[ENDED] Giveaway for my new Android puzzle game, Super Blackout

Josh1billion

Josh1billion

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Giveaway has ended!  Thank you to everyone who participated.

original post:
 

Hi CAG,

I just released my first Android game, which is a puzzle game called Super Blackout.  To celebrate, I'm giving away 5 copies of the paid version, which offers a few benefits over the free version.

Free version is here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joshforde.superblackout_free

Paid version is here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joshforde.superblackout

How to enter:

1. Install the free version (link).

2. Post here letting me know you installed it.

3. If you have time, try out the game and let me know what you think.  Otherwise, this being CAG and all, you can just throw it in your backlog for now. :p
 

Giveaway ends:

September 2, 2013 at 12:00 a.m. central.  Any posts after that time will not be entered into the drawing.

Winner selection:

One week from today (Sept. 2), I'll pick 5 winners randomly from those who posted.

Prize delivery information:

I'll PM the winners on September 2, requesting your e-mail addresses.  Once all of the winners have notified me of their e-mail addresses, I'll send the game to them via e-mail.

Note that I will be sending the game file itself (as a .apk file), so you will need to transfer the game to your phone (or download it straight from your e-mail inbox) to install it.  I don't have any way of offering free downloads directly from the Play Store, as far as I know, otherwise I'd do that instead.  Sorry for the inconvenience in that regard, though the installation process should still be easy enough, and I'll help out anyone who has trouble installing it.

Game info:

This is my first Android game, a puzzle game which took just under a week to develop.

The "Lights Out" game concept has been around for years, but I decided to put a spin on it by including some new features that I saw were missing from other games on the Play Store (features that were requested by those games' users but not implemented).  Thus, Super Blackout was born.

Features include:

- 90 levels (Easy, Medium, and Hard modes, each with 30 levels)

- a random level generator, with adjustable difficulty

- a level editor, with up to 30 slots to save custom puzzles

Screenshot:

x4rvir.png

 
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I've installed the game. its pretty good, but im stuck on level 10!

Edit: done lvl 10 now, and couldn't do 17 (had 717 moves). Then restarted and did it in 8!!!

Very fun game. :)
 
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Eden0032 said:
I've installed the game. its pretty good, but im stuck on level 10!

Edit: done lvl 10 now, and couldn't do 17 (had 717 moves). Then restarted and did it in 8!!!

Very fun game. :)
Click to expand...
Thanks man. :)

The trick, as you've found out, is to restart if you're too many moves in. All of the Easy levels should be able to be finished in about 10 moves or less (many around 4 to 8 moves). Oftentimes, if you tap the correct initial tile, the solution will start to be noticeable.

 
I am installing it now. Although I most likely wont have time to play it until at least Monday night with the crazy start of semester project I have to work on. It looks like a great game that I will enjoy when I get the time to play it though. I am always looking for more games to play while on the go with my android.

As for the lack of entries it has always seemed to me that we have a very small android community here on CAG. I see lots of IOS posts all the time but very little posts about android and when I see them they are in here http://www.cheapassgamer.com/topic/221364-android-games-ongoing-sales/ and in here http://www.cheapassgamer.com/forum/71-android/ or sometimes when an indie bundle website has an android version of something in its current bundle. I would try posting about this in those places. It might be better noticed in those locations. I know that these are the places that I follow for my android news on CAG.

 
Installing it now!  Looks like it should be a fairly fun puzzle game - glad to know about it, even if I don't win. :)

 
I installed it.  Played for a few minutes because that's all the time I have but it looks like the type of game I like to have on my phone.  I can play for a board while I'm waiting for something or watching tv.

 
Cool I love puzzle games and always love to support devs on CAG. Will have to remember to install this once my phone is charged and post some thoughts here (will try at least, my memory is pretty YMMV) :)

 
I installed this right after you first posted it, just figured I'd wait to comment until I had played it a few times. I enjoy it, it's fun and some of the levels are frustrating, nice job with this game!

 
played all night long at work... great job on this, i hate it so much that i love it type of feel

honestly, i havnt enjoyed something like this since the first time i played Mastermind WAY back in the day... it was an old Tiger Electronics joint

so i guess this is my entry! doesnt matter though, i never when a damn thing...

 
pretty cool game. a few suggestions:

1. show the minimum # of moves: i like challenging myself to not only finish the puzzle, but to find the most efficient and elegant ways to solve it. 

