Click on masks that are next to each other to make them switch places.
You can only switch two masks if in doing so you can align three or more identical masks.
All criticisms and suggestions are welcome.
Update:
We added a score added a time limit to make the game more exciting.
Matching masks stops the time limit timer for a few seconds.
We still haven’t decided what would be the best style to display the score how long you have before the time limit timer starts moving again. In the meantime, we using plain labels to display that info.
Very nicely done love the title/swing/you are in game kinda mood I will say whatever everyone else had said - add a score! otherwise it seems kinda pointless. Ooooh and as masks are creepy, and haloween is coming, maybe try some spooky/gory/eeeeep masks as a promotion?
By popular demand we are working on adding a score time limit. I will update this thread once we upload the new version to the server. Thanks for playing and letting us know your opinions about our game!
Interesting! It reminds me of Dr. Mario. While there is a time limit, it doesn’t appear to do anything. I have run out of time multiple times and yet I don’t lose and my score keeps going up.
The game timer is the wall in the background going down. Once it disappears from the screen the game is over.
I guess you’re looking at the countdown timer that tells you for how long you have stopped the wall going down.
Ahh, now I get it! I only waited 1 minute before, it seems if I wait 3 minutes I lose. While that seems a bit generous, it’s good to know there’s a working timer. I encountered a strange situation today:
I may be tired, but I can’t see any way to progress, and that doesn’t make for a satisfying loss. Which makes me wonder–when you generate a new group of masks, do you verify before dropping them that the resulting position will be playable, and if not generate a different group?
Yes, it is quite frustrating when the board gets locked-up like that. We’re just dropping the new masks at random because we haven’t found a way to make sure there’s always at least one possible move available to the player. Furthermore, once the bottom of the board gets locked-up we don’t even know if it’s possible to fix that by dropping new masks at the top.
If you can’t think of a way to do so, a simple approach is a brute force search. Create a duplicate mask-matrix and simulate moving all the blocks! 8x8 = 64 blocks that can be swapped in at most 4 ways each means there are at most 256 possible swaps, and less than half that number if your algorithm takes into account duplicates swaps, edges, and corners. Such a search may take a couple seconds, so do it in a separate thread, and perhaps only if the player can’t find a swap within 5-10 seconds.
An easier to implement (but less optimal) approach is to assume that if the player can’t find a match within 30 seconds, something is wrong. Any detection method is superior to waiting 3 minutes to lose.
In that case, completely replacing or re-organizing the mask matrix could be the solution.
We already have an internal representation where we can test the 105 possible swaps without affecting what’s shown on screen. We also have the code to check if there is at least one available move, and it runs fast enough to execute it in the main thread without introducing any noticeable delay. The real problem is: Is it possible to make sure the board never gets locked-up? And, wouldn’t that make the game too easy when players find out they can always find a match in the top rows?
We updated the game to give a faster pace. We also updated the GUI to make it easier to visualize how much time you have before the wall starts dropping again. You can try it at: http://mundojava.com/Masks.html
As always, every suggestion and/or criticism is welcome.
Totally agree … seems much cooler … the masks are creepy … maybe you could play on that? make them creepier? what would be uber creepy, is changing the occasional mask to something more creepy looking, maybe one untouched one every 30 seconds or so … playing on 31st
go for creepy and go with a viral creepypasta … would totally get some hits with that I’d rather play something creepy than cute, but maybe that is just me
