Onefifth's messages

The core concept and gameplay for both games honestly only took about a day or two to get working. The part that takes weeks is just layers and layers of polish to make it look good. Coins took significantly longer than it should have because we were developing for Mobile devices at the same time and ran into an unbelievable number of problems on Android and iOS.
It’s how I prefer to design games, find a simple and fun mechanic and then explore it as much as possible. And then polish it until you are sick of the game and then polish it a bit more. Ideas are ideas, I’m not sure I have useful advice on coming up with those, just make sure you are willing to admit your idea sucks. Everyone has not so great ideas, if you find the prototype of your game isn’t fun, iterate a little, but don’t sink too much time into it. Good luck on your own projects!

Thanks for the advice! that’s awesome. And yeah, I first played Flood Fill on mobile and loved it, and then I saw Coins expecting a shitty, generic puzzle game and it blew me away. Even though we are in direct competition for the monthly mobile contest, I had to rate it 5/5.
I think I should really put more time into polishing games and making them look good, as my art style just plain sucks. Again, thanks for the advice!

The idea is that the player is at a level where he is close to stopping to play anyway. Because what point does it serve to make the player’s last experience with the game one where he wanders off in frustration? That can’t be right… ;)
I also think that puzzles are inherently bad games exactly because of that risk to be a overly frustrating rage generator. ^^
Yes, it is awesome when you manage to solve something extremely hard. But only if you do so. But most people will rage-quite long before that. And never experience the fun. So to them, the whole point of playing a game is missing. That can never be the goal, can it?

About the skipping: Maybe you can allow playing any of the three earliest still unsolved levels. (So if 1 2 3 _ 5 6 _ 8 _ are solved, you could play any of 4, 7 or 9, but not 10.) That way one can switch a bit around, and learn new tricks that then are useful to the one problematic level.

About me figuring it out: See that’s the thing: I gave up. With only two non-aced levels. And probably won’t play again. It just was too little fun, I wasted enough time by far, plus there are loads of games one click away. And that sucks, doesn’t it?

Not for me. The enjoyment of a puzzle is figuring it out, knowing you are one among few makes it even better. The enjoyment of a puzzle comes from the problem solving and the effort. If a puzzle makes someone frustrated to the point of quitting, they probably shouldn’t really be playing it in the first place.
My goal as a designer is to make a game I feel deserves to be made, not to appease the widest range of audience. If I was going for that I’d make “Zombie Upgrade One-Button Shoot-man”. It is repayable because it makes you do a ton of crap that take a long time, not because it is a well designed or good game. I’m not totally sure where I sit on the whole “false achievement” issue as I refer to it, basically games that progress as you put time into them and require no actual skill. I want a game to be hard, I want to get a little frustrated, because that’s what makes the achievement and success real. I realize not everyone feels that way and I hope they can still take something away from stuff I make, but they aren’t my primary target audience.

As someone who’s not really into the whole puzzle genre, I’ve got to say I agree with OneFifth on this one. I played through the first 3 levels of coins, stuck through it, and aced them all. And then when the new coins come into play I got stuck, gave up, and am glad a ‘Solve now’ button didn’t appear, because it means I can come back to it and enjoy a little mental struggle. :L

Whenever a solution button is available, for me, someone who doesn’t really play puzzle games, I treat it like an action game. Click, click, click, win.