2. an undo button? maybe you dont want people to just buttom smash and undo to solve by dumb luck

3. after solving the puzzle, instead of the "snaking" animation, maybe you can replay the moves that the player did? sometimes i solve them so fast (or by luck) i dont even know or saw what i did. 

 
i used to have a handheld game... i think lights out.. it was like 10 by 10 ... soft buttons that light up red... it was a ton of fun..

i installed this... will check it out later...

nice app, thanks for the contest

 
dorkyden said:
pretty cool game. a few suggestions:

1. show the minimum # of moves: i like challenging myself to not only finish the puzzle, but to find the most efficient and elegant ways to solve it.

2. an undo button? maybe you dont want people to just buttom smash and undo to solve by dumb luck

3. after solving the puzzle, instead of the "snaking" animation, maybe you can replay the moves that the player did? sometimes i solve them so fast (or by luck) i dont even know or saw what i did.
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Thanks for the suggestions; those are good ideas. For #1, it might be a little too late in the development process to do that, because I'd have to play through each level and record the number of moves manually, so it's possible that I might make a mistake when doing that, since it'd be based only upon my own judgment. Note also for #2 - if you ever want to undo a move as it is now, you can just tap the same spot that you just tapped, and it will have the same effect as undoing the move.

canvasch said:
i used to have a handheld game... i think lights out.. it was like 10 by 10 ... soft buttons that light up red... it was a ton of fun..

i installed this... will check it out later...

nice app, thanks for the contest
Click to expand...
Good catch; I got the idea from a version of Lights Out. The version I played as a kid was the one that Tiger released bundled with their handheld platform, a not-so-successful handheld called the Game.com.

 
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Installed. Played it on my tablet and love these style "lights-out" games. I owned the handheld with the soft buttons mentioned earlier and played it for years. Great job Josh. Hope you sell millions!
 
Finally got around to playing this, and overall can say I quite like the basic idea. I played the first 20 or so levels before taking a break when I hit a particularly challenging one, and here are a few suggestions:

1. I think it would be good if the color of the bored changed every so often. Not that there is anything wrong with the green, but after a while everything tends to get old, and having a simple color swap could really help.

2. I'm not sure if it's my phone, but I think the text and buttons could do with some more anti-aliasing. Right now they are a bit too jagged for my tastes, and I think smoothing them out and maybe adding adding a bit of shading to make it look less flat would make everything look more professional (this isn't a knock at your or anything, it's just the best word I could come up with).

3. The background is rather bland in my honest opinion, and reminds me a bit too much of early windows screensavers. Keeping it simple with maybe a flatter background with lights going across the grid or something along those lines would be a better option I think. Making it 3D (or there abouts) just looks a little off.

4. I REALLY suggest you add some sort of music. It can be as simple or complex as you want to make it, but as it is it's just so silent. Maybe I'm just jaded from having not turned on an app without hearing some sort of sound in quite a while, but it's something I would very much like to see in future updates (assuming it's possible to add something like that, I'm no developer so I couldn't say).

Hopefully I didn't come across as too harsh. I think the actual game is pretty fun and so far has a good level of challenge to it (obviously a must in puzzle games), so I suppose I just wish the presentation was a little better is all. Anyway good job on it regardless, and thanks a lot for the givaway. I hope you do well with this and future projects, and look forward to seeing what you come out with next ^_^

 
MrNinjaSquirrel said:
Finally got around to playing this, and overall can say I quite like the basic idea. I played the first 20 or so levels before taking a break when I hit a particularly challenging one, and here are a few suggestions:

1. I think it would be good if the color of the bored changed every so often. Not that there is anything wrong with the green, but after a while everything tends to get old, and having a simple color swap could really help.

2. I'm not sure if it's my phone, but I think the text and buttons could do with some more anti-aliasing. Right now they are a bit too jagged for my tastes, and I think smoothing them out and maybe adding adding a bit of shading to make it look less flat would make everything look more professional (this isn't a knock at your or anything, it's just the best word I could come up with).

3. The background is rather bland in my honest opinion, and reminds me a bit too much of early windows screensavers. Keeping it simple with maybe a flatter background with lights going across the grid or something along those lines would be a better option I think. Making it 3D (or there abouts) just looks a little off.

4. I REALLY suggest you add some sort of music. It can be as simple or complex as you want to make it, but as it is it's just so silent. Maybe I'm just jaded from having not turned on an app without hearing some sort of sound in quite a while, but it's something I would very much like to see in future updates (assuming it's possible to add something like that, I'm no developer so I couldn't say).

