Scoring Explained Okay the scoring: saosijs is correct, the time is locked when you get the 3 stars. The bonus points depend on the time spent and the retries used, so it is correct that you can't better the score once you've 3-starred. I agree it's not necessarily the most intuitive thing, but we needed a way to differentiate 3-starred attempts on the leaderboards: the best thing would be to have score AND the time spent as the sorting order for leaderboards, but GameCenter (nor Google Play Games) does not support that. So we needed to have the time integrated into the scores that get submitted to the leaderboards. If the time didn't lock, you could memorize the level and grind the time down to the minimum and everyone would have the same scores. With diminishing bonuses the leaderboard scores can be compared. Does that make sense? But if you want to replay the game and get better score, you can go over to the statistics and reset your progress. This resets the timers, scores, stars and level unlocks so you're effectively starting from scratch (except you may remember the puzzle solutions). Haha, yeah there are quite a lot of metal bands in Finland, Insomnium is one of my favourites as well. Moonsorrow might be *the* favourite Finnish metal band for me. Too bad I rarely get to go to festivals, we used to go with my wife but nowadays it is quite bit trickier as we have 3 daughters.. Thanks, I hope you'll like it!
Thanks Mika! I appreciate your presence here (and your patience in explaining ) Your puzzle game is really good! I always look at GC to see what Roger- is playing and that's how I discovered this game. About the scoring ... my first reaction is, if a scoring formula is hard to understand, few people will bother, so it defeats its purpose. And currently it really is not intuitive, I had to experiment purposefully to understand the scoring. Maybe a compromise could be to have two leaderboards, one "standard", where retries don't matter and points for a star outweigh the time bonus, so that two stars (even in 0 seconds) never gets you the same score as three stars (even if it took a zillion seconds). This is what everybody immediately understands and expects. Then a second leaderboard, "first time cleverness" leaderboard as we now have, since it seems important to you to have this I'm trying to avoid to have to reset the complete game progression, so what I did a few times, was taking a screen shot and solving a level "outside" the game, but it is not as pleasurable as solving it by trying different "paths" and kind of interactively, trial-and-error, solve a puzzle in-game (and with the rotating wheels it is really hard to pre-think a solution from a static screenshot )
I always and only play the real good games, glad you noticed Saosijs ha ha, I am in the second world which looks better then the first world, and it has some really clever puzzles with the disappearing lillypads. Off topic, this is for all developers, always have Gamecenter in your game, because friends will always look what you are playing, so it's very important to get your game recognized, do I need to tell this all the time sigh.............
Thanks for the input saosijs, two separate leaderboards is a neat idea. Even though I'm worried about the user interface, how to present all that, because already there is lot of information on the level completion -screen. Hmm. I guess I'll still have to discuss this with Teemu, the game designer. We did spend quite a bit of time arguing about the scoring, trying different systems before settling on this one, but I agree that the current system is not perfect. Personally I don't mind the diminishing returns on time and retry bonuses, because they're just bonus points. I'm happy with 3 stars no matter how long it took me to get it. But I can see that it might bother some players.
Yeah, that level took me about 25 minutes too but when you finally see it it's great, one of the better levels in any game this year.
Btw the stars don't have anything to do with the time, instead they are directly based on the amount of things (creatures + cherries) left alive. So if you have 1 creature left it's 3 stars, 2 stars if you have two creatures left (or one creature + one cherry), etc. You probably were aware of that, just wanted to clarify in case others are wondering. 5 days of launch sale left!
Just completed world 2 it was somehow easier then world 1 but maybe I understand the mechanics now better, I did world 2 in 43 minutes, twice as fast as world 1. Wish there were more monsters, but I presume it was hard to think of new monsters, can't think of any with special ablllitys myself.
Sorry for quoting you this way (bits and pieces glued together ), but yes, a straightforward leaderboard on progression = total number of stars, would be nice too By the way, no.1 on world 1 is that a real, fair score?
It might be easier, but there is also that you get the hang of the game so it's bound to be easier. Same with the swamp I think, but for me the snow levels are the hardest. Some of those, anyway. As for new creatures, we had some ideas and we tried a couple of additional types but they didn't add enough to be worthwhile additions, so in the end we decided just to condense it to 3 different monsters. We do have some potentially cool mechanics lined up for another world type (plus more general mechanics as well), but we'd need to get the game really going first before it makes financial sense to implement new features. Currently it feels like we don't get discovered at all, almost no coverage so it's a bit tough. Let's hope things pick up sooner than later. Hmm, I feel like those kind of leaderboards would become obsolete very quickly though? You know once every player spends the hours they're gonna get the 72 stars / pack, so it doesn't take long for all the scores to be 72, 72, 72, etc. And oh shit that's my testing score, they were supposed to go to the sandbox but apparently not. I'll see if I can get that GC Tester account hidden from there.. EDIT: I have removed the test scores, sorry about that!
If there ends up being some kinda random generation puzzle mode or endless mode or something of the sort I'll hop on
You should hop on now because it's half price, and the game is great fun and has some really thought out levels, no random but very clever levels.
Exactly my thoughts! It is a bargain for 99 cents, heck it is easily worth more than double. Also, good premium games like this are rare and need our support. Remember that the times where we can expect endless updates and improvements for one single dollar are long gone. Developers invest money and time to make these games, it is more than fair to pay for that. Returns are not high for most premium games, competing against free-to-play games is hard. I always think, if I go the movies I'm willing to pay much more, for much less entertainment time and that espresso that I buy, I gulp down in under two minutes!
Especially when the alternative is turning a premium game into an Ad-free (sometimes) Free -to- play experience.
Saosijs your score is down in world 2 it has to do with the dev. When he removed the test scores, you just need to replay level one of world 2 again, it worked for me that way.
Thanks for the support guys! We actually had plans for a puzzle generator, and some new game mechanics + a new terrain type, but all that depends on if we get enough players to make it worthwhile. So far, from what I can tell, players like the game but for some reason almost nobody wants to write about it! With basically zero budget marketing it's quite tough to get noticed..
