I get this question a lot. That circle marks the spot where 5 tickets were collected earlier in the game. This is an introduction to the idea of tickets after you unlock the Infinity Mode.
You are so very welcome! We are super excited that this is getting such a positive response from players and we hope these good vibes will influence more game developers to spend the time on it.
Sorry, I missed this post earlier. Yes, I'm looking into the first one. The second one I'm aware of, but happens so rarely that I decided to leave it in the game for performance reasons. Detecting exterior edge collisions would be quite expensive so for the moment I don't detect them on mobile devices.
Pine Street Codeworks, I appreciate this. Thanks for the explanation. I am glad to know that this is not somehow unique to my experience of the game.
I don't understand the developer's intent behind the Infinity mode. It seems that it is just a poorly disguised energy-based system of "endless mode", forcing the player to wait and come back in order to make more moves. Why is this type of "free-to-play"-like mechanics and shenanigans being implemented here in a premium game? Why not just let the players play this mode as they pleased to finish the achievements at their own pace? Deliberately slowing players' ability to accrue tickets to use power-ups is not a good reason. These two modes should not conflate each other. I also think the Arcade mode is too unforgiving due to the random deck allocation of bubbles. Too many times I found to have reached basically a dead-end because of certain bubble allocation. One may chalk it up to just simply restarting the level to try again, but this mentality ignores the fundamental disadvantage (or flaw if put bluntly) of this design. Further, the Bloop fish is moving too fast for many levels to leave time for the player to think through each move. I am aware that I am speaking in the minority here, but I have not seen discussion elsewhere on this fundamental aspect of the game.
I agree. I far prefer the puzzle levels and may not actually finish the arcade levels. Still worth the money though.
I see you disagree with the design and that's fine, but slowly accruing tickets for hints and powerups is exactly why it's energy-based. This gives the tickets an inherent value without asking you to spend actual money. The alternative would be to give you unlimited tickets or Infinite play time and you could just use as many as you want, whenever you want. Could the time or ticket quantities be tweaked to make more people happy? Probably and I'm open to suggestion. I'm not sure what the issue is here. Is solitaire not a fun game because a bad decision you made early in the game cause you to lose? Unlike solitaire, Tiny Bubbles has a wide range of strategies. Your skill is very much in play in Arcade compared to other Bejeweled-style match 3 games. For example, often it's more effective to outside edge pop a mixed color instead of trying to match it. Consider how many moves it takes to make 4 green or brown bubbles vs. the one move it takes to get rid of a solitary green? The strategy required to be successful later in the game often requires paying close attention to the bounty. Look at what colors are close to 10 and work on collecting only those. Did you notice wilds release an additional color for each color they match with? Use this to get those bounties faster. Make longer chains and get more wilds when you can. You are very much in control of your success or failure in each puzzle. Build your mastery and then the randomness will have a lesser impact on your success.
That's great to hear and I'm glad you feel it still has value even if you only like the one game style. The game was designed to have these styles separated because there are some players that do prefer one style of game over the other. I could have easily interlaced the 2 game styles in a linear path, but I thought it was a better game that could appeal to more people by forking the paths.
Stu, Thanks for the detailed explanation. I appreciate your perspective which understandably differs from mine. I obviously and deeply respect your vision (you as the creator of the game). This is why I preface my previous comment that my view is likely in the minority. Let me illustrate with an example. May be you can help me to better understand the intended skill-based strategy to solve this achievement. In Infinity mode, there is an achievement called Ten is Zen to match 10+ bubbles. For 10 bubbles, this means that I have to first set up 3 disjointed islands of 3 same-color bubbles and then match all of them together with one last bubble of the same color. During this build, if the Bloop fish blows a bubble of the same color adjacent to any of the islands, that island will match away and your build is ruined. At first, I thought the "intended" trick was to use only brown bubbles, thinking that the Bloop fish would not blow this color. This turned out not to be the case, as the Bloop fish could even create this mixed color (in addition to any primary and secondary color from the RYB color model). Because the Bloop fish's position is random (I presume), no amount of skills (notwithstanding lots of patience, given this build will take multiple sessions to complete because of the limited number of moves available per session) the player can overcome this by strategising ahead to protect those islands.
