Pips are the correct term for the little black dots that represent value on dice and dominos. This screenshot from the dev shows a move about to be made. It would connect two pips, as shown by the two black hint bars.
See- my first language isn't english, so I actually didn't know that! and all that came up when I searched on google were squiggly lines and numbers - but I geeeet it now!
There should be some "Jokers" or so that allow you to skip a level. This would help a lot with levels where you have no chance to win, eg. levels where you are to connect two tiles but with dropping cards, blocking the way.
There seem to be some issues with the Replacer injection.
Sometimes, the replacement card seems to not be counted by pushers and pullers and can be covered by other cards.
Also, the Replacer in combination with the Orphanizer can repeatedly destroy and create cards until a Tilt occurs. If this is done again, the replacement card might be placed on the same location.
Also, the par progression seems a bit excessive at times.
Yeah there is something weird going on with Replacer. Must time some timing issue as it doesn't always do that. Yeah there are quite a few combos that would go infinite and that is exactly why the tilt mechanic exists. This one doesn't net you that much score though.
The pars increasing mega exponentially is very much intended. It's a score game after all and it needs to end at some point. I tried to balance it so that it would be very very difficult after 20 and impossible when getting near 30. But it has been proven to me that even 60 is achievable.
I think that the "link to" are kind of nice at making you think about your build and card placement. The hardest one I had was "link to 7", which was possible to finish with only one card (if everything was placed around it), and I enjoyed building it and thinking about my placement
It’s actually way easier to go infinite with pushers and pullers but of course it depends on what injections you get. But yeah, added in thre tilt mechanic pretty soon on development as these infinite combos started surfacing.
Just played the online version, and during one level, I received the special task, "link to five." I wasn't sure what that meant, and I thought I had gotten the special task by having five tiles that were linked, but I was told that I didn't achieve the goal. Did the code not recognize that I had five linked tiles, or did I misunderstand?
Yeah the link tasks seem to be the generally most confusing task to players to underatand. And of course even more so if you don’t read what Scalab says about it. Basically it’s just that you need some card you place to connect to five pips in the surrounding neighbour cards. Ie. seeing five lines go away from the card before you release it.
I will definitely do something to it on the next version. It’s too confusing and can be outright unfair and/or impossible even with higher numbers.
Detonator, Bommerman, Replacement breaks the entire game but because of tilt it can't get nearly the number of points it should be getting and loses pretty quickly.
truly fantastic, unbelievable that you're giving this away for free, only real complaint i have is no way to natively turn off the music, as the music loop does get a little repetitive. love the inclusion of what looks like the actual code, incredible creativity
When a bomb is stopped by a "Tilt" infinite combo stopper, it has a tendency of breaking the tiles that were supposed to blow up but didn't. It might be at the result of the "replace" code injection triggering visually but not mechanically, making effectively fake "ghost" tiles.
I think that is a bug which at least few people have encountered and completely unrelated to the tilt mechanic. It might have happenes to you just at that same time. There is a code injection which increases the tilt limit too which is tuned a bit low to make the injection seem like a more attractive pick.
A super game. Needs some clarifications for the injections, and some clarification of the modifiers in each stage if any. Screenshots or gifs will help non-English speakers understand each part.
Awesome work, super fun to play! And the music is great as well! I did manage to run into a bug however.
When you play a 'connect the tiles' level with the 'orphanizer' code injection, and place a bomb tile next to one of the special tiles, upon explosion of the bomb tile, the special tile will activate and orpahnizer will remove it as it is 'alone'. This makes completion of the level impossible.
Hey, I did a small playthrough of your game. The sound effects are so satisfying and "Pick Code" feature was pretty creative (eventhough I need more brain power to understand that;)
this game is so fun. managed to get #1 spot and only slightly regret making my username fartass. once it gets going it is so fun to plan out your cards and see your plan come into fruition. the strat is getting the push all and pull all upgrades and then pairing pull/push cards up to make infinite loops. combine that with upgrades that add stars to the board (or that add bombs to the board if you have the defuser) and with the stack upgrades and you can eventually end up with 30+ stars looping over a hundred times. the strat is pretty consistent too if you use the middle 3x3 grid for the pip cards and use the edges for matching up push and pull cards. at that point it's all about seeing how intricate you can make your loops (matching up multiple push/pull/rotate cards) and pip chains. the main con is that it takes a lot of time for the game to go through a turn especially when you have 3 +1 stack cards like I did and an intricate loop system. this game was fun to have on in the background while I did something away from the computer though. main bug is that cards could occupy the same grid space and do overall weird stuff if I had a weird push/pull card combo going all at once. also the link seven goal is absolutely brutal I had it with the guy that pushes your cards down and that's what ended my 3779074 run.
