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Player Thoughts : Shuffled Tracks Blog
10th May 2019
Record time for player feedback! Let's have a nosey.

You can Play Shuffled Tracks in the Extras section of the Shoebox.

RSKGames


Played ''Shuffled Tracks'' and was quite surprised to find such a polished game done in 2 days.


You'd be surprised..
... The game was almost ready to go, yesterday!!
Most of today's coding session was spent fixing up the generator to make the levels more difficult.

-=-=-

As a sliding puzzle game it is much more interesting than arranging numbers in order sliding game.


Agreed. The track blocks can be near enough placed anywhere, so it's more a "build a good track" than a standard slide-block puzzle.
The game is based on the classic 8-bit title Locomotion, but without any timed elements in play. Shoebox doesn't seem to suit timers.

I always hated how slow the original game was, back in the day, and now I've actually gone and made it somewhat slower.. So.. Um.. Guess I'm officially getting old, then!

The train pulsing animation is very well done.


Yes, I definitely designed it like that, and it certainly isn't just a leftover artifact from wonky maths!
..
!!!

The green background given to connected tiles is very helpful in solving the puzzle.


And a little repetitive, code wise, too! Rather than dump that into a quickly reusable function, I actually ended up copy+pasting huge globs of text throughout the code.
Lazy Jay!

The "check the path" code is used when generating a track at the top of the script, used ingame to draw the green background in the middle of the script, and then used again for testing completion at the end of the script.
Each one slightly different, but ultimately the same code copy+pasted repeatedly.

Meh..
It works, that's enough!

These are some of my nasty AGameAWeek habits that I've picked up over the years.

The addition of pressing the green arrow at the bottom right to move to the next level is a good feature. A ''Choo Choo'' sound after each puzzle completion could be a nice addition in future update.


The Green Arrow (Tick!) was added because I wanted to watch the train go around! Otherwise it would just instantly end with the usual swoopy game-over thing.
I'm not sure if other games, so far, require such a thing.. But.. Might be a good idea to go back and check, now that I've realised it might be handy to have!

As for the sound effect.. Only if I can think of more than one single use for it. You might've noticed that all the sounds, so far, have multiple uses.

I am not much of a word game player. I tried playing ''Crossword game'' and sometimes I found the red X mark outside tile boundary.


Yeah, I've been trying to figure out a sure-fire way to decide the best place to add the score, as well as the best way to draw it.
If you look inside the "Plays so far" (tap the player's name) then you can see that it isn't always picking up the right "Played Word".
I need to fix that, first.. Then I think having the score appear above the actual last letter of the word, rather than after it, might help quite a bit.

Working on it!

You can Play Crossword Game in the Words section of the Shoebox.
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