controls are broken and the music is oh so annoying
Reviews for "Viva Hexagon! Feat. Ipulo"
zeddy1267 responds:
Skill issue
Dude, amazing game. It's so fun (a bit tricky because of the many controls, but got the hang of it). I reached 10:10 mins in solo play. This might be cool as hell to play with a partner
zeddy1267 responds:
Remember, there's always the AI opponent! Which is what versus mode is balanced against. The AI does suck in battle mode though.
And the most boring tutorial award goes to:
Wow, quite the cool puzzle game you got here! For the most part it feels very well-put together and professionally made, bursting at the seams with a lot of content: impressive stuff!
In particular, I love how fun it is to move the player character around: gives me Pizza Tower vibes with how how animated and expressive they are which not only helps with making actions clear to distinguish, but makes certain actions, like slamming blocks down, very satisfying to pull off again and again. Speaking of satisfaction, the game, while not overly explosive in its pizazz, does still feature a lot of those subtle touches, such as playing a sequentially higher-pitched sound for chain bonuses. While it is a bit overwhelming to grasp their entire moveset at first, I enjoyed the challenge of getting it down and becoming not only more effective at scoring, but stylish in doing so. Again, it just overall feels well put-together and fun to play!
As mentioned, if there is one downside to this game, is that it can be a bit rough to grasp at first. To be fair, most of the design is rather intuitive and will be familiar to players of games like Puyo-Puyo and the like, but there are certain aspects that kept catching me off-guard despite seeing them multiple times, such as how similar color blocks will stick while others fall, how you need a full shape and not lines or columns of colors to score, how you can't grab blocks when standing by them despite the character doing the grab animation, and I'd just plain forget I had a lot of moves like dashing and attacking.
Similar to that is the tutorial, which can be rather overwhelming due to how verbose and jam-packed it can be. Kudos to making the tutorial very interactive and visual, and I appreciate trying to explain all the various oddities the game has, but it was just so much and that very same interactivity could screw me over at times where suddenly the text would move onto something else when I wasn't done reading it. If I were to have a suggestion, it would be to have the tutorial not be a single huge overwhelming sequence, but several split-up chapters, some for very basic gameplay and others for advanced techniques and special cases: a player could just do the basic chapters and get into play faster, coming back to the advanced chapters if they spot something confusing when playing, and it'd be much easier to just look up something specific without having to do everything from the start. In addition to that, I think there were a lot of cases where text could be more concise or replaced with a picture, or split up into separate pages to make it look less dense, and some things are just so obvious you don't need to waste time explaining.
Still, the initial process of learning the game, while it could be improved, wasn't that bad and it wasn't too long before I got into the game and had a bunch of fun!
zeddy1267 responds:
Thanks for your kind words! The movement is definitely the part I care most about, since I do really enjoy platformer's that play well.
Yes, the tutorial/general introduction to the game is definitely the roughest part. The game, being a unique/gimmicky puzzle game, can take a moment to wrap your head around at first. This is partly why I made the tutorial as verbose as it is. Think of it more like the included instruction book rather than a quick tutorial. It's the full, unskippable documentation.
I certainly WANT to improve the tutorial in some way. If I had to do this again, I'd something along the lines of making a short interactive tutorial to just quickly introduce you to the game, and then have the rest of the text stored in a separate in game handbook. Quickstart & full documentation.
I ultimately decided to leave the tutorial as-is. Since this is more of a demo for a true Viva Hexagon! game, I didn't spend too much time on the tutorial. For example, something I really want to do is a single player arcade mode/campaign, like what Puyo-Puyo has. This is something I want to tie tutorial into in some way or another (even just stuff like quick tips between stages). Not being able to do this in the current state of Viva Hexagon! (No arcade mode) definitely made me spend less time on the tutorial than I probably should have.
The tutorial is also just the most difficult code to work with, since it's very fragile. I realized the flaws with the tutorial, but just couldn't be bothered to fix them in this release of the game.
TL;DR yeah, I'm aware of how overwhelming the tutorial is. Thanks for the feedback!
which key is "start" in Keyboard mode?
zeddy1267 responds:
Enter. Can you tell me where it says to press start that doesn't also mention pushing enter? I've made sure to be careful about that, but it's very possible that there's a few missing cases.