Binary Sparks - A weather/electricity puzzle game

We decided to make a first look as we played through the game for the first time. We apologize as it is a little critical or teasing, we just wanted to record our thoughts of the first time playing it so you could see exactly what our impressions were and what we may or may not have had trouble with. We understand it's still in the works and this is an early version, so hopefully this video will just help you know how it is going so far from a players perspective.

 

Hello, sorry it wasn't quite as positive of a review as you were hoping for, it wasn't our intention. To clarify, we loved the gameplay and the idea of the game, we just felt the graphics made it hard to enjoy. We wanted to show you the game with a fresh pair of eyes unfamiliar with the game.

I'll try to explain more.

The graphics do not necessarily need to be complex in order to be good, however for us it was slightly hard to figure out what was happening both in the trailer and during the gameplay because they were so simple. For example, in other games we have played when you plugged something in that connected an electrical current you would see an electrical cord light up with power and then that cord would run down all the way to what you powered up. Because there weren't any visible connections between the plugs to anything else it was confusing for us to see what was happening when the plug was connected.

In the scene below, our minds can quickly create a frame of reference.

Simply graphics are fine when we can build images of them from past logic. The floating platforms in the sky were confusing, are they are part of the level or just art? Why are they floating? It was hard to figure out the silver pyramid things, the pinwheels, other random trees and poles because it was hard to distinguish what was artistic qualities of the game and what were action points.

Altering the graphics to look slighly more like space platforms could help.


If a game says that you are on a space station there is some place in our minds with some information on a space station that creates a frame of reference for us to view the game through. If the game states that you are on an alien planet, you can imagine that you are going to see weird and strange things because that is what fits with that frame of reference. The only frame of reference here was that you are playing as a robot, the rest of the graphics did not help to create a world at all similar to one that we might be familiar to, if it was suggested that we would be exploring space in another dimension, or some other reason, that might explain why things look so strange but without some frame of reference to give some background information to the scene it can be confusing.

I think a tutorial would help, however it might make the levels too easy at the same time. If all the action objects were labeled that could help. (ex. The teleporter could say "teleporter" above it in gray letters, like character names in online games.

 

Hey there! I am the other member in the video that played your game and thought I might chime in with what I thought about it

I think you could actually keep the game mostly as it is. Possible spend some time enhancing some of the detail graphics on particular aspects of the game (transports, cubes, trees, just some specific things) and still keep the overall basic clean feel of the levels the same.

We aren't saying that you have to start over from scratch! And we also did really like the puzzles in the game

You posted with the game that it takes place in a “stranger futuristic solar system.” however this does not give that much reference for the levels. Why is a platform floating in space in this solar system? In the solar systems we know of all that there is is chemicals, stars, gasses, other aspects like that so the levels in this game do not really fit with our current image of a solar system. When you said “Welcome to the 9th dimension!” in the post, the video, and the game it didn't really stick out for me at least, so I did not notice it. In the game it was kind of hard to understand what the voice was saying, this could be the voice or too many rock concerts on my part.

Perhaps summarizing the game “You are going to be flung into another dimension where the world as you know it no longer exists. Solve puzzles in ways you could never imagine, prepare to see a whole new solar system” or something similar would have been better. Or perhaps in the trailer have words appear across the screen stating that you are going to be entering a totally different dimension, the 9th dimension? Or maybe even show a banner like that before the game starts to prep the player before they are in it?

Honestly, you could keep your game exactly the same and not change anything. The fact that we missed that it was in another dimension/galaxy is only here so you know that some people may miss that point if the information on this page is all that they are given.

I think the game is good overall, it is only the communication to the player when they first see the trailer and information that is somewhat lacking from our perspective. Perhaps if we had realized we were in a totally different dimension/galaxy it would have made more sense in our minds and would have been easy to figure out. That is part of the reason we were mentioning the graphics so much, more detailed graphics may have communicated to us that we were in another dimension even if we missed what you said in the post. Also, we are probably going to be some of your harshest critics, the point is that we can point all this out and then you can choose what to do with it. The other problem is that we can only play from our perspective, not everyone is going to miss the dimension/galaxy part or be bothered by simple graphics, it is just our perspective and we are trying to be as honest as possible.

 

I wouldn't get discouraged at all, your game has lots to offer. I'm guessing you enjoy playing the game yourself, likely because you know exactly what the game is and the different challenges and great things to expect. Likely the game is way more fun in the later levels. If you can convey to people the game from the way you understand it than its going to improve tenfold.

 

We decided to try a different route with this video... Let me know what you think



List
High priority:
It was hard to distinguish the action items like switches from the decorative items. Perhaps labeling the action items or making them glow or some way to distinguish them would help. For instance I didn't know the teleporter was in fact a teleporter.

It was hard to tell what each switch was doing when I pressed them. This caused me to get confused on what was actually happening when I pressed each switch.


Low priority
The first level had too many places to fall, this made it somewhat hard to get used to the gameplay.

A visual theme to pull the graphics together more. For this one, think of yourself as a movie directory. Every shot and angle should try to look visually appealing. Taking a videography course or photography course can really help.

 

I'm glad you like it! and no worries, I realize it wasn't your intention.

We were of course able to figure out the theme you were going for now, I don't see anything wrong with running with it. The crazy looking atmosphere works,but having some of the floor panels change color without reason and other things in the environment that don't make any sense might give the viewer the feel of a different dimension. Maybe if you want to go with a crazy wild other dimension feel make it even crazier? Weirder colors, more random of shapes, nothing that looks too normal, yet it has to give the viewer the illusion of normal (Yea, if that makes sense right)? Or maybe pick a couple main colors and have almost everything be those main colors with only a few things popping out? (think flowers in a green field with green trees and brown bark and brown dirt, the flowers will stand out but the overall feel will be green and brown.)

The main thing is making the areas you can walk on look like paths or the areas you can't look like barriers. If you can eliminate this confusion of players wondering where they can move it will help.

 

Sure, I moved this into beta since the game can be tested. If you want to do updates your welcome to post them in the updates/log section as well.

To answer your other question, the reason we were confused with the action objects and the decorative objects is mostly because there were so few objects to interact with in the game. From this perspective, we were unsure if these objects should have been used for some purpose. Take the top screenshot picture for example, while these were not action objects, it kinda feels like we could bounce another object off of them and use them as some sort of reflector. We of course were able to find the action objects, however we were not very confident we were doing the right thing as we played.