"Deeper" - first prototype

edited in Projects
I've really, really, really wanted "Freecell: Advanced" or something of the kind to come up in my to-play list, and I'm not sure what attempts exist out there already. But I thought I'd give it a try.

imageimage

This is a pretty rough draft of what I've been working on, to give y'all the idea. You're a crew of deep-space miners on some legendary planet, underground treasures, blah blah blah. The goal is to basically dig ever deeper by storing, managing and eventually removing tiles from a playing grid. Your crew has to deal with rivals, aliens and environmental hazards. Three main points to remember:

(1) If you know the rules of Freecell, bear those in mind when you play. It'll help your understanding a truckload, particularly with the Quantum Backpack.

(2) Go crazy with combinations. A surprising amount of stuff works with a surprising amount of other stuff. I'm hoping to generalise the rules as much as possible in subsequent iterations.

(3) If you find yourself struggling, be sure to read the item descriptions carefully. They'll drop a lot of hints about possible combinations.

Get the current version here:
https://www.box.com/s/6d97b01443677db257b1

Controls:
- Mouse to select a tile, hold to drag it to destination tile or free cell.
- R to restart (once you can't make any more legal moves)

Comments

  • A couple of radical departures from the current prototype that still need to be made:

    - I'm going to remove the fiddly quantity/power ratings and redesign the game without explicit numbers. Right now the game is a little too much about attrition where it should be more about combination.

    - I'll be making more of the tile flags explicit in future versions. There's an emphasis on creativity and exploration, but I'm not sure if players are typically armed with enough knowledge to have fun if they enter the game for the first time. And I'm not necessarily sure if enough people will experiment broadly enough to find a lot of the combos.
  • A wild Nandrew prototype appears! :D

    I really enjoyed finding out what the different interactions did, but I could have done with knowing what would combine when I started dragging a tile - I feel like that would have given me nudges to try combining weird things so that I knew what they did for later when the strategy really started coming in.

    Also (and this might be in already seeing as I played a couple of versions back) I'd love it if the game would remove the "extra step" to combine with a tile directly above the tile I'm moving - provided there's space in inventory. Double clicking to move a tile to inventory instantly?

    Finally, I hear there are uniques.
  • Haha, yes.

    Also, you will be suitably hilarified to note that the proposed "extra step" removal did indeed take place ... then I removed it again *just* before releasing this build because it caused some rather awkward bugs. :D

    I've taken another look at this prototype and it is perhaps a little *too* unfriendly to get into, even for a dev community. I will try get another version out in a few days that will be way easier to test and absorb, so hang tight if this has left you mystified.
  • I really want to play this... but I could never finish a game of Freecell, so I got scared off. :sad:
  • Heh heh. Wait on the next version, if you prefer.

    Stuff's going to be, uh, simpler while still being, er, complex. Y'know. Basically a much friendlier game will be presented to you while keeping the same level of depth.
  • Had some fun with this I like were this is going. <zombie_voice>need moar updates</zombie_voice>

    Also:
    ___________________________________________
    ERROR in
    action number 1
    of Draw Event
    for object Block:

    Error in code at line 95:
    if (Roomwatch.mouseTarget.fDestructible)

    at position 28: Unknown variable fDestructible


    Capture.PNG
    928 x 597 - 110K
  • I played some earlier today and only now understand the name Free"cell". Doh. Anyways, there were some combinations that I felt were supposed to work but didn't. For instance combing two strength 2 blue dirt to create a strength 4 dirt(like the tetancles). There were also some I didn't feel should work but did...like combining blue dirt and red dirt. I didn't get very far into it though, so there may be stuff I don't get yet. Looking forward to updates.

    OFF TOPIC: Start a Freecell game and go to the menu to choose a game. Type -1 for the game number and try to solve that 8-O
  • Haha, WOW. Thanks for the FreeCell trivia, that was really cool.

    Glad to see the feedback, but I'll be sure to try deploy a much slicker version within the week. :)
Sign In or Register to comment.