Hey, I'd like to introduce our new iOS/Android puzzle game we've been working on for the past two years: Oddhop! In short: the goal is to move creatures on a hexagonal terrain and hop over adjacent creatures, in order to eliminate them one by one until a single survivor remains. To spice things up, we have a wide range of features which all affect the game mechanics (as well as the visuals). Highlights include: Play with three creature types of varying characteristics! Traverse varying terrain types! Interact with various gameplay elements including portals, cherry-picking, revolving platforms, statues and more! See if you can master the over 100 unique puzzles! Enjoy the lush graphics and relaxed, take-your-time gameplay! Oddhop is currently in closed Alpha testing, and we're hoping to release the game later this Spring/early Summer. If you'd like to test the game early on, let me know - we will be expanding our Alpha group soon (and most likely also having a public Beta a bit later). More information and screenshots: here For even more, see Oddhop Press Kit I have attached some screenshots below and here is the teaser video: Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel Any comments and feedback is welcome! Thanks for the interest! -- Mika / MHGames, @mhgames_
Thanks guys! Personally I'm happy with the gameplay, as my previous games were a couple of match-3 titles so it has been very refreshing making something that is not a match-3! Hit me up with PM if you'd like to try the alpha in exchange for some feedback! It's fully playable, only missing things like music, some sounds, GameCenter and of course polish.
I'm probably sending TestFlight invites later today, so yey! Oh, also forgot to mention that the current plan is to make Oddhop a premium app on iOS (around $2 most likely), and ad-supported but free on Android (with the option of removing the ads with an IAP).
Testers wanted! We're still looking for people willing to test Oddhop and give some feedback in exchange! Good way to try the game early without paying the $2, isn't it? Hit me up with your TestFlight details and I'll add you. Android-testers are also welcome.
So got through the Intro pack and halfway through pack I and a level in pack IV. Love the visual style as it's colorful and also the animations in the levels such as the swaying trees or even the snow falling down. I really appreciate those little things being done Gameplay is easy to pick up. It does get harder trying to get all 3 stars once you have the other mechanics in play such as the revolving platform. I like that as I don't want it getting too easy if you can just breeze through the levels. The total time played stat on the stats and on the level result screen doesn't make sense to me if it's a "take your time" type of game. How about replacing that with total hops since the gameplay is all about hopping over other creatures? Will you have achievements implemented once Gamecenter is working? i did noticed the missing music. Also, not sure of the screen shakes option if it's also implemented? was trying to figure out where during gameplay does the screen shakes.
Spikeyflip, thanks for trying the game and providing feedback, much appreciated! Thanks, personally I'm (mostly) happy how the visuals turned out. Initially I had the idea of using 3D lightmapped backgrounds with these 2D characters, but I feel like I made the right decision abandoning that and just doing the backgrounds in the same style instead, even though they took much longer to make. Would you say that it is too easy to pass levels (i.e. get one star)? A few people said that and we agree, so we'll try slightly raised score limits for the 1 and 2 stars in the next build. This is a good point! At the very least we need to rethink about that marketing copy ("take your time gameplay"). Initially we didn't have any time bonus, so the time you spent didn't matter at all, although personally I like seeing how long I've been cracking away on a level pack in total. But some testers felt the bonus point system was irritating, because you'd only get full bonuses if you 3-starred a level on the very first try! So we wanted to address that and added the time based bonus points to compensate, so you get bonus points if you take your time and think about your moves (less retries) or alternatively you try various approaches but try to solve it quickly timewise. I agree with you that it isn't necessarily "take your time" type of game any more, but then again it's only the bonus points that are affected. (Btw we are also toning them down, currently the bonus points make up quite a lot of the final score.) As for the number of hops, I think it's a bit weird metric that doesn't tell you too much, whereas time spent is immediately useful. Btw the time total in the level packs counts the time for your highest score, so it stops increasing when 3 stars have been reached in every level. The total time in the statistics tracks all play time, even if you replay levels. Achievements are coming, we are currently finalizing their design so I can start coding them in. Screen shakes are in, but as this is not exactly an action game there are few places where the effect happens. Shakes happen when using the portals / wells and when breaking ice blocks / patches. As for the music, we want to have a "theme song" for the game that is played in the menus. For the gameplay we were thinking about having just ambient soundscapes, as to not be distracting. Think nature sounds, birds chirping, trees swaying in the wind etc. Thanks again for the detailed feedback, looking forward to hearing more.
