leaves just one; this needs to be the first block in the single yellow chain. Because the locked block points in a useless direction, it has to be last block in the yellow chain. There is also only one position in that column where those two blocks can interact with the other yellow blocks, so the first block needs to send out a stream at that position and the last one needs to be hit at that position. This puzzle highlights that blocks that are part of an in-progress chain don't have to remain stationary; the fact that streams take time to travel and that multiple chains can happen at once allow you to move blocks mid-chain to great effect.

I hope that helps; feel free to ask if you need more!


How far have you made it into the puzzles? The action stages in the adventure mode tend to get much more attention than the puzzles in brainteaser mode, and the lack of achievements related to brainteasers (definitely an oversight) leaves me wondering if anyone's managed to solve the toughest ones. Personally, I prefer the puzzles to the action-oriented gameplay of adventure mode. I hope you've been enjoying them!

9

AI War / Re: Rtsnet dead?

« on: October 20, 2011, 04:19:07 AM »

RTSnet merged a while back with AppliedIRC, which seems to be the main branding now. You should still be able to connect via irc.appliedirc.com 6667. The arcengames.com IRC chat page should probably be updated to reflect this change.

As for channel ownership, for some reason, my account and the channel both became unregistered at some point. This probably had something to do with the merger, though it happened sometime after the merger, which was a ways back. *shrugs* It's in good working shape at the moment, anyway, and not a problem, as far as I'm concerned.

10

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Ride the lightning: rebalance?

« on: October 01, 2011, 04:19:31 PM »

I find myself accidentally using this spell all the time because of its special binding to the jump key, which sucks because of its cost. That said, keeping it on its own key would be way less convenient.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: How was your first trip to A Valley Without Wind?

« on: September 27, 2011, 01:30:13 PM »

The spawners are almost like the respawn behavior of enemies in older games that didn't have the ability to remember what you had killed, but they come across to me as more frustrating. At least in older games, killing an enemy meant it was gone until you brought it back, either by moving its spawn point off the screen or leaving the room (the latter is more applicable in this style of game). You got a real benefit from killing enemies, which was that there would be no more enemies until you brought them back by leaving.

I think that spawners would be much more interesting as a rare thing that gets players moving through a particular area more quickly, and perhaps to augment boss battles; right now, spawners are everywhere, which makes them frustrating and normal. Then, I'd suggest that new areas be automatically populated with enemies when you enter them, and the game remember the enemy when you leave if the enemy is still alive. When entering old areas, the game could decide to place new enemies there based on the amount of time you've been away; the longer the time, the greater the quantity and the more likely there are to be enemies there at all.

With this, killing enemies would get you an immediate benefit of relief, and you'd be free to explore the area as you'd like without further hindrance. There would still be enemies later, so the game would remain interesting when returning to previously visited areas. There would also be spawners in some places, which would be an interesting feature of the terrain that players would have to make decisions about. I think this would go a long way to combating the notion that enemies are currently just attrition; players need to think that killing enemies actually does something for them.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Q & A

« on: September 27, 2011, 12:35:44 PM »

Also awesome?  PUNCHING BATS IN THE FACE.  It never gets old.  It even deserves lots of capital letters, which I rarely use.

Super Bat Puncher (NES)

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Tidalis Technical Support / Re: can't shift-click

« on: September 18, 2011, 08:49:26 PM »

I think one of the recent updates changed the key binding for this from the Shift key to the Z key. The Unity3D engine that we use has problems figuring out that a key has been released if the game loses focus, so things like shift+tab, used to control the Steam overlay, cause shift to get stuck, which was causing a lot of pain for a lot of people. Unfortunately, we have no control over this bug, and the Unity team has yet to provide a fix. So, the solution was to change the default to Z, which would address the problem well enough. That would explain why it stopped working for you after an update. You can change this back to shift, if you'd like, with the Key setting in Settings -> Change Key Bindings -> Make LMB = RMB.

If it turns out this doesn't fix it, you could try removing or renaming your settings.dat and settings.bak files in Tidalis/RuntimeData. These contain all your various settings, achievement information, and your license key information (but not adventure mode saves). If the feature works after that, then it is some other setting that somehow changed, and if not, I suspect it could be something else related to an update somehow. If removing the files didn't fix it, you can restore your old settings.dat and settings.bak files to get all your info back in the game.

14

Tidalis / Re: 85% off Tidalis on Steam (daily deal)

« on: August 24, 2011, 01:22:52 AM »

Thanks for your support! Tidalis has a lot of different kinds of modes in it, so I hope you'll be able to find at least one that you really like.

15

Tidalis / Re: Is there a pause key?

« on: August 24, 2011, 01:18:20 AM »

By design, the only way to pause the game is using the escape key, which brings up the main menu on top of the stage you're currently playing. This is pretty standard puzzle game behavior, since being able to stop time would be a pretty big exploit in any action-oriented puzzle game (like how modern Tetris games are pretty broken by the fact that the Tetris Company demands that games allow the player to rotate a block indefinitely, giving players as much time as they want to think about a move even at the most difficult, high-speed levels).

That said, perhaps there are some things we can do to help make it easier for you to find combos. I suggest making good use of the right-click dimming feature, where right clicking on a block causes blocks of other colors to dim. This makes it very easy to see relevant blocks, and thus much easier to set up a chain. You can do the same with blocks that will fall as a result of that combo, right clicking on them to limit your view only to relevant blocks. If your goal is deep combos, I suggest trying to keep your chains small; the larger they are, the harder it is to keep track of the future state of the board and, thus, the harder it is to set up subsequent chains in the combo.

The most important part of getting deep combos, in my opinion, involves a method that is completely at odds with the intuitive method of planning everything in advance. Planning things in advance is good, but the deeper things go, the harder it is to keep it all in your head. You'll need to plan in advance in the actionless brainteaser mode, but in action modes, you want to only plan out two or three chains at a time and then look for new chains on the fly. In the amount of time it takes for one chain to complete, you should be able to find another chain to include in your combo. If you are fast enough and keep a good supply of blocks flowing by using the fast-forward feature, you can keep a combo going indefinitely, which is how I managed the scores I have on the Steam leaderboards.

So using the dimming feature is a huge help for finding potential chains to include in a combo, and adding chains to combos on the fly rather than planning it all out in advance is a necessity for getting around the inherent difficulty of a board with such spatial and temporal complexity. If you've played any of the Panel de Pon games (Tetris Attack, Pokemon Puzzle League, Planet Puzzle League), that same sort of mindset works very well here.

Also, a big help for doing things at a really fast pace is the Smart Drag feature that you can enable in settings. Smart drag lets you set up a chain with a single mouse drag by not letting you change the direction of blocks you've already dragged over until the next time you right click. This is fantastic for making chains that loop back over earlier blocks in the chain.

If you have any more questions about the game or its strategies, please don't hesitate to ask. I'm happy to try to help!