There is actually a hidden speed up feature if you hold down space while the scoring is going on. I was supposed to add a tutorial message about it the first time your scoring takes long enough but pretty sure I forgot it.
Yeah the levels are indeed absolutely trying to make you fail past 20. At that point you've already mastered everything the game offers really and will start feeling repetitive.
Just some thoughts I've come up with over way to many rounds:
1 - Have the code injection descriptions available on mouse over.
2 - Ability to see current code injections when selecting a new one.
3 - Level task/challenge combinations nerfed/removed if they are terribly conflicting. Link 7 and it raining tiles - I'm unsure of what the odds are for having that be a winnable level. Perhaps with the correct code injections it would be more easily winnable - or maybe it isn't supposed to be winnable? I also noticed raining tiles and connect cards can become really difficult/impossible as the raining tiles will drop right next to where a tile is placed.
4 - Ability to a trade (mutate?) a tile after each round in case you have been forced to take an undesirable one that conflicts with your current deck build.
5 - An undo button just for the most recent move. I have accidentally placed a tile and it made me cry.
I am seriously impressed this was made in a month and I really hope it gets some continued development.
Thanks again for these! These all absolutely make sense. Especially the number two, wonder why I didn't add that even though I recall having few times when I was pondering myself on the selection screen whether I had another skill or not.
The levels are meant to be very difficult past 20. The pars start increasing by a lot and fast and the tasks become very hard and of course the curses make them even more difficult.
I was toying around with having a card removal and/or skip (and now that I think of it maybe even a one time use reroll) but felt like it might be too much stuff thrown at the player at the start when they're not in need of it. Of course it would make sense to add these as unlocked via code injections.
It's addicting. An entirely new and unique take on tile/card games. This is something that's going to be on my browser for a while. If you ever need anything music wise to add on to this, let me know.
One weird thing I have noticed, when you get a tilt some tiles will not be active for several turns afterwards. They become also ghost tiles.
The center tile pictured below would not connect to pips. It was like the tile wasn't there but still took up physical space. When a tile was put into play the ghost tile would not activate in combos but would allow the combo to pass through.
And then a few turns later, they would start behaving like normal tiles again.
haha I have just spent far too much time on this game! So much fun. Unfortunately not good enough to make the leaderboard but am on the daily one woop woop!
This suffers from the exact same problems as some of your other games:
Simple core game play mechanic
Interesting and complex rule additions as play progresses that thoroughly enrich and diversify game play. I have yet to have 2 identical runs.
Easy to learn and hard to master
Terribly addictive
Fantastic stuff, Antti!
I would like to be able to see the description of code rules during game play. The only time I think I ever saw those is when they are first introduced. I'm still not sure what some of them do.
Some of the runs I had I encountered some awesome code injection combos and then didn't see them again. I'm not sure if that's just a balance/RNG thing. I would like to see those more powerful injections combos a little more frequently.
It's really pleasurable to start playing a game and think "ok...familiar...but what the hell is really going?" and within 15 minutes be very much intrigued as comprehension starts to sink in and the richness of the game play emerges.
I need to figure out what kind of combos you had going on to get that high score you set.
At first I only had the code "description". I had a suspicion that it would cause some annoyance to players who can't/don't want to understand them so I added the "real" descriptions too but decided to show them only when introduced. I guess there would be no harm in showing that message again too when hovering on the icons while showing the code bit too.
There are some quite crazy combinations indeed. There are around 30 different injections in total and they really aren't balanced at all how they're given, everything has the same chance. And they aren't very balanced power wise either. Some of them are pretty bland and I always don't pick them and some are just god tier.
I did want to have more different ones still but couldn't really come up with anything good to add. And I still want to add more of em.
