Comment by JJCUBER
2 years ago
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).
This reads like the incident history chart of a new patient of hand therapy. Love it.
> 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.?
Silence would be my preference, honestly. Then I can listen to my own music if I want.
Lightweight puzzles are likely to be something I do while doing something else. It's pretty presumptuous for a puzzle to think that there is no other music that it could conflict with.
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