Hopefully I didn't come across as too harsh. I think the actual game is pretty fun and so far has a good level of challenge to it (obviously a must in puzzle games), so I suppose I just wish the presentation was a little better is all. Anyway good job on it regardless, and thanks a lot for the givaway. I hope you do well with this and future projects, and look forward to seeing what you come out with next ^_^
Click to expand...
Thanks for the suggestions, and good ideas.

The color swap you suggested in #1 is actually a paid feature. ;) The paid version removes ads and allows you to change the graphics (tiles and backgrounds), and there are 18 choices total, including the default one. A few are simple palette swaps, and a few others are little pictures (like a sun tile that turns into a moon when darkened).

For music, I was considering this, but I ultimately decided on going the silent route for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to make 100% sure that it didn't become something that would annoy users or break their concentration. Second, I noticed most puzzle games that I've played (most that aren't fast-paced and require some concentration, I mean) don't have any music, presumably because they don't want to break users' concentration.

In regards to the anti-aliasing, which phone are you using? Could you send me a screenshot if you have time? Aside from the numbers (such as Level and Moves numbers), all graphics are just fairly high-definition images (with the text of buttons and headers being built into the image rather than drawn dynamically), so I imagined they'd scale better than it would take for any artifacts to be noticeable. Hmm.

 
Thanks everyone for entering; much better turnout than I expected, with 14 entries total. :)  Winners have now been picked.

I used random.org to pick five numbers, 1-14, rerolling on repeats, with the number referring to the poster number in the thread (not the post number).  Those numbers are:

1,8,2,14,7

which means our winners are:

Eden0032, Cloulien, tejadab, BOUNCIN PENGUIN, and lowdwn169.

Sending a PM to the winners now to request your e-mail addresses for sending the game file.  Thanks again to everyone who entered, and I hope to do another giveaway of some sort when my next game releases. :)

 
Congrats to the winners, was hoping to win myself (of course lol), but I might grab the paid version some time anyway once I've played some more of the free version:)

Josh1billion said:
Thanks for the suggestions, and good ideas.

The color swap you suggested in #1 is actually a paid feature. ;) The paid version removes ads and allows you to change the graphics (tiles and backgrounds), and there are 18 choices total, including the default one. A few are simple palette swaps, and a few others are little pictures (like a sun tile that turns into a moon when darkened).

For music, I was considering this, but I ultimately decided on going the silent route for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to make 100% sure that it didn't become something that would annoy users or break their concentration. Second, I noticed most puzzle games that I've played (most that aren't fast-paced and require some concentration, I mean) don't have any music, presumably because they don't want to break users' concentration.

In regards to the anti-aliasing, which phone are you using? Could you send me a screenshot if you have time? Aside from the numbers (such as Level and Moves numbers), all graphics are just fairly high-definition images (with the text of buttons and headers being built into the image rather than drawn dynamically), so I imagined they'd scale better than it would take for any artifacts to be noticeable. Hmm.
Click to expand...
Good to know about the colors, I thought that might be the case but didn't see anything in the game that said so. Well I guess I can see your point about the music. What about maybe just a track that plays in the menu, or maybe an announcer similar to Bejeweled. I just feel having something play when you first open an app makes a much better first impression, but perhaps I'm alone on this so do as you will :)

I'm using the (rather ancient) HTC Droid Incredible 2/S, and it sounds like it might be just me. I'd send you a screenshot, but for whatever reason I no longer seem able to take them :whistle2:? So not much I can do about that it seems. It's not terrible or anything and I might be a good deal more picky about stuff like that than most, so if no one else is mentioning it it's probably not worth bothering with.

 
Prizes have been e-mailed to 4/5 of the winners. Just waiting for Bouncin Penguin to reply and he'll get his, too.

MrNinjaSquirrel said:
Congrats to the winners, was hoping to win myself (of course lol), but I might grab the paid version some time anyway once I've played some more of the free version:)
Click to expand...
You have my thanks in advance if you end up buying it. :)

MrNinjaSquirrel said:
What about maybe just a track that plays in the menu, or maybe an announcer similar to Bejeweled. I just feel having something play when you first open an app makes a much better first impression, but perhaps I'm alone on this so do as you will :)
Click to expand...
The announcer is a good idea, never considered that. Hmmm.

 
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