Wezzle

[cdmckay]

I'm one half of an indie developer called Couchware Inc.  We just released a demo of our first game Wezzle, a match-3 puzzle game.  Try it out and let us know what you think!

http://couchware.ca/www/wezzle/web/

The product page is located: http://couchware.ca/www/wezzle/

Here's a screenshot:

[gouessej]

It looks like clean and professional, good job.

[jojoh]

Very nice and polished.
Music keeps clicking on the machine I tested it on. Lots of other things running, so it might be some interference from that (WinXP, java 6, FF 3.5). I also didn't get the second intro help right away. I thought I could rotate the blocks somehow, and didn't realize that the "pieces" would remove blocks. It didn't take long to figure it out though. Very nice otherwise to have the help in the gameplay and spread out during the game.

It is a bit deeper than most color matching games, but often lots of stuff happened without me realizing why, but that might be just fine. To have the chance to be lucky in a game is seldom a bad thing.

I hope you will post some updates how the sales go.

One small detail. The yellow balls in the "Next" window were not anti-aliased. Since everything else is, it sticks out. It could be connected with the logs that I saw:

1   2   3

[INFO] (10:47:20.281) ResourceFactory - "Could not find sprite: Background_Circles_Gold.png" [INFO] (10:47:20.281) ResourceFactory - "Could not find sprite: Background_Circles_Green.png" [INFO] (10:47:20.296) ResourceFactory - "Could not find sprite: Explosion.png"

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[cdmckay]

Thanks for the feedback, jojoh.  I've posted by replies below.

Very nice and polished.

Thank you

Music keeps clicking on the machine I tested it on. Lots of other things running, so it might be some interference from that (WinXP, java 6, FF 3.5).

Could you elaborate on that?  There's also a click sound played when you use a piece - maybe that's the source of the clicking?

One small detail. The yellow balls in the "Next" window were not anti-aliased.

We're using FSAA so it should automatically be anti-aliased.  Maybe your video driver doesn't allow software to turn on FSAA?  There's also an issue on Mac where we're not able to enable FSAA.

It could be connected with the logs that I saw:

That log message is OK.  It's just saying it can't find some resources that are in the full version.

[fruitmaze]

The game has very nice graphics and smooth animations, and the overall style is good. I have only played it once so far, but I agree with jojoh that there are alot of blocks falling (quite fast) down and disappearing during game play that to me feels a bit confusing.

[jojoh]

Could you elaborate on that?  There's also a click sound played when you use a piece - maybe that's the source of the clicking?

Well, it is a quite frequent sound (more than once/sec), seems like it is the base sound that gets a bit messed up, but just guessing here. The melody itself seems OK. I was testing on a work IBM laptop, probably with a pretty crappy sound card. Haven't experienced it before though. Sound is way better on the vids on your site, but a different song.

We're using FSAA so it should automatically be anti-aliased.  Maybe your video driver doesn't allow software to turn on FSAA?  There's also an issue on Mac where we're not able to enable FSAA.

Well, the rest of the GFX (blocks gradients and more) looks just fine, but that could naturally be pre-rendered. Here is what it looks like. I think your screenies look better, but hard to tell, since they are scaled down.

Here is what it looks like:

As I say, it is a minor thing, but it sticks out, with everything else looking so good.

[kappa]

oh, very nice and polished.

+1 point if the game installs and uninstalls correctly
+1 point if the game doesn't crash ever
+1 point if the game is slickly presented
+1 point if the game has "good" graphics that suit the game
+1 point if the game has "good" sound that suit the game
+1 point if the game's overall style is "good"
+0 point if the game is original or brings a great new original twist (its nice, but way too many match 3 games out there atm)
+1 point if your judge enjoyed playing the game
+1 point if the game is complete enough that doesn't feel anything is missing
+1 point if you don't whine and you demand nothing of the mods (simply saying "can you rate my game please" is fine)

9/10

Featured.

[cdmckay]

Just a heads up to everyone that after some soul-searching we dropped the price of Wezzle to $4.99 from $14.99:
http://couchware.ca/www/blog/2010/03/27/wezzle-price-drops-to-just-4-99/

[cdmckay]

Hello again JGO,

About a week ago we posted an applet demo of our game Wezzle for you to see.  As it turned out, we didn't really give people much to see so we've expanded the demo to show all 4 items and 5 more levels.  That's double the content!  For free!

Without further ado, here's a link to our expanded demo: http://couchware.ca/www/wezzle/web



Feedback, comments, and criticism are always welcome.

Cameron

[DzzD]

really, the game look really very nice & polished...

but... but... but ... why ? why do I need to accept a security popup ? and then why do I need to wait nearly one minute for it ot start ?? the most complexe graphics are rounded squares...  inded really nice rounded squares... but... why using opengl in such case....   


anyway, it run fine here

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[cdmckay]

Hi DzzD,

The reason we're using OpenGL is due to a design decision early on.  Basically it's much easier to write a 2D game engine when you use a 3D card because it has a high fill rate (i.e. you can just redraw the whole screen each time).  Unfortunately, this decision requires us to load native libraries with the applet and thus the security pop-up.

In hindsight, we should've used something like Pulpcore, but we didn't know that it existed at the time and we were too far into the development by the time we did.

On the bright side, if we port to Android and iPhone, we'll have all these lessons to learn from.

How far'd you get in the demo?

Regards,
Cameron

[DzzD]

this is not the kind of game (puzzle) that I prefer to play but after some minutes I found the interactivity very nice & smooth, I believe that people liking puzzle game will really enjoy playing it.


yes, Pulpcore is a really nice API that IMHO, you should have used (also in case of such simple graphics even a pure Java2D would have done the Job very well for Desktop version ), about Android my knowledges are too poor to give any advice, the only think I know is that it offer a lite version of OpenGL (OpenGL ES) that you can access nativly.

[cdmckay]

We have released a 60 minute time-limited trial for Wezzle. This version features everything, including achievements and full screen mode.

If you haven't tried it out yet, please give it a go