Reviews for MORSE

[SeanRoss]

Incredible. This game is not only fun, but it is an incredible teaching tool for Morse Code. I taught myself Code over a span of a day using this game alone - I've never seen anything like this... very fun in itself.

For the future, develop more in-depth gameplay, involving some sort of a tiered level system, or perhaps just slow the game down. I felt that once you had around three rows unlocked, the game ended very quickly. Would love to eventually see some reward for sinking/shooting enemy ships/planes/soldiers, and punishment for sinking/shooting your own.

All in all, simple and very unique. I'm going to follow this one, I have a feeling it's going to become the next great thing.

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[TheDudeist]

I've tried and i've tried, but i don't get it, i followed the key instructions, tried to put in the commands, but seriously, what do i put in? the number first? or the letter? why is there a timer for when i put in commands? the underscore takes a second to put in, so it seems impossible to me to put in letters like Y, or the number 0 take too damn long for me to fill out, before i'm finished inputting the code it all disappears, the pre-picked(i think) coordinated change and im back to square one every time, not to mention that even if i do fill it out in time, regardless of the order in which i put it in, it rarely ever seems to end up striking where i intend, maybe its because i don't really know the rules in morse code, but its frustrating, maybe i'll study morse code and try again, but for now, i'm giving up. Since i'm not sure whether it's my fault or the game's fualt, i'm going give the rating on the review a 2.5 for now, and not rate the game itself.

[LupusUmbrae]

I sense great potential. On my playthrough there was NOTHING to do on the land screen until after all rows were unlocked. Basically, the first time I ever saw German infantry was when the war was basically already over. Can't be because I was too damn good on air and sea, can it?

Btw, I found the gameplay quite intuitive, it took me about 5 seconds to figure out what I had to do.

I also found a bug: .--- isn't recognized.

Keep up the good work.

[patdbgt]

After playing for a while I feel like this game has a lot of potential, after reading the instructions you typed in the comments the game made sense. Like chipcheap mentioned the games pretty easy up until the point when all rows unlock and the board is flooded with enemies.

At that point I had a lot of trouble changing rows and managing what was happening in different number rows, I'm not perfect on morse code knowledge so the time between figuring out what number and letter I needed I often missed my chance and had to try again.

I feel like this game would do really well if you introduced a level system where you could win a match with less rows active and as you progressed through the levels it would get harder and harder to win each match with maybe a new row each time and more enemies as well.

AlexVsCoding responds:

The game has a couple of units on each board at the moment - I'm hoping to increase that number to add a bit more variety and tactics to the battlefield. The way that the enemy/unit count is calculated is the swing of power works as a multiplier (If power = 9, the number of troops spawned per shipment will be 9.

Keep in mind, the build I nearly launch was without the increasing rows (All rows open with that rate of troops marching through), so whilst it seems like there's not much there pacing wise I am working to get on top of it.

The version I've released is more of a vertical slice/lumpy experience that I'm going to sculpt from. When I started work on Narcissus, the pacing was absolutely terrible and a lot of people found it really hard to pick up. I fixed that. Having said that, the complexity of Narcissus lay in it's level design, whilst this is likely going to be the careful management/balancing on numbers. We will see.

Thanks again for the useful feedback!

[chipcheap]

I don't know why everyone is complaining about there being no instructions, I just started doing what i could and it should be really easy to understand.
Really great concept for this game but very unbalanced as of right now. At the beginning you have 1 or 2 rows, where literally no enemy is in sight and then suddenly your men burst the enemy lines and suddenly you have like 20 enemy ships at once to deal with, trying to learn how to type in numbers and then the corresponding letters. I just won the game because my army has advanced far enough already to win without dealing with those ships and enemies at all.
My suggestions are that you either make everything slower, so you can actually kill off every enemy 1 by 1 or you create some difficulty levels for everyone, so they can learn how to morse slowly but steadily.
I think this is actually a great way to learn morse, which I am interested in, but like I said, the difficulty curve is from easypeasy to OH GOD, WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON, I BOMBARDED MY SHIPS ACCIDENTALLY. Another good thing might be deleting commands from before, but it might become a bit unrealistic.
Overall, I like it and I would like to play it more to learn from this game, but the things mentioned can be improved. :)

AlexVsCoding responds:

Thanks for the in depth feedback! I should mention the project is currently in development and I'm more than aware of the balancing issues. The main problem I'm encountering at the moment is I've mastered Morse Code and the principles of the game, so the only way for me to get more feedback to improve the product was to put a build out there for people to play. One of the other complaints by experienced players is when they get to the higher levels, it only takes a couple more troops to cross no mans land to win (by which point they've already cleared the enemy end of the board) so there's balancing there as well.

The way the rows are figured out is for every soldier you get across no mans land, you get an extra row. But, my thinking in rather than on that number specifically have a combination of that and number of units hit on target. I'm also in the process of figuring out a decent tutorial system (As I'll admit the current intro pretty much drops you in the deep end. For example, having the terrain at first locked purely to the trenches and having you target points on the enemy trench.

With regards to the commands from before, if you get more advanced at the game you can stack attacks (which feels super duper awesome if you get right e.g. seeing 3 or 4 groups of ships go up in smoke in sequence). But from testing it at events, people end up with really long rows of letters such as E and S by accidentally pressing. For the start of the game, you'll only be able to store one letter and as you proceeded that would increase.

Keep the feedback coming people and I'll mould the project from there!