[Game] Element Walkers

[Ove Ahlman]

Hey,

Here is my new game Element walkers

https://oveahlman.itch.io/elementwalkers

Features:

• Multiple characters and character switching.
• Some awesome fire, water and grass particle effects.
• 14 elementary levels. (pun intended)

There is plenty of potential to add more features to the game such as pushing boxes, picking up powerups which change your color etc. But I feel like there are still 14 interesting levels, and maybe in the future I will do a sequel extrapolating more features.

The code for the character switching is really horrible, maybe there is a better solution. If you want a look it is available for download on the itch.io page, but basically I list up all 64 different possible switches possible.

I will be happy to hear your thoughts on the game.

Thanks,

Ove

[Alan Hazelden]

Struggling to get past this early level

You might be able to have a couple more tutorial levels before that?

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[Hugo]

Well, I beat the puzzle that Alan got stuck on. But midway through solving puzzle 4, the game just passed me to the next puzzle, even though I was not finished yet. I had 2 out of the 3 characters in place. I think this level is missing one of the final goals in the middle

[Ove Ahlman]

Thank you both for the critizism. 

Hugo, Actually the objective is to fill all crosses, but ofcourse it is not ever really necessary and used only this level. So I've updated it so that it both becomes minimally harder and now solves through filling all characters on all crosses.

Alan: Indeed, the new trick introduced in that level might need a bit more smooth introduction. I also had another level which was very similar, so now I have edited the level you got stuck on so that it gets a bit more straight forward, yet forces you to use the new technique, and then you get to a harder level where you need to apply the same trick.

Again, thanks both. The game is now updated.

[That Scar]

So far, this is the most bland game by you, Ove. I've completed 10 levels but they all feel the same, like I am playing Towers of Hanoi but with branching paths and the discs are bigger but also smaller at the same time and they're not even certain about their own shape. It was mostly about doing all the options you haven't tried doing yet, which is fine, I guess (the solving process reminds me of how I was solving Hack the Net, which is a game Alan made). The graphics are also sub-par, the walls and ground are quite jarring (sound is fine, I guess). It's fine but you've delivered great stuff before so my expectations were high :P

About code and stuff:

I usually have both "all crate on target" and "all target on crate", it helps a lot while testing, too!

It's interesting how fire animation is 3 cycles, grass is 4 and water is 5.

You might want to not trigger the animations when the turn is a player turn instead of a real-time turn. Next time.

I think the rules are fine, there are only 9 different players and 81 different conversions, 1 line for each, which is doable even by hand. It becomes a problem when you have to copy-paste a larger block and possibly make changes later because that means you have to make the change in each copy and that sucks even if you have 4 copies because you have to always be mindful about changing code in those segments and making tiny tiny changes is harder.

Personally, I would try to make that part more simple and introduce combined various terms in the legend and compose the player of several objects but I generally dislike games with "character cycling" so I don't feel like elaborating on this :P

[Ove Ahlman]

Thank you very much Skalmantas for that criticism. I agree that the mechanics in this game do not have the same depth as in the previous games I have made, and I think the hanoi's tower reference is quite fair. The game takes a slightly newer twist with levels 12-14, so I hope you get to those at least. 

Graphics is not my strong side, so I appreciate that you point this out and I quite agree that the floor and walls might be made much more interesting and nice. I should really construct a proper workflow for the game creation, so I push my self to actually look at the graphics and evaluate and not just think "its fine with my placeholders". 

Among the puzzle script games I have made this is by far the most complex and indeed it should demand more organized code. Thanks for the tips.

Sorry for not living up to the hype, I didn't know that there was any... :.-)

All the best,

Ove

[igorsc...@gmail.com]

Cool game concept, reminds of She Remembered Caterpillars!
Level 4 twist was very tricky to find out xD
Didn't play to the end yet

[stellated...@gmail.com]

> The code for the character switching is really horrible, maybe there is a better solution. If you want a look it is available for download on the itch.io page, but basically I list up all 64 different possible switches possible.

You can get shorter code if, instead of character sprites for each combination, you had 4 different sprites layers, like

player0, player1, player2 (invisible)
headRed, headGreen, headBlue (head)
legsRed, legsGreen, legsBlue (legs)
player (just a pair of eyes)

And then the legend

. = background
1 = activePlayer and headRed and legsGreen (you can add numbers here instead of in the rules if you don't want the switching order to be random)
A = headRed and legsGreen
....

head = headRed or headGreen or headBlue
legs = legsRed or legsGreen or legsBlue
number = player0 or player1 or player2
playerPart = head or legs or number
partRed = headRed or legsRed
partGreen = headGreen or legsGreen
partBlue = headBlue or legsBlue

And set up with

random [ playerPart no number ] -> [ playerPart number0 ]
random [ playerPart no number ] -> [ playerPart number1 ]
random [ playerPart no number ] -> [ playerPart number2 ] (add more numbers as needed)

[ > player | playerPart] -> [ player | playerPart]
[ > player playerPart] -> [ > player > playerPart]

Then the switching can be simply

[ action player number0 ] [ number1 ] -> [ number0 ] [ player number1 ]
[ action player number1 ] [ number2 ] -> [ number1 ] [ player number2 ]
[ action player ] [ number0 ] -> [] [ player number0 ] (we don't need the number2 here, and if we leave it out then this also acts as a failsafe for levels with only 2 characters)

It also makes the cancel part much shorter

[player partRed tileRed] -> cancel
[player partGreen tileGreen] -> cancel
[player partBlue tileBlue] -> cancel