Attempt to shoot number two

Less than six months from the date of the clinical death of my first digital brainchild. The stones of Labyrinth fell off, the graphs of the number of installations slipped to shameful non-print values, the meager cents of daily profits turned to dust. What does a brave and tireless indie developer do in this situation? That's right: he draws conclusions . And after the conclusions, it is not a sin to breathe life into a new, fresh project - and shoot them right on top of the top. The main thing is not to miss.

Foreword

So without having had time to really boil, the passions in the previous game finally settled down in the form of a curve (ok, straight) crawling along the X axis of the new installations. Looking at the statistics and analyzing my first experience for the hundredth time, I came to the conclusion that I was already quite ready to create something new for puzzle lovers - and something more profitable for myself.
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Looking for ideas for a new game, I really wanted to take into account the following points:

• The degree of replayability should be higher. If before the levels were collected and honed in advance (and there were not many), now you need to make a game with randomly generated levels. Each game launch should be as fresh for the player as the first. And better without any levels at all;
• Design and design reduced to a minimum. If in the previous game I had to spend several weeks on 3d modeling of wall segments, setting up the shader, rendering and spinning textures, then this time I would like to do a minimal amount of visual content, reduce the time to work on the visual, and not at the expense of beauty. That is, do not kill a lot of time to prepare textures. And better without any textures at all;
• The confusion and complexity of the game. The idea should be accessible and understandable right away. If earlier you had to do the training level to get the player up to speed, then now you need to make everything easier and more obvious so that the idea is clear without preludes. And better without any idea at all.

Several different sketches were made. Among them was a proto-prototype of a giant logistics strategy (made a beautiful world map with navigation and points of cities + a sea of ​​unrealized ideas), a prototype of a physical puzzle on loops (pieces of a mosaic are connected by a hinge controller, dangling on each other as on loops) and one game in the word game genre.


The logistical katra of the world was beautiful, but too ambitious as a project (for geographic fetishists like me, I’ll throw a reference to the prototype in the comments, if necessary). The physical puzzle did not grow together because of the curvature (although the idea is really cool), but the verbal puzzle fit well with the set conditions - and it seemed that we could implement it simply and without any particular difficulties. And it was on him that I concentrated my efforts.

Implementation of the idea

So, with the idea decided: a verbal puzzle. The game level is a squared field, each of which contains one letter. Consistently choosing adjacent letters, the player makes a word. As soon as the word is composed, the letters, its components, are removed from the field, and the voids formed are filled with the letters that were above: the field is crumbling, as it were, the underground grotto falls asleep.

The idea seemed quite fun, but lacked some kind of "peppercorn". The peppercorn came suddenly in the form of hexagonal cells. That is, the entire field in the cell becomes a honeycomb. Fresh, witty, youth .


The most interesting thing at this stage was to understand the structure of the fields built on hexagons. Here the collection of articles Red Blob Games came to my aid (reading and poking at examples is a pleasure). Inspired by the study, I even realized the search for the shortest paths. It was only after I realized that I would not need him in the project.

The second stage of implementation was the introduction of a dictionary, according to which the game will determine whether a word exists that the player has entered. Several articles and comments were written on this topic in our community (for example, articles about the game “Balda”). Thanks to the authors, there is a lot of useful information.

In my game, I used dictionaries that I fished out of the Wiktionary dumps. As it turned out, there are many projects that are engaged in cataloging all kinds of Wikipedia, they also helped.

It is worth mentioning here that by doing research work in areas adjacent to the main business, you open a huge number of “sucking holes”. And here it is very important to control yourself, not to succumb to the temptation to drown in this sea of ​​extremely interesting information (this is how I got stuck in the hexagon for a month). Let many consider it a kind of greeting to the Captain, but still I thought it necessary to mention this point.

Focusing primarily on Russian-speaking players, I decided to add the English dictionary as well. In order to find it, there were no problems (the same dumps and numerous research groups with materials in the public domain). The only thing, all sorts of academic and Oxfodr dictionaries had to be supplemented with modern English words a la selfie. I did not apply such procedures to the Russian dictionary. Let the great and mighty live, but still a little more inert, - and our neologisms are often controversial, so it was not so much to add vocabulary to them.

It was also very interesting to study the so-called "frequency of letters" - the probability of occurrence of a specific letter in a language. This indicator influenced how often one or another letter should appear on the field. Breaking a bunch of articles and papers on this topic (once again hanging on for a few days), I came to the conclusion that the best solution would be to simply calculate this figure on the basis of my dictionary. It would seem a simple, banal decision, but even the most obvious things sometimes have to go a long way.

Interestingly, the values ​​I received differ significantly from the wiki data:


Or my dictionary is so poor that it does not even have the letter "E", or one of the two.

Registration

If in programming I can reasonably be considered a layman, then the graphics and visual design of the case were slightly better, I would like to think so.

As it was said above, this time the design had to follow the trend of minimalism and poverty today. On the one hand, this allowed it to be realized in the shortest possible time - on the other hand, it allows the player to easily and completely immerse themselves in the game. Like, nothing distracts from the process. I think this may well explain laziness to cut tons of textures, one for each interface element.



As you can see from the screenshots, I wanted to minimize everything that can be reduced to it, remove all unnecessary and even a little useful. If it were not for the protests of a sense of aesthetic completeness, I would remove even diagonal stripes and translucent empty hexagons in the background.

Yes, the era dictates its own rules. This is reflected in the design. For example, why do you think an empty area is highlighted in the middle of the bottom of the screen? Correct: for rekl

Advertising

There is no advertising in the game. Not because I don’t believe in its miraculous effect on the fat content of the sandwich obtained after the game is actually believed , but because the standard Admob banner simply doesn’t fit in the space allotted to it below, unaesthetically overlapping, firstly, too many background diagonal stripes (and they are cool), and, secondly, an important text under the field.

In fact, it was decided to test the Shareware monetization model, which is not very popular on mobile devices. That is, the player who installed the application is offered to play the game several times for free. And already on familiarization with the game he has the right to decide whether he likes the game and whether he is ready to buy it.

In the modern world of mobile games, when a developer extorts money from the user, which has become the traditional free-to-play method, an attempt has been made to humanize the “consumer” and “producer” relationship. A unique case in history, do not pass by.

Notes for the most persistent (Disclamer)

The author did not invent anything new. Only inspired by existing analogues, including the game Shapefold (physical puzzle), the amazing game Reiner Knizia's Labyrinth, the game Ticket to Ride Online and ...

Somewhere at the design stage, it was found out that the game being described, mercilessly copied from an unknown, randomly encountered flash Wordblocks (the name may be different, I forgot), turns out to be, in fact, a clone of the Spell Tower iOS device that is well-known among English-speaking users. After identifying this fact, it was decided to learn from the Spell Tower all the best, adding new features, including the name. Fair.