9 Ball connect

[HappinessSam]

I've been trying to learn typescript/javascript so I've tried to port one of my old Flash games, since I have all the assets and actionscript code, so I thought that would make it easier.

I decided to use createjs, since out of all the rendering engines I looked at it had the best documentation and the most professional looking website (yes, I'm that shallow).

 

This is the current, nearly finished version please give it a play and tell me what you think/what bugs you find. It works well on firefox/chrome on my desktop and on chrome and default browser on my phone, but I can't get the css to display correctly on dolphin. I am ashamed to admit I don't have any apple devices to test it on so I'd really appreciate any feedback on them.

 

It's my first attempt at a html5 game so I had lots of little issues but on the whole it seems fairly simple and nowhere near as scary as I thought it would be.

Things I had problems with/questions:

• Sound. I tried soundjs and I couldn't get it to work on mobile. I understand this is a problem but I hoped there would be some good ways to deal with it. How do you guys handle it? It's disappointing because I feel that the music and sound was a major part of the original flash game.
• CSS. Ugh. I just can't get my head around it. I ended up just having some javascript handlers on the resize/orientation event, but as I said it still doesn't work correctly in some browsers. I would love it if someone could point me to some good tutorials that are relevant to games. the ones I've found so far are terrible.
• The actual gameplay. I thought it would work, but I think having your finger on the screen obscures the ball you are on and makes the game fiddly to play and not that much fun. I need to give more thought to my next mobile game.
• Packaging the game. I have all my code in one js file, but all my includes are separate. Also I have a lot of pngs, since this is how you work with createjs bitmpaAnimations. Is this okay, or would I be expected to have a single js file and one spritesheet with all of my assets?
• Visual studios. I'm sure it's a great programme, but it seems to have so much bloat and it runs very slowly on my (1st gen i7) laptop. I feel I may be using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

Anyway, love to hear feeback, plus suggestions on where to go from here (my first html5 game).

 

[HappinessSam]

I just bought a second hand iphone 3gs from a pawn shop and the game runs, but it's very, very slowly. Would this be a problem or are 3gs already old enough that I don't have to worry about them? (Did I just waste £70?)

[Rune]

I test all my stuff on the ipod equivalent. I think it's worth having just to get an idea of the minimum user experience. I think most people have upgraded, but it's a great test platform.

[Dream Of Sleeping]

I was playing it earlier in firefox and sometimes it would stop responding to user input completely.  But it doesn't seem to be happening now.  I almost like the game a lot. I really like the drawing the line across the balls  part but I don't like the fact that balls of the same color disappear. That makes it a bit too much like all those match three games. To me the game would have bee more intresting if the only way to make the balls disappear was by using the line on ascending numbers method. But that's just personal taste. You could always make an alternative game mode, just for me. lol

 

But still you've done a really great job. It looks really nice too.

[-AAG-]

I tried it on my old acer aspire one netbook on chrome and it worked just fine. I did found some issues:

I do not understand this set of instructions at all. The number sequence seems to be messed up and whats up with starting with a 9? The instructions say you can go from 1 to 9 but the sequence goes from 9 to 1. I found this screen very confusing even thou I did figure what you where trying to say. Also the background on the start button clearly doesn't match the background of the game. At least not at this zoom level.

Like D of S said, my game crashed at this point, it would not respond to my input. However if I paused and resumed I could make one more move and then no input again. I could keep on repeating this process and keep playing but obviously this isn't what you intended. I also figured that the way the game is made, I could simply click on the screen at random even without looking and still win. Try it, you will make lots of points.

 

I agree with D of S 100%, the line drawing mechanism is actually good. If you drop the color matching stuff and build on this mechanism instead this could end up being lots of fun. You can make it so you could start your sequence at any point, eg. 1,2,3,4,etc...but also 5,6,7,etc. The longer the sequence the larger the points of course. you could also make it so you can make sequences of just odds or even numbers eg. 1,3,5,7, or 2,4,6,8.

Another thing you could do is a big bonus for something crazy like the sum of the first 2 numbers in the sequence equals the third number,  so a sequence could be 1,3,4 meaning 1+3=4. If you insist on the match color thing you could make it so that a sequence with all balls of the same color is worth a lot more than a multicolored one.

[HappinessSam]

Cheers, that looks like a bug in my code for when the balls drop, though irritatingly not one I've seen myself. I'll have to do some digging 

 

On the instructions, I agree they could be better, but it's hard to explain it and I've found that most people don't even bother reading them. Would 'The cue ball acts as a wildcard' Sound better?

 

About being able to click ball of the same colour, on my very first version you couldn't (as I said it's a port of an old Flash game), but I found a whole lot of people just come in, don't read the instructions and try to click same colours, then get pissed off and leave when they can't. Adding that ability gives those people something of a game to get them interested, but it also adds the tactical ability to remove balls when the RNG gives you numbers which don't go together.

 

On scoring, if you just randomly click, or only remove balls by clicking you won't get a good score - the multiplier for chains is huge, and getting chains with colours the same also adds to that. Part of me like the suggestions about odd numbers, sums etc, but I think it would just massively overcomplicate things. I don't even want to think about making instructions to explain that.

 

Oh, last thing - the background on the start button. Using createjs you don't seem to get mouse events in places where there's zero alpha, so you can click a text button but click the space between letters and nothing happens. It seems there should be a way around it but I couldn't get it working properly so I took the easy way out of having a 0.0001 alpha box behind the text. Really dodgy hack that I should look into fixing.

[-AAG-]

The cue ball part is easily understood. Is the number sequence itself that doesn't make sense to me. First it starts with a 9 and second the cue ball seems to be acting as both a 3 and a 4 at the same time. 

 

That's weird about the no collision issue. Is almost like it uses pixel perfect collision all the time rather than preset collision boxes. In GM Studio you can also set an alpha tolerance value for collisions and any pixels outside that value will be ignored. But GM Studio does all kinds of weirdness, I don't know how much of it applies outside GM.