jdnx429

A while back, as I was looking through my old games, I decided that I needed to update them before working on any new ones. One of the things that struck out at me about Poker Square and Cribbage Square is how few trophies they have - about 10 each.  I also noticed that half of those trophies would only be earned after a near-eternal grind.

One of the more significant updates to either of those games will be the addition of dozens of new trophies. Each of the three games - Cribbage Square, Poker Square and Blackjack Square will have 40 trophies.  I will also reduce the requirements for the ‘lifetime points’ trophies. My goal is to have all the trophies capable of being earned with just 6-8 hours of playtime on each game. Previously, the lifetime point trophies took dozens of hours to earn - way too much for such simple games.

Like the stamp-themed trophies from Aliens Over Hawaii, the new trophies will also have theme to tie them together. However the theme will carry to all 3 of the ‘Square’ games. The trophy artwork for the lifetime trophies will remain the same but everything else will be redone in a coin theme. I think it’ll be fun collecting the coin trophies for each of the games.

Luckily, the big thing left do before listing the games is drawing up and coding the trophies which is an easy and undemanding thing to do - perfect for some of the down times during vacation (assuming I even turn on my laptop.)

Anyways, I’m off to enjoy the Arizona and Nevada sunshine for the next week!

P.S. I see that my problem of me trying to find the Whirled Coin/Bar Ratio when I’m offline was pretty much solved (for the moment). Ha! I’ll still check up to see if there are any changes due to the HWFO if I’m online on vacation.

I’ve noticed over the last week or so that the Coin/Bar Ratio has been increasing at a relentless pace. Take a look at this graph for the last couple of months. The Ratio was holding steady, under the 12,000 coin level until around May 5th when it just rocketed upwards at a pace I haven’t seen before.  I speculate that lots of people playing the game, earning coins and not buying bars causes an increase in the rate.  Bang Heroes was released on NewGrounds on April 21st; a bit too early to cause the big bump so I don’t have much of a clue on what’s causing the big bump.

Anyways, I should probably find a more automated way of getting the current ratio instead of me just checking on Whirled once or twice a day.  I wonder if I can use one of those websites that allows me to create an RSS feed for any site.  It hasn’t been much of a priority before since I’m generally lurking on Whirled. However,  I’ll be out of internet access travelling through Arizona for about a week starting next Sunday so I think I should spend more effort into looking at something.

I’ve been making some slight changes to Poker Square and Cribbage Square. The biggest change is adding the ability to switch cards after they’ve been placed. However, this ability must be earned by scoring a certain number of points in a previous round. In addition, a player can switch at most two pairs of cards. Here’s a quick screenshot showing a pair of cards in the middle of being switched.

To figure out at what point threshold a card-switch would be earned, I had to take a look at metrics for each of the games. I didn’t want a card-switch to be easily earned but neither did I want it to be rare.

These are the metrics for Poker Square as of yesterday. I recently updated the game so the number of scores recorded are a bit low.  The red line indicates where I’m placing the threshold for earning a card-switch: 100 points.  I also noticed that I need to bring the score cap down quite a bit, to possibly 200 points (currently it is 300) since the bulk of the scores are bunched up on the low end.

Below are the metrics for Cribbage Square. The red line again indicates the threshold for earning a card-switch. In this case I decided to place it at 80 points. You can also see that the scores are a bit more balanced here than in Poker Square.

Since I mainly work on these games during some free time on the weekend and I do have a week-long trip to Arizona coming up, I think it will be early June before I get these changes in the live versions.  I could get them up right now, but I want to wait until I finish Blackjack Square and I’m also going to try do something special with the games. Hopefully I can do it without too much hassle.

A month has passed since I released “Aliens Over Hawaii” and I found the reception of the game to a bit frustrating.  When I initially listed the game on Whirled, many of the comments were complaints about the game being too hard. I realize I’m the one who made the game and have played it at least a hundred times so I may have a different perspective on the game than everyone else. However, I never thought the game was “impossibly hard”.  Sure, there are stage segments where I died a dozen times but those were Stages 7 and 8 - on Hard Mode.  I honestly found it baffling that there would be people finding the game to be hard on Stage 1, even on Easy.

So soon after the Whirled release, I loosened up the game a bit and added the auto-fire (which in retrospect should’ve been there in the first place).  A short while after that I uploaded the game to Newgrounds and Kongregate. More complaints that the game was too hard followed and so I loosened the game a bit more.  I eased up on some trophy requirements, I made the bosses a bit easier, I increased the shield regeneration rate and then I loosened everything again just a bit more.

However, there’s a certain point where I got tired of listening to people complain that the game was too hard. I also became increasingly uncomfortable loosening the game past a certain point. I had tested and re-tested the game many, many times so I was confident that the original game was ‘hard enough’ - not impossibly hard, but certainly challenging. That’s when I decided to reset the game back closer to it’s originally difficulty level and create the ItemPacks. If people still thought the game was too tough, well then here are some things you can buy to make it easier.

One mistake I did make, though, was making some of the trophies too hard to get. When I was first planning out how the trophies were to be given out, I had a goal in mind that all trophies would be earned in 50 full playthroughs of the game. That’s why the final Lifetime Points trophy was set at 150 million points (3 million points per game * 50 games). The enemy trophies were spread out amongst those 50 playthroughs. I spread them out so that at least one would be earned every few playthroughs. However, I realize now that 50 full playthroughs is too much. I reduced the trophy requirements so that all trophies would be able to earned in at most 20 playthroughs which translates to roughly more than 20 hours of play time.

Anyways, with the release of the Item Packs  I will just let the game rest for the time being - no updates or significant changes for a while, maybe some minor bug fixes. From here on,  I’ll be working on fixing up some things on the games that are currently live and then it’s off to make some new ones.