Blog - Player Thoughts - Rollyblob

10th July 2017

Each week, after I post a game, I get a nice set of comments from people.
Let's take a look at this week's!

RSKGames

RollyBlob is a great puzzle game. The puzzle game mechanics are done
wonderfully. The 60 second timer keeps you on your toes to find the
solution fast.

-=-=-

Yeah, the puzzle part of this game is what set me off thinking about Quadoban.
I've spent much more time, this week, playing and rejigging bits of Quadoban than I have focusing on this game, and .. Honestly, it shows!
This isn't the best game I've done, recently, by a long shot.

The initial levels have the path to the end which is very
helpful to get into the game.

It was necessary to add such paths, to act as a kind of Tutorial, but without it being too Tutorial'y.
I've been trying to do this more and more, lately, and with this game it seems to fit rather well.

Liked the game ending sound.

Lots of pretty generic synthy sounds, for this one, I'm afraid.
I spent about 5 minutes, maybe less, playing with Bfxr and that was pretty much it!!
Even the music's from last year's "Liquid" ALBum.

You need to get the spinning gem to unlock the level end tile, one wrong move can end the game, which makes it a challenging puzzle game as you have to figure it out within 60 seconds.

I tried my hardest to make the levels as complex as I could, but without more time, I could only really generate simple little levels.
You'll find that, once you've played half-a-dozen levels, the path layouts start to become really obvious.
Or, maybe that's just because I know how the generator works!?
To me, it needed something a little more taxing, which is when I added....

I couldn't enjoy the game due to the difficulty added by the flaming thing going in circles. All the fun is totally dashed by this. I could have managed if the flaming thing was spinning slowly or if the smoke was not present or there were some in between safe spots for the player to take cover.
I would have liked this game more than Quadoban but the flaming thing has spoiled it.

Oh dear..
Hmmm.
Well, like I said, after a few levels I got the feel of the puzzle element a little too much, and the game became rather monotonous and dull to me.
I added the swirly flaming balls in an attempt to make things a little more complicated.
I guess I overdid it, huh?!
Dang..

TomToad

Rollyball. Fun game, but I don't like that you only get one chance to solve a level. Idea: start with 3 lives, one life ends when you go off the level or get hit by the flaming asteroids (or whatever they are). You can collect bonus lives randomly placed in levels or by completing several levels in a row without losing a life.

Again, another "quirk" born out of my need to make things more exciting.
The puzzle mechanic would've been ok had I got the generator up to a decent spec, but it seems to keep generating the same paths over and over and over again.
Possible solutions for that are of course adding a level editor, but I'm still not comfortable doing that in Monkey, mostly because it's hard to then share levels without me additionally needing to create a massive online server to host them all!!

So, instead, I opted to make the game harder, with the flying flaming balls, and the insta-death stuff, too.

I apologise that neither of these elements seem to have turned out very well.

Perhaps I should do a DX fixup edition of this game, later on down the line..?

.. And, to be honest, I could do with designing a proper art style for the game, too.
Everything about this game is more than a little rushed!!

Views 127, Upvotes 36

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