Thanks for your input! Very very much appreciated.
Main Menu
... d'oh!!!
These games are written using my own hand coded framework, and are designed to run on a standard PC with a typically HD resolution. Crunching all the images and display routines into the tiny 400x240 DS screen has had a number of complications.
Recently, I rewrote the primitive (circle, square, triangle) functions to scale a little better, but .. I know exactly where this bug is, simply from your description.. I’ve obviously forgotten to add the scaling to my "MouseIn_Radius" function. It's assuming the larger circle, still.
Ok, that’s an easy fix.
You’ll know exactly when I changed it, since the slightly older games, as you noted, don't have that issue.
Incidentally, you’ll also have noticed my somewhat lack of bothering to touch the touchscreen, so hadn’t noticed that.
I did double check the rescaled options menu, but the main menu.. "what could possibly go wrong!!…"
D'oh!
Options Stutter
The "stutter" when leaving the options is the game saving all the data. (Settings, and resaving highscores). It also does this stutter when the "Game Over" text is onscreen, and it'll also be noticeable there now that I've pointed it out, but is much less obvious. The Jingle helps disguise it quite a lot!!
Since I’m using the same framework between games (which handles scoreboards, menus, saving, etc) I've made the save function save a lot of extraneous data. The same amount of "number space" is saved for all the games, which might be enough to hold scoreboards, or unlocked level data, or any other sorts of information.
I’m just ensuring that everything is always saved. Maybe I should add a "swoosh" between saving the options and continuing..?
Paused
I would LOVE to add something silly to the Pause screen. My previous frameworks have had little "unobvious" games in the background of the pause menu, but I haven’t yet come up with one for this.
.. honestly. I just haven’t had the time!!
But that’s the intent. The pause screen is currently waiting for …something!
Oh, and the word is off center so I get a bit more space for whatever that might eventually be.
Gameplay
Flappadiddle - Untouchable!!
Flappy has a nice colourful swirly shield whenever he's stood on the ground.
Since this isn't "really" all that obvious, I ensured that at least one of the levels tried to make it as obvious as possible.
That fifth level is supposed to be there to help the player understand the concept of the swirly thing.
I’m still undecided as to whether that works, but it sure beats having a wall of text to explain it!!
Additional note : I try my best to avoid text where possible, to aid in the lack of translation. Wherever I DO need to add text, I try to use "arcade" language. Start, Level, Game Over, Player.. words that I hope people will tend to understand, no matter what their native language.
Franken Hopper
Same menu reasons as above. Fix will be ... shortly. I have another big tweak to get working, first!
As for balance/difficulty, that game's been through quite a journey. One day, too difficult, the next, too easy, and back and forth it's been.
I tried to settle on a nice enough middleground.
Additional note : Although I try not to make my games "unfair", I do also try to make them hard enough that you can hop into them and play them from the very beginning each time, and still get a kick out of them.
Most of my games are of the "scoreboard" type, rather than progression type, and as such it would really suck if every single time you had 3 or 4 tutorial stages before things got interesting.
With AGameAWeek, there is no tutorial. I try to make games easy enough to grasp, but fun enough to play, and .. that’s kinda my thing!
Micro Clampett
The "smaller" Start button is proving somewhat difficult to replicate after all my rescaling stuff! I did like the much smaller unselected button, though...
Which do you prefer?
On a Space Shooting Trail
There are three powerups. A red bomb, a blue freeze and a green "double shot"
The double shot wears off fairly quickly, the bomb usually ends in chaos, and the freeze usually ends up freezing baddies while they're offscreen and resulting in a bit of a bizarre rest period.
You’ll just have to trust me when I say that the blue freeze tends to work better on a larger resolution!!! (Or grab the Windows/Linux/Mac edition from my site)
As for "further right", you already CAN go further right!!
The "how far" limit is pixel based, so on the Windows version you could only go 128/800 pixels, whilst the 3DS you can reach a much further 128/400!
Scaling's been a real bugbear throughout all this!!
Initially the player was originally stuck on a single X coordinate, but I felt a little X movement wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
I'll have a look into allowing more movement, but no promises
Roland
I do like how this game turned out. The puzzles can be fiendishly hard, for what is simply a 5x5 grid of blocks!
But, obviously, not to everyone's tastes
I might revisit Roland in the future. I think that with a few extra blocks types to contend with, things might get a little more perplexing for him.
Notice that this game is probably using the oldest version of the Framework, so you’ll notice the save-stutter a LOT more on it. It definitely needs an upgrade!
All games will be recompiled and reuploaded with the newest edition of the Framework "soon".. I’m currently trying to get the last few bits and pieces slotted into the framework before I do that, though.
Again, thanks for your lovely big post. I hope you enjoy the games so far, and .. don’t worry, there's loads more to come!
(A new JNKPlat is definitely on the todo list.)