Yeah that run was quite nuts. I think it was the only time during the month of development where I even broke 200k. Good thing it happened when I had already added the leaderboards. 😆I made it few stages past 20 on that run and didn't even fail to not scoring enough but instead faced a very tricky special task + curse combo.
Thanks for playing and so much for detailed feedback! ❤️
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"Link to three pips" What does that mean? What are pips?
The backwards bug doesn't tell you...
Other than that - really charming game! and I love how it utilizes code and shows the actual code
Pips are the correct term for the little black dots that represent value on dice and dominos. This screenshot from the dev shows a move about to be made. It would connect two pips, as shown by the two black hint bars.
OOOOH
See- my first language isn't english, so I actually didn't know that! and all that came up when I searched on google were squiggly lines and numbers - but I geeeet it now!
We just call them "Pricks" where I'm from lol
Thank you for explaining heh! :D I appreciate it!
No problem! :3
I had a run ended by a link to four level with raining blanks.
There should be some "Jokers" or so that allow you to skip a level. This would help a lot with levels where you have no chance to win, eg. levels where you are to connect two tiles but with dropping cards, blocking the way.
lol the being able to pull cards out of your deck is hilarious.
who did the singing? it's great
I have no idea really. They were cut from some a cappella sample. Can't remember the exact source though.
There seem to be some issues with the Replacer injection.
Sometimes, the replacement card seems to not be counted by pushers and pullers and can be covered by other cards.
Also, the Replacer in combination with the Orphanizer can repeatedly destroy and create cards until a Tilt occurs. If this is done again, the replacement card might be placed on the same location.
Also, the par progression seems a bit excessive at times.
Great game, thanks for making it.
Yeah there is something weird going on with Replacer. Must time some timing issue as it doesn't always do that. Yeah there are quite a few combos that would go infinite and that is exactly why the tilt mechanic exists. This one doesn't net you that much score though.
The pars increasing mega exponentially is very much intended. It's a score game after all and it needs to end at some point. I tried to balance it so that it would be very very difficult after 20 and impossible when getting near 30. But it has been proven to me that even 60 is achievable.
Thanks for playing! ❤️
I suppose my complaint is that progression seems to be tied too heavily to randomness in the cards and injections that you are offered.
What dose it mean about tilt when I have a infinite loop?
it just stops infinite combos preventing infinite scores while also getting stuck in a loop.
Quitting the game on injection selection screen just takes you to the next stage, and you become "down an injection"
it just really sucks when you get a broken build and die to link to
Yeah, those link tasks can be unfair. I will at least nerf them to at least only have a target you can actually achieve with your cards.
i got link to 2 and got to the 1380 one
I think that the "link to" are kind of nice at making you think about your build and card placement. The hardest one I had was "link to 7", which was possible to finish with only one card (if everything was placed around it), and I enjoyed building it and thinking about my placement
Rotations are way too broken, they end up making a infinite loop that is really fun
It’s actually way easier to go infinite with pushers and pullers but of course it depends on what injections you get. But yeah, added in thre tilt mechanic pretty soon on development as these infinite combos started surfacing.
Just played the online version, and during one level, I received the special task, "link to five." I wasn't sure what that meant, and I thought I had gotten the special task by having five tiles that were linked, but I was told that I didn't achieve the goal. Did the code not recognize that I had five linked tiles, or did I misunderstand?
Yeah the link tasks seem to be the generally most confusing task to players to underatand. And of course even more so if you don’t read what Scalab says about it. Basically it’s just that you need some card you place to connect to five pips in the surrounding neighbour cards. Ie. seeing five lines go away from the card before you release it.
I will definitely do something to it on the next version. It’s too confusing and can be outright unfair and/or impossible even with higher numbers.
Detonator, Bommerman, Replacement breaks the entire game but because of tilt it can't get nearly the number of points it should be getting and loses pretty quickly.
