Comment by stevage
2 years ago
A few comments on the game:
- would be good to support two tap moves like on lichens rather than only drag and drop
- drag and drop seems really buggy on my phone. Often had to repeat my move.
- accidentally clicked give up instead of try again, then my game was over? Not really sure why there is a give up button at all.
- the timer just adds stress instead of fun, for me.
- hated the music being on by default
- imho the obstacles should be symbols, not just a different square colour. I had trouble seeing them.
Great feedback, thanks for that! There's plans to support two taps soon. Same for an 'are you sure' button when giving up. The reason the button is there (aside from its psychological benefit to not give up in early playtesting) is that it allows players who get stumped at a certain level to save their high score to the leaderboard without finishing the game. As explained in the post linked above, puzzle games are, in some sense, different from arcade games in that you can never just die.
Which brings us to the next point: 'endless' mode handles the game over state with a countdown timer, ensuring a convergence toward an end game even in a (theoretically) infinite game mode. But that mode is purposefully designed to be more arcade-like and speedrunnable, versus 'classic' mode which is dedicated to strategic patient thinkers. If timing in games stresses you out, definitely feel free to stick to classic instead of endless mode. Many folks love the timing aspect, but if you've never been into things like blitz chess, it's totally understandable.
Thankfully, you'd be happy to hear that the scoring system is purposefully designed to minimize the impact of timing in classic mode for exactly that reason (check out the 'Scoring System' section in the post).
p.s. I'm surprised to hear drag and drop is giving you issues on your phone, sorry about that. Not sure any players have had that issue before. Do you mind sharing what device/os/browser you're using, and if you're accessing echochess.com in a fresh browser tab directly?
>As explained in the post linked above, puzzle games are, in some sense, different from arcade games in that you can never just die.
I didn't finish the post because it went straight into strategy tips before I had even had a chance to play!
Also personally I'm not really interested in arcade mechanics. I'm not interested in global leaderboards or whatever either. Just interested in playing puzzles in my own time on my own terms.
Your thing is very cool! I like the way it is so constrained it's often possible to plan 6-7 moves ahead without much effort.
>but if you've never been into things like blitz chess, it's totally understandable
I'm massively into blitz chess. But this is a puzzle thing, and for me, there is no need for a timer in a solo game.
> Do you mind sharing what device/os/browser you're using, and if you're accessing echochess.com in a fresh browser tab directly?
FF/Android. I didn't understand your second question.
Glad you're enjoying the puzzle exploration. Curious if you've tried levels 11+ btw? Planning 6-7 moves ahead gets trickier later on, especially when you reach the highest levels of 'Classic' mode.
I get your point about solo games vs blitz chess. Puzzle games aside, when I'm playing solo I tend to prefer Turn-Based Strategy games like HOMM, King's Bounty, Civ, Eador, AOW, etc. a little more than RTS games like SC2, Warcraft, AOE, BfME, DOTA, League, and so on. In multiplayer, RTS can be a lot of fun. Of course the best solo campaigns are always real gold, whether timed or not.
The nice thing about good strategy and puzzle games is that they can be enjoyed in different ways by all types of players who appreciate puzzle solving.
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Similar to them, I also noticed some weird issues on iOS where it would sometimes drag the page when moving pieces and, other times, prevent seeing either the top or bottom portion of the UI. I ended up moving to PC for that reason. I also recall not being able to type in a name for the score at the end (on iOS).
One other thing I noticed was that submitting a lower score (at least in endless) still overrides your old one. (My scores went 860.5k -> 314.7k -> 446.9k -> 136.7m, overriding every time.)
Question: when you say iOS, do you mean navigating to echochess.com directly on a new window in a browser like safari? The only time I've seen that weird behavior you're describing is when a webview is being loaded for the game from within some other app. The second part sounds like a bug - thanks for the heads-up!
I'm still not over how you casually dropped that you reached 136.7 MILLION btw. gg.