Again, this is a case where this achievement requires some deep mastery of the game. This is not an achievement that happens accidentally or for beginning or intermediate players. Nor is it achieved through random circumstance or "trial and error." I will give you some tips on this one: You've nailed the basic approach, which is creating islands of 3 same-colors. However, when Bloop blows a bubble to match an island, you need to be ready for that and act accordingly. There are several ways to handle this. In infinity mode, Bloop will blow an average 1.5 bubbles after you make a move and always on the outside, so you can be ready to act. If you're trying to maintain an island of 3 yellows, for example, and he blows a 4th yellow, then fill that bubble with red or blue to change it to a non-matching color. Or, you can use a scissors move to pop the extra yellow. If you get a yellow move, then use that to create more islands elsewhere in the cluster. Be mindful of the size of your cluster when you're making islands, because if the cluster crosses the boundary, then matches will deflate quickly to avoid Urchin Armageddon. This state effectively prevents you from saving your islands should Bloop blow a matching bubble. Avoid crossing the boundary by making matches with other colors so the cluster doesn't get too large. Lastly, if you're getting low on moves, you can always leave Infinity mode and come back later when you have more moves. You don't have to wait for Bloop to blow all the bubbles in his queue or wait for the urchins to pop all your bubbles.
I, too, found Spumoni Pop in Murky River extraordinarily challenging to solve (at least reliably). The solution that I ended up using differs from that hinted by the developer. An earlier goal in this solution is to remove the crab by force-matching it to the edge while protecting the stars by buffering them with a wall of empty (never colored, including brown) bubbles or shadow bubbles in the bottom right and top left quadrants respectively. The enclosed screenshot (in this post) illustrates this setup. This leverages the behavior I observed that the crab would always prefer to pop a colored non-shadow bubbles when it runs out of space. This can be done by collapsing the wall of bubbles in the bottom left quadrant. This collapse would pull the crab to that quadrant so that it would not attack the star in the top right quadrant where it was relatively unprotected. This behavior appears to be reproducible and is the only solution that I can do "relative" consistently ("relative" because the Bloop fish can randomly ruin this setup, an issue that the developer and I disagree to some extent). I tried out the developer's method but consistently hit a wall because the cascades of matching often went so quickly that I was unable to keep up to protect the stars or that I would run out of bubbles. Once the crab is removed, farm the bubbles for the wanted colors is relatively straightforward to solve the level. Like to hear the developer's thoughts on how the crab determines which bubble that it prefers to break, as I am still uncertain if the behavior I observed was merely by chance.
Does anyone know which level in the Arcade world can be used to "reliably" farm the achievements to create and match 4 wilds and 5 wilds WITHOUT using the power-up to add a wild? I tried playing Combo Mastery, but there are not enough bubbles to make enough matches to create all of the wilds I need. Likewise, I tried Mega Cluster, but the layout are not ideal to store wilds as they are prone to collapse because of unwanted matches. Or are these achievements intended to make use of the power-ups?
Great questions. It definitely helps to use the powerup and the "Ultra Match" (lasers) at the same time. This is one of the hardest achievements in the game. It requires mastery of the queue such that you can place moves so quickly that you don't give the game a chance to find matches. You also have to prevent colors from matching with the wilds by changing their colors. I recommend going for it in Mega Cluster or Smith's Foam, but be very mindful of the boundary. Good luck and let me know if you're able to achieve it!
This is awesome, I love seeing these alternative solutions to my suggestions. I'm going to try and explain the nuances of this, granted my design choices here may not be ideal. I honestly didn't expect this level of interest from players about the crab logic when I designed it, so no doubt it could be improved. When a crab's bubble has deflated to be too small for him, here's what happens. First, if he's in a shadow bubble, he'll look for a neighbor bubble that's also shadow and break that edge to merge them. Otherwise, if he's on the outside, the bubble will pop. Finally, if neither of those two conditions are true, then he'll break into a neighboring bubble. Which neighbor is arbitrary. It's not exactly random, but it's an edge that's determined by the chaos of the underlying topological structure. I'm not trying to be mysterious, I'm just saying that it currently doesn't follow any easily predictable rules. In my observation, I'm not sure this matters much because most of the time the intent is to get the crab to the outside to pop its bubble, but I'm open to hear other people's opinions on it.
Hi everyone! Here's a preview of something we're working on for the next update. This feature allows you to play the game with iPhones and iPads rotated into landscape orientation. The tricky part was getting it to work with iPhone X also: Let us know what you think?
