Hey! I've been playing for 2 hours now. All I can say is that it is indeed a very nice little game. Easy to learn. It definitly plays a lot like "Threes". But expand on the idea! Definitly worth the whole dollar the dev ask for. Even at 2$, lol, I would have bought it! I just wish more modes or characters or missions will be added in the future. Would definitly pay for more content. Congrats to the dev! So far my best run is 32!
The White/Neutral stencils are defeated when they are combined with a Red/Enemy stencil. If you want to use a White stencil's ability (like mining, battling, farming, etc) you need to first combine them with a resource card (Iron, Gold or Diamond). Remember, you can always replay the tutorial from the main menu by tapping on the "?" icon. Hope this helps and thanks for playing!
Thanks Mj1ggy, I appreciate it! I'd love hearing about any bugs you find on the Stencilsmith Twitter and/or Stencilsmith Facebook Page. I also passed along your thoughts of the music to the Music/Sound designer =).
It's like you can see the future Ijipop! Already working on adding more modes/missions to spice things up. Thanks for the generous praise! Glad you're enjoying the game.
Nick here, I hope you guys don't mind my replies to some of your posts. It's awesome to be able to get feedback from people playing the game. Thanks for helping to get Stencilsmith on the radar of so many gamers with your posts on this thread over the past 24 hours! Stencilsmith is my life right now and I'm doing everything I can deal with bugs and add more content. I invite you to follow the app on Twitter and Facebook. These are new pages but they will be updated regularly with "relevant" info on the game. Thanks and have fun stenciling! Stencilsmith on Twitter Stencilsmith on Facebook
I had an issue playing on my old as nails iPad mini (iOS 7) ,the actual game appeared really large like iPhone type graphics ....maybe that's because of the minis smaller screen....but that's not the actual prob.....I was able to play the first few moves until the part where I had to combine the sword with a blue tile....it kicked me/home screened me every time i make that move.. It's prob an issue with my dinosaur device...but for some silly reason I like certain types of games on a smaller screen, just my strangeness I'm gonna download on my newer device in a bit ....but I figured you might wanna know what was up with other devices/iOS . This was the first thing I downloaded today, totally love the puzzle/Rpg combo
Tough cookie Well done! Nice game. I'd call it a mix of Threes! and Dungeon Raid, and that's both high praise. While playing, I felt a need for a more solid understanding, like in threes, of what will merge and what would bounce. Also, earth cards being this multi colored confuses me a bit. Would a tiny bit of (super big pixels) texture break the aesthetic? All in all: thanks for making this, it rocks!
Hey Beth, thanks for sharing your experience on your (I'm guessing) first gen iPad Mini. As you may have seen, the game is currently optimized for iPhone 4s and above at this point but I am currently working on making it Universal to support iPads natively. One of the challenges with the iPad in general is the aspect ratio which makes it difficult to display the UI in the same way that an iPhone 5 or above given the height of those screens. Please let me know if you have more success on your newer iPad as I'd like to know that you were able to experience the game without it crashing on you. Glad to hear you like the mixture of genres!
Thanks for the feedback Fruityth1ng. I wrestled with finding the right balance of explaining the game in the tutorial without making it seem like it'd never end. I am working on a couple of solutions to this problem, the first being a Recipe list which you can access from the pause menu and it will list every single combination of stencils/cards that are possible in the game for reference. For now, I invite you to replay the tutorial which can be accessed from the main "Stencilsmith" menu which you'll get to after you complete a game. Star the replay the tutorial by tapping the "?" button. Little hint, the tutorial ends with a gem card which you don't have if you start a game by pressing the "Play" button. A small advantage but may make all the difference in a deep play through =).
Current high score leader with 75, which is unfortunately greater than the number of players on the leaderboard
Thanks for all your support. I'm ecstatic that you're enjoying the game and have obviously learned some of the strategies needed to go deep in the level count. I would love for the leaderboard count to soar as well. I'm doing all the hustling I can to make that happen =).
Stencilsmith Update Coming! Been busy working on the next update of Stencilsmith and wanted to share what you can look forward to: *Stencilsmith will be Universal! iPad's running iOS 6.0+ compatible. *Recipe List! See a comprehensive list of all possible stencil/card combinations possible in the game to be referenced anytime during the game. *Fixed a bug where player was sometimes given an extra move even after all hearts were lost. This update will also bring a price change from the current Launch Sale price of $0.99 USD to a $1.99 to welcome our iPad friends to the world of Stencilsmith! This too will be a temporary sale before until the price settles at $2.99. Thanks for all your support! Touch Arcade was integral to launching Stencilsmith earlier this month & to thank the site and the community I bought an ad at the top of the forums. Thanks to everyone who uses it to navigate to the App Store to add Stencilsmith to your iOS game collection!
The game is pretty neat. It cleverly expands on the Threes formular and makes it, I think, less solvable. Definitely solid design work! My biggest gripe is the highscore system though, which makes matches take longer and longer the better you get. You kind of get punished for improving your play. I would love to see a single-player elo/matchmaking system along the lines of what Auro does (and recently adapted on PC by Militia and Axes & Acres). This would probably make the game a keeper for a long time on my phone. As is, I'm already feeling the "match-length fatigue" kicking in.
Yeah this makes sense, even if I don't know how those games work, I understand the fatigue part. Also not sure this is a fault of my strategy or the intended end game or something else but I seem to be consistently able to get to the 70s or even 80s but my board gets filled with enemies and I can't make enough swords to keep up.
Thanks Nachtfischer & Mj1ggy for pointing this out. I've also seen your review Mj1ggy on this and am working to rebalance the higher levels to ensure players aren't penalized for doing well. This has been one of the biggest challenges in development. Initially each level required more XP to level up but I found it more satisfying to have a game that could allow a player with only a minute or two try to get as far as they can in a short period of time or other players with more time try to calculate every move in the quest for breaking level 100 and beyond. An update is being submitted for review early this week and it will include tweaks to game difficulty at higher levels in hopes of decreasing that frustration you're getting by making it very deep in one play-through. I really appreciate how much you've both played to get to those levels and for providing feedback because without it I wouldn't know what I truly need to focus on for the next update. Please keep the feedback coming and thank you for playing!
Update to 1.1.0 available for download Just wanted to give a heads up that 1.1.0 is up on App Store for download. This update will contains native iPad version along with a new menu of all possible combinations you can make in the game, ability to listen to your own music and serious tweaks to the difficulty in hopes of eliminating the frustrations of getting stuck at higher levels. Most of these updates were spawned from users on this forum who posted here or private messages me. Keep the suggestions and bug reports coming everyone!
Back atop the leaderboard! Weird bug - after I got a new best, the recipe button was blinikng so I clicked it. Both times it kicked me out of the app shortly after.
Hi Mj1ggy, congrats on resuming your reign as leader! Thanks for the heads up on the bug. The blinking of the Recipes button is intentional to draw attention to the new menu. After you finish your next game, would you mind attempting to navigate to the Recipes menu and let me know if you still experience the crash? Thanks as always!