I may have found a few fun glitches... and recorded them :))
Read through the comments, and it seems other people may have? I believe it's to do with orphaniser and replacment
And then was lucky enough to find a few more cards that broke it... more
Fun ones at least. 😅 But yeah, there are some ”known” issues with explosions and replacemets.
truly fantastic, unbelievable that you're giving this away for free, only real complaint i have is no way to natively turn off the music, as the music loop does get a little repetitive. love the inclusion of what looks like the actual code, incredible creativity
When a bomb is stopped by a "Tilt" infinite combo stopper, it has a tendency of breaking the tiles that were supposed to blow up but didn't. It might be at the result of the "replace" code injection triggering visually but not mechanically, making effectively fake "ghost" tiles.
i discovered that if you place a card down with a bomb and it activates and both cards get destroyed, if you have orphanizer it's just game over
literally impossible if you use bomberman starchild chaos and danger levels on connect tiles
why does a tilt happen and what does it do
It’s just there to stop going infinite with the combos.
it happens so early though
also it makes the cards go wonky like i wont be able to connect some cards with others and the scoring line will just stop even though it can continue
I think that is a bug which at least few people have encountered and completely unrelated to the tilt mechanic. It might have happenes to you just at that same time. There is a code injection which increases the tilt limit too which is tuned a bit low to make the injection seem like a more attractive pick.
isn't that injection stack size, i have always been wondering what stack size does
Yup, that’s it.
yaay, i'm 643th place!
wish i could play in on my phon. it is so good and fun game
A mobile version with some improvements and additions is something I’m really considering as it’s been getting pretty nice reception.
A super game. Needs some clarifications for the injections, and some clarification of the modifiers in each stage if any. Screenshots or gifs will help non-English speakers understand each part.
Wow, this is really fun. The music is awesome. The pick a code mechanic is really unique.
wish it was fully mobile friendly
Awesome work, super fun to play! And the music is great as well! I did manage to run into a bug however.
When you play a 'connect the tiles' level with the 'orphanizer' code injection, and place a bomb tile next to one of the special tiles, upon explosion of the bomb tile, the special tile will activate and orpahnizer will remove it as it is 'alone'. This makes completion of the level impossible.
Fantastic, would have been a 100% instabuy. Got to #20.
Couple of notes:
* The game can force you to lose by requiring to "link seven" when you have no seven-pip cards in your deck.
* When a bomb tile gets destroyed and replaced via the "replace" upgrade, the pips on this card won't link properly anymore.
add a cheat code of some sort
Hey, I did a small playthrough of your game. The sound effects are so satisfying and "Pick Code" feature was pretty creative (eventhough I need more brain power to understand that;)
SOOOOOO GOOD!!! how long it take you to make, its just amazing!?
Thanks! ❤️ I made it quite casually during a month. On average maybe put something like an hour or two per day to it.
man you must be pretty good thats such a short time for a game like this, i hope to see it get updates and more polish and content.
this game is so fun. managed to get #1 spot and only slightly regret making my username fartass. once it gets going it is so fun to plan out your cards and see your plan come into fruition. the strat is getting the push all and pull all upgrades and then pairing pull/push cards up to make infinite loops. combine that with upgrades that add stars to the board (or that add bombs to the board if you have the defuser) and with the stack upgrades and you can eventually end up with 30+ stars looping over a hundred times. the strat is pretty consistent too if you use the middle 3x3 grid for the pip cards and use the edges for matching up push and pull cards. at that point it's all about seeing how intricate you can make your loops (matching up multiple push/pull/rotate cards) and pip chains. the main con is that it takes a lot of time for the game to go through a turn especially when you have 3 +1 stack cards like I did and an intricate loop system. this game was fun to have on in the background while I did something away from the computer though. main bug is that cards could occupy the same grid space and do overall weird stuff if I had a weird push/pull card combo going all at once. also the link seven goal is absolutely brutal I had it with the guy that pushes your cards down and that's what ended my 3779074 run.
Haha, only slightly. 😅
There is actually a hidden speed up feature if you hold down space while the scoring is going on. I was supposed to add a tutorial message about it the first time your scoring takes long enough but pretty sure I forgot it.
Yeah the levels are indeed absolutely trying to make you fail past 20. At that point you've already mastered everything the game offers really and will start feeling repetitive.
how do the link x number stages work i'm so confused
You have to link the pre-populated tiles to each other. Make them connect.
no i mean the stages that just say link three tiles with a clear board and no par
3 'pips' have to connect to another 3 'pips' when placing a tile.
oh okay thank you so much :)
Quality of Life / Feature Wishlist
Apparently I can't step away from do;MIN(0).
