1821

So I’ve played a few rounds and I still honestly don’t really know whats going on… it seems like I’d like it if I got the hang of it but man give us some pointers or something because I keep losing but I’m scoring decently and the little green bar is moving up (thats XP right?). I dig the chilled out art style and music and even the super-ambiguous gameplay but there needs to be a bit more documentation of some sort.

1822

thanks Adree, I will prepare a One-Page-Manual on our Web-Site, where I explain everything. For me, the game is almost too obvious … but I get this feedback from different sides, red alert here…

1823

Some Screenshots.

The

sssss of downloads we hope to have.


It’s not the first time a spambot has frozen up.


Bee Jokes.

1824

Cool, I picked this up. I’ll write it up on my web site (and here) once I’ve played for a bit.

1825

Just picked this up, I like this PopCap style of bookworm better than the one they actually released for the iPhone. Can’t wait to beegin myself.

1826

Finished Star Defense which is the tower defense game that’s played on rotatable asteroids. Sadly, this feature is also the best part of the game. Gameplay is decent but not too deep, controls are fiddly, there’s no speedup, and worst of all the game is terribly unbalanced. Easy difficulty is usually too easy while Normal is impossible after the second level. Resources are quite limited so as far as I could tell, it’s one of those annoying puzzle solving games, like the higher levels of GeoDefense, where you lose if you don’t place each tower at exactly the right spot at the right time. Not my cup of tea.

1827

Also got a new GeoSpark highscore at 96,300. That was probably my last game, too, as I started getting those ignored taps that others have reported. Great game but I don’t want to lose due to random bugs.

1828

I’ve played a lot of Bookworm Adventures lately (thanks, Steam sale!), and now I’ve played through about twenty rounds of Bee Spelled, and I think you guys were heavily inspired by the wrong bits. I’d rather your game had several different modes that lent themselves to trying for higher scores without, say, getting kicked in the nuts near the end by some self-healing robot when healing gems for the bee never show up. It really sucks to play through eight or nine rounds and go down like a chump because the random number generator isn’t going your way.

Why is the amount of damage I’m about to unleash with a particular word hidden? Why isn’t the amount of healing that will be done if I submit a word in its current form displayed on my health bar? Why is the multiplier system such a mystery? Do some letters have more weight than others in terms of scoring? None of this is explained.

As for modes, how about a series of boards that always start the same (and has letters that are always replaced the same), and the player has five or ten or whatever turns to get the highest possible score? How about a mode that lets players hold a letter in reserve each time they spell a long word so they can use it later? What about all the minigames that were included in Bookworm Adventures? There are lots of different things you can do with this, and aping Bookworm Adventures’ adventure mode doesn’t do much good if your game leaves out the adventure part.

All that aside, the game works great and the dictionary is already proving itself better than that of Bookworm (it’s accepted several words that Bookworm has rejected in the past). It’s a nice little time waster but it could be a lot more compelling with better transparency and some extra modes.

1829

Thanks. Eager to see that. What’s your website anyhow?

Good points. Truth be told, there are lot of features that got cut late in development. One was for the ability to store items so you could heal the Bee without resorting to healing tiles. One tip though for gaming the random number generator is try to save the tiles you need for later enemies. You don’t have to use all the special tiles in a single word and you can space out the attacks with 7-8 letter words and generating special tiles, than dropping one massive 10-letter word and getting gimped by the RNG.

As for modes, we’d certainly like to do more modes. We had initially started with the adventure mode, but had to scale down during the development process. We figured we’d get the base game working before toying around with different modes.

As for the amount of Damage unleashed, it’s directly related to rating of the word. (Great, Fantastic, Amazing, UnBee-lievable) The damage number was initially removed from the play area for UI reasons. We can look into restoring that.

Thanks for the feedback.

1830

That makes more sense now, but I still don’t understand how the multiplier works for scoring. Is it based solely on word length, or do certain letters (J, X, Z, etc.) factor in more when used? The main thing I don’t get is that I can keep it at 10x for a bit but then it drops down to a lower level seemingly arbitrarily.

The tactic I’m using for higher scores now is gaming the self-heal bots. As long as I can keep a few heal tiles of my own on the board I can rack up a higher score by purposely keeping them alive and letting them heal so I can squeeze more words in before the end of the game is triggered and there are no more scoring opportunities. An endless mode that doesn’t stop after the tenth bot would be a fantastic way to avoid having to do this.

As for damage/healing indicators I wasn’t thinking numbers, but a colored overlay directly on the health bars that grows as you spell your word so you know precisely how much the bars will be reduced/expanded after the attack. That way you don’t have to fiddle with numbers or percentages or whatever – you get a simple visual indicator on the relevant UI element.

Please understand that I realize it takes no effort for me to sit here and play armchair designer. I’m just throwing stuff out because I really like the core gameplay (as with Bookworm Adventures), but think it could be really tightened up with a few tweaks (as with Bookworm Adventures, which to my mind is a study in unrealized potential). Hope the game is a success and you guys make the money you need to continue developing it :)

1831

Equis, just bought Bee Spelled. My wife thinks it’s great.

1832

hey guys, I think Quozzle might be good stuff if you want to show it to your girl friend… there are some promos left. okay, that’s it. My last marketing trick. It is good to pickup girls. There you go… second video

1833

I don’t suppose anyone knows of a U-boat type game? I’ve googled around and can’t come up with anything except terribly arcade-y submarine shooters.

I don’t know if anyone remembers the original U-boat back in the 90s, but you were the commander of a German submarine who would receive orders to intercept X Y or Z vessels, with freedom to move around the map as you saw fit (there were controls to speed up time as I recall). Your tools were the map, a periscope (while submersed), a couple physical handbooks (well done, those) that gave you ship profiles and the like to aid shooting your torpedos. The interior was a handful of static images with clickables to access the action-oriented stuff or the map.

It was a very bare bones type game with terrific atmosphere mostly derived from great audio and the “hurry up and wait” type gameplay as you stalk armed merchant and military targets. I’d love something like this on my phone.

1834

I must be the last person in the world to discover Flight Control. Very nice little game, although admittedly very simple. Are there other games based on the same idea?

1835

I remember Harbor Master 3D being described as a good Flight Control clone, released just before Christmas. I haven’t played either of them.

1836

God, I hate Flight Control and those style of games.

The pirate one with the three boats, and the Nintendo-esque fat/standard/skinny three ships you use to protect the harbor isn’t too bad, though.

1837

After reading Tom’s post about The Quest on fidgit today, I’m wondering if there’s a unanimous pick for the best RPG dungeon crawler ipod app. I’m in the mood to crack skeleton noggins and pick up shiny pieces of gold. The Quest sounds intimidating and relatively pricey but I may give it a shot. What say you all?

1838

I haven’t tried The Quest, but I think Undercroft is pretty solid – defintiely has that old Eye of the Beholder feel to it.

1839

Contra-fidgit, the Quest shows as 5.99 on itunes. Is there a different version or something?

1840

Undercroft is a good choice, particularly since I hear they fixed the unlimited consumables exploit.