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> it allows players who get stumped at a certain level to save their high score to the leaderboard without finishing the game
Have you considered saving the high score after every level automatically?
That approach could work too. There may be a few minor nuances here and there but it's workable. Each level currently does save the running score so far, and resets it to that value when the player restarts the level. It's just not saved as a high score on the overall leaderboard until the player actually ends the game session.
There's a section in the post about the ethos behind the scoring system and how it's designed to incentivize good gameplay while accommodating for speedrunners as a non-primary audience. It also ties in with the part about sawtooth difficulty curves and skipping levels. So some of these considerations can come into play here. In general I tried to reproduce the retro feel of arcade games without taking away from the strategy/puzzle solving kernel.
But yes, definitely. That's a valid approach too.
Just like you, I accidentally hit "give up" at one point by mistake. I actually found the music quite good.
In a somewhat similar vein, I found the endless mode to be a bit tiring, since you have to keep up the pace to maintain enough time. It could be nice to have a pause button for endless mode (or both modes). Of course, it would defeat the purpose if someone could just pause right after seeing each board, but I feel like having a pause button with some sort of multi-minute cooldown could be an interesting addition. For some people, this might defeat the purpose of endless mode, but it's just a thought!
I also ended up playing endless long enough to get a score that was too large; my score overlapped with my name on the leaderboard. (I reached level 157 with 136.7m score, then I let time run out due to my hands getting tired.)
Your outrageous high score is breaking the endless leaderboard UI! Well done :)
I get your point about the pausing concern. I've actually thought about that in past playtests and I think the long-term solution for these things is likely even more drastic: increasing the difficulty of the procedural gens incrementally more after X levels have passed. And/or capping the winnable time back from solving every consecutive level after the first Y. There are lots of interesting things that can be explored in this area - see the last section of the original echo chess writeup.
Awesome to hear you reached LEVEL 157 in one run! Curious if you got taken by the 'one more turn syndrome' [0] in that session, or if you had embarked on this run with a clear goal of surpassing 100,000,000?
And please make sure to ice those fingers. echo chess cannot be held liable for finger damage.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(series)
Increasing the difficulty over time sounds fun! As an idea, there could also be multiple endless modes which either have faster/slower ramp-ups, start "further into" the difficulty, or just have fixed "easy," "medium," "hard," and "ramp-up" (curve).
To be honest, at first, it was less of an urge to get "one more turn" in and more of an urge to make sure I had beat my original high score. Once I surpassed it, I was trying to see how long I could survive without running out of time. It was at that point where I realized I could keep going forever without running out of time (I could recoup more time than I spent, and I would regularly hit 99 capped time). After this revelation, I set a goal of going until my hands got tired. Once my hands got tired, I almost succumbed to the "one more turn syndrome," but after moving (I believe) one piece, my score had a nice 3-digit repeating pattern and was a round number, so I called it quits.
Luckily(?), my hands have made it through games that are far more torturous on the fingers (though it has been a while).
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> I actually found the music quite good.
I'm not expressing an opinion on whether the music is good or not. I just really don't want (or expect) any music to play. It's particularly annoying when I play on my phone in a quiet moment, and suddenly music is blasting out. It doesn't seem to remember the setting.
That's fair.
Side note, unrelated to echo chess - which of these (very eclectic) TBS or puzzle games would you say have soundtracks that are more of a fit for the solo puzzle-solving experience you'd find ideal: Tetris (tanaka), HOMM (romero), Civ (knorr), or small indies like Monument Valley, Into the Breach, etc.?
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what's wrong with music on by default?
flash games operated like that from the beginning till the end
I guess it's normal in the arcade world, but not in the puzzle world.
Actually most well-reviewed puzzle games on Steam and mobile do come with some killer background tracks. The echo chess track has been surprisingly popular - anecdotally, one of the early playtesters mentioned they routinely run echo chess in a background tab while working to get into deep focus mode. Granted, the board game version of the puzzle word does music differently for obvious reasons.