Just some thoughts I've come up with over way to many rounds:
1 - Have the code injection descriptions available on mouse over.
2 - Ability to see current code injections when selecting a new one.
3 - Level task/challenge combinations nerfed/removed if they are terribly conflicting. Link 7 and it raining tiles - I'm unsure of what the odds are for having that be a winnable level. Perhaps with the correct code injections it would be more easily winnable - or maybe it isn't supposed to be winnable? I also noticed raining tiles and connect cards can become really difficult/impossible as the raining tiles will drop right next to where a tile is placed.
4 - Ability to a trade (mutate?) a tile after each round in case you have been forced to take an undesirable one that conflicts with your current deck build.
5 - An undo button just for the most recent move. I have accidentally placed a tile and it made me cry.
I am seriously impressed this was made in a month and I really hope it gets some continued development.
Thanks again for these! These all absolutely make sense. Especially the number two, wonder why I didn't add that even though I recall having few times when I was pondering myself on the selection screen whether I had another skill or not.
The levels are meant to be very difficult past 20. The pars start increasing by a lot and fast and the tasks become very hard and of course the curses make them even more difficult.
I was toying around with having a card removal and/or skip (and now that I think of it maybe even a one time use reroll) but felt like it might be too much stuff thrown at the player at the start when they're not in need of it. Of course it would make sense to add these as unlocked via code injections.
It's addicting. An entirely new and unique take on tile/card games. This is something that's going to be on my browser for a while. If you ever need anything music wise to add on to this, let me know.
Job well done.
Is is a very impressive game! Very neat concept and a cool interpretation of the theme
One weird thing I have noticed, when you get a tilt some tiles will not be active for several turns afterwards. They become also ghost tiles.
The center tile pictured below would not connect to pips. It was like the tile wasn't there but still took up physical space. When a tile was put into play the ghost tile would not activate in combos but would allow the combo to pass through.
And then a few turns later, they would start behaving like normal tiles again.
Yeah I’ve noticed this too but no idea what causes it. It seems to happen with explosions with the replacement skill which you seem to have here too.
If it's an error, it's a very graceful one that didn't break anything.
It seemed to occur pretty consistently when combo chains lasted more than 40 seconds or so.
this game is genuinely incredible and has really got me hooked! amazing job
Super polished. Really fun as well!
"Looks like it's raining blanks."
Task: Link 5
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hey at least it wasn’t link 7. 😅
haha I have just spent far too much time on this game! So much fun. Unfortunately not good enough to make the leaderboard but am on the daily one woop woop!
This suffers from the exact same problems as some of your other games:
Fantastic stuff, Antti!
I would like to be able to see the description of code rules during game play. The only time I think I ever saw those is when they are first introduced. I'm still not sure what some of them do.
Some of the runs I had I encountered some awesome code injection combos and then didn't see them again. I'm not sure if that's just a balance/RNG thing. I would like to see those more powerful injections combos a little more frequently.
It's really pleasurable to start playing a game and think "ok...familiar...but what the hell is really going?" and within 15 minutes be very much intrigued as comprehension starts to sink in and the richness of the game play emerges.
I need to figure out what kind of combos you had going on to get that high score you set.
Great stuff and thank you!
At first I only had the code "description". I had a suspicion that it would cause some annoyance to players who can't/don't want to understand them so I added the "real" descriptions too but decided to show them only when introduced. I guess there would be no harm in showing that message again too when hovering on the icons while showing the code bit too.
There are some quite crazy combinations indeed. There are around 30 different injections in total and they really aren't balanced at all how they're given, everything has the same chance. And they aren't very balanced power wise either. Some of them are pretty bland and I always don't pick them and some are just god tier.
I did want to have more different ones still but couldn't really come up with anything good to add. And I still want to add more of em.
Yeah that run was quite nuts. I think it was the only time during the month of development where I even broke 200k. Good thing it happened when I had already added the leaderboards. 😆I made it few stages past 20 on that run and didn't even fail to not scoring enough but instead faced a very tricky special task + curse combo.
Thanks for playing and so much for detailed feedback! ❤️
I know this is really old, but the game is still being played and enjoyed thoroughly.
I would really appreciate it if you could go back in and add the plaintext injection descriptions like you mentioned in the above post.
Interesting game. I'm getting the hang of it.