Has anyone played Close Castles at a convention, etc.? This looks very similar in style to that... does it play that way?
The only issue I have is that you can outsmart even the Hard AI 95% of the time by strategically covering the entire left and bottom edges with walls facing in, winning the game by default. I know it's just the AI, but it's something a human opponent would pretty quickly shut down. The AI at all difficulties just lets it happen as long as there's never the promise of taking out more than one space per offensive move, which makes its programmed value judgments pretty transparent and breaks the game.
There are numerous times when the AI takes my tiles and I don't get any extra moves. I've also found a way to win by fortifying all your blocks before the AI gets to them and block it out. Works every few games.
Something weird just started happening. I've tried restarting my phone like 5 times, but the game consistently crashes every time I open it, before the dev logo even goes away. Same thing happens when I try to open through Game Center. Edit: even tried deleting the app and reinstalling. Still having the issue. 5C, btw.
Boss has phone restricted through Airwatch... this is one of those games that is restricted and I can't play online with anyone.
This response is primarily directed at JCho: My little friend, of course everyone's entitled to their opinions, but see...you have to understand why I replied to your initial comment the way I did. Had you not posted anything, everything would have been fine and dandy (and I was actually contemplating just deleting it, but then I'd have to put up with an endless slew of "WHO DELETED MY COMMENT?!?"/"TOUCHARCADE MODS ARE TWATS"/"HURR DURR NO FREEDOM OF SPEECH ON THIS WEBSITE" posts, which really...no one wants to handle) but after the developer's superbly reasonable response and his "We'll see what happens down the line based on player feedback"-type comment, I fear the masses checking out this thread will pull an App Store/Google Play Store on us and start to comment "WHY DIS NOT FRI? IF IT WUZ FREE...I WUD HAF BOT IT~!", inadvertently sticking the developer between a rock and a hard place, ultimately leading to Kindo being turned into yet another Free to Play title. I say yet another, because it's brilliant that they chose to go premium and I was honestly shocked when I found out (having not really followed too much of the pre-release stuff) that I just had to buy it before there was really any impressions out there or whatever...and having already spent a good 30 or so Dollars on the App Store this week. I chose to back up a very admirable move, regardless of how the game turned out...and have been more than pleased with how it in fact did. I don't want every Tom, Dick and Sally checking out this thread to now reconsider buying this just because there's the chance they could save a couple of bucks if (and that's a big IF) the developer considers going down the Free to Play path one day. If, Odin forbid, Kindo isn't the massive multiplayer hit it deserves to be, I would strongly consider launching an entirely new Free to Play version of it with the limited games and a way to disable ads (yes, it should definitely have ads too) and unlock the backgrounds through IAP...and ultimately relabeling this version to "Kindo: Premium Edition" or "Kindo: The King's Crown Edition" and leaving it as it bloody fantastically premium as it is. Oh...and one more thing: If you've been following the mobile scene for a while (like you probably are), you'll know that while the whole "Try for free + premium IAP unlock" model is realistically the best model for the platform, it doesn't ****ing work. No, I'm not just spewing crap from my mouth. It's been proven! This is just one example (and I seriously am not going to be assed to check out 10 million threads on TouchArcade to find the handful of other examples that do in fact exist, just to further prove my point): "Gasketball had been downloaded 200,000 times in its August 2012 launch week and was briefly ranked near the top of an iTunes top downloads ranking, though it did not break the top 200 grossing chart. The game's conversion rate from its free-to-play base package to the paid version was 0.67%—lower than their goal of at least 2% of an estimated five million downloads". SEE? (No, there shouldn't be a ****ing smiley there...what happened with Gasketball was a ****ing travesty.) Oh...was I forgetting something? Of course! *instructs reader to kindly look below* Now suck on that JCho!
Brilliant gameplay. Easy AI is too easy, but I at this point I still could not win from medium AI. Great challenge.
Despite the (previously) close names and theme, the games don't have much in common in terms of gameplay. I haven't played it but from what I've read Close Castles is a real-time strategy multiplayer game played with gamepads, whereas Kindo is a turn-based board game from the Abstract Strategy genre. Also if you'd like to know more about where Kindo came from, I wrote a blog post last summer about it: http://blog.spacebears.fr/post/94007945337/constraints-as-game-design-tools Nice catch! It's true that it could have been a bit more obvious... To get back to the previous discussion on business model, we're indeed listening to what the community has to say but won't change the game to a freemium model for a few comments in a forum. I was more thinking about tweaking things for potential Android, Web or Desktop versions later down the road. We know that iOS games rarely get a first chance to shine, let alone a second one, and we probably wouldn't have had a better feature spot as a freemium game. So 1. We definitely have a lot of room for improvement here. We're working on it but it's a tricky subject! 2. As I was saying to greenleaf in the previous Upcoming thread, we actually like the immediacy of the game, the fact that you can open a game, play your turn and leave without having anything else to tap or validate. But I do understand the need. I sometimes wish I could have pressed an Undo button to change my play! We could probably allow both methods and put a toggle in the Settings, but then it would be twice as many things to design, develop and debug. We'll see what we can do on this! 3. It's at the top of our list of UI improvements. We're considering using something similar to the "clear" button in the iOS Notification Center. Thanks to everybody for trying the game and letting us know what you think! We're glad to see that most of you seem to enjoy the game
Thank you for your answer. To 1. Yes, I understand what you mean. In my youth I wrote a chess AI which was not so bad. But it was a hell project which took two years. Right now I get around 50% on the expert level. So a better AI would be welcome. To 2. Sometimes I try to make a move like drag and drop. But instead placing a new stone I make a wall. So a undo would be nice. To 3. Sounds great.
Maybe instead of keeping old games around just have a stats page where it says how many times you've won or lost? It's fine the way it is though. I just delete my lost games and keep the won ones so I can keep track. The undo button would at least be nice for AI, if not live games.
