As a fellow amateur game dev, nice job!
Unfortunately, I (and likely many others on HN) am pretty sign-up adverse, and since this game seems like it should be perfectly playable 100% client-side, I think this is going to really hurt adoption.
Yeah, I was excited to give it a try but I won't sign up without at least trying a few puzzles first.
I like it!
One big annoyance with the power-ups is that the failure condition is checked before you can use them. It's particularly painful since they all replace the current piece, so they seem tailor-made to get rid of a nasty piece that would cause you to lose... but then they have to be used before you get to that piece that would cause you to lose!
Anyway, both times I played I got in the 40s without any power-ups used, then saw that the next piece would cause me to lose but none of the powers could save me. Probably the ideal fix is just to not trigger a loss while you still have powers?
Thank you all so much for your comments. Regarding the possibility of playing without logging in, I've modified the code to allow it. You can now try my game without logging in ;)
Thank you!
Thanks! Fun game.
This looks nice but the initial sign-up barrier seems unnecessary. I don't want to create an account and validate my e-mail address before knowing what the challenges and the app actually are. This also introduces a 30s to 2m window until the confirmation e-mail is delivered.
It might improve the flow to first letting them play a challenge (does not have to be daily challenge, e.g., just the demo tetris-like game from the starting page) and then introduce the account sign up afterward.
To comment on the actual game (tested on Firefox desktop):
- The yellow box with hints overflows (and is cut off) in the middle of the second paragraph
- The site layout appears to be optimized for mobile (portrait) screens. But the actual interactive elements look to small for touch targets. For desktops (if that is a target), consider using the horizontal space more (e.g., for the box with hints or the leaderboard(s))
- The tooltips on the actions at the top of the lines games board were not in English (appear to be maybe Spanish/Portuguese). Seems like a missing translation (my language preferences are en;de).
- the lines game itself was fine, the idea is okay but I don't think I want to play more than 2-3 rounds of it (which is okay for a daily challenge-ish game). An improvement might be to highlight (with a light background on the board) what combinations of piece layouts are possible after placing the first block (e.g., the straight piece only has 4 possible layouts after the first block and one after the second).
Nice! Consider adding this to https://hnarcade.com :)
Edit: never mind! Already done! https://hnarcade.com/games/games/linex
I enjoyed playing Linex! It reminds me of doing perfect clear solves in Tetris, but without the stress :) I appreciate the skip, next, and hole-fill power ups.
If you don't mind me asking, how are you doing piece generation? Is it random%7, drawing from a bag, or something else?
This is a lovely game. It's simple, and clever, and you have no one to blame but yourself when you lose. Thank you!
I'd love to be able to play by dragging. On mobile it would be really nice if I could draw the shapes with my finger