Game Center users: I have a question for you! I've recently implemented Game Center leaderboards and achievements (not yet in the Alpha, but probably coming soonish). Say I have a button for reseting all player progress in the game (stars earned, levels unlocked, scores, stats, etc.). If you were to start replaying from the beginning and would use the said "reset" feature, would you expect your achievements to be reset as well? Or should I add another prompt after reset where you can choose to either keep your achievements or reset those as well? Perhaps the extra prompt wouldn't hurt, as you're probably not reseting at all or at least very infrequently.
I'd rather not have my achievements reset if I decide to erase my progress since I have put time in unlocking those in the first place ^_^
Good point, I guess I don't add the achievements reseting. It's easy enough to add in an update if somebody actually needs it. Hopefully next week I can get the next Alpha out, with GameCenter support and more. Haven't used GC with TestFlight before, so I think testers need to enable GC Sandbox from the device Settings, but we shall see.
Hey, new Alpha version 0.7 is available from TestFlight, including plenty of changes such as Game Center leaderboards and achievements! EDIT: Apparently no need for Sandbox toggling, GC should just work. We've also made scoring adjustments, time & retry bonuses now account for less of the total score, and we raised the limit for 1 star in all levels. More gameplay statistics are now tracked, and it's possible to reset gameplay progress should one want to. Tutorial sign got improvements, it's now brighter and more visible when there are unread tutorial tips, as some testers still found it easy to overlook. Plenty of bugs fixed, too! More testers (and especially comments) are still welcome as we head closer and closer to a (public) Beta!
Mmm I don't see anything on the achievements when I select it. Also, it would be nice to skip the tapping on the sign board part if someone wants to just jump into the gameplay.
Hmm. I've not used GameCenter with TestFlight before, so I'm not sure how it's supposed to work. It seems weird if it's required for testers to use separate Sandbox accounts. Do you have a Sandbox toggle in your device Settings -> Game Center section? If you have, try to have it enabled. At first I thought that was required, but then again on my other iPad device there's no Sandbox toggle and yet the TestFlight-version of the game signed me in just fine with my normal non-sandbox GC account. About the sign board; do you mean the tutorial on the intro levels? There we decided to make it mandatory to read the tutorials, because otherwise people would just not notice the sign at all and then they'd wonder what to do in the game. For non-Intro levels reading the signs is optional.
Hi I don't see a sandbox option under game center ^_^;; Ahh makes sense as it's the tutorial. Thanks for the clarification!!
Well that is weird, wonder how Apple intended TestFlight to be used with non-published GameCenter leaderboards... Maybe they didn't, wouldn't surprise me. I guess we'll live without testing GC, then, apart from my personal tests of course. Oh well.
New alpha v0.80 is now available! It includes some polish, including dynamic eye movements for the creatures. They now look at each other and events on the playfield, brings quite a lot of life to the creatures I think.
I made a "visual history" blog post on Oddhop the other day, it was quite fun looking back to the very old & ugly prototype pictures and go through the development back to this point. Take a look! In other news, for the next update we've added quite a lot of sound effects. And it looks like we're going to have the background ambience sounds for each level theme in there too (2 / 4 done so far). We've also been working with a talented composer to have a nice little theme tune for the game, hoping to have that in the game sooner than later as well.
Oddhop launching on May 12th! It's been a month, but I think this piece of news warrants a bump: Oddhop is launching next week, on May 12th to be exact! Check out the launch trailer below. And that's not all: to celebrate the launch we're having the game on sale right off the bat: buy Oddhop in the first week after launch (up until May 20th) to have 50% off the price! Just a little over week now, feels great to have this game off my hands after these 2+ years of development! Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel
