Hi everyone


For my final year project, I'm making a puzzle game "Lines":



You can run it from http://www.edngames.com (it uses Clickonce)

I am looking for bored people to give it a go! To set high scores, you have to sign in to the website and "buy" the game (its free). Its kind of like Xbox Live Arcade, but not quite as good ;-) There is a video of an old version of the 360 port on youtube here.

Very interested in any feedback (good or bad)!

Very nice! I haven't tried it, but the video looks nice and the gameplay looks great. I'm going to give it a download in a few minutes and see if I have any ideas from then. Nice work on the score-board too!

Just gave it a shot. I like it a lot. But I'm going to be very nit-picky here and hopefully it is more helpful than hurtful. :)

• Give some sort of instruction screen please. I had no idea how to rotate the blocks at first. I also didn't know that red blocks can't be rotated. What I would suggest is maybe the first time they play you can show them a screen and then remember they played it and never show it again or simply put a menu option for it.
• Put in thumbstick support. It's a pain to use the D-Pad when there's that lovely joystick above it. I would say this is a must-have feature for you.
• Add a pause menu. I pressed start while playing and nothing happened. I pressed back and the game totally quit out on me. There should be an easy pause menu that lets me either continue or quit.
• Make the lines a bit darker. I can see them easy enough, but it'd be nice to have them a little darker.
• Different backgrounds. Perhaps an options screen to choose one or you can simply have them fade into a new one every 30 seconds or so. Having the same background for a while can get a little annoying.
• Remove the "Not Connected To EDN" logo when playing. It might just be me being very picky, but I don't think that's necessary to show after I've gone through the menu and begun playing. I'm a fan of minimal UI in games, so extra things like that ted to feel more like clutter than useful to me.

That's about all I can think of. Overall you have a very fun game going. Keep up the good work!

Edit: Also, I wanted to thank you for one of the smoothest deployments of a game yet. Very simple and very effective. Where did you learn how to generate that installer system? I haven't really looked into ClickOnce, but if you get time you should think about writing up a quick article for Ziggyware on that. It's definitely a useful way to deploy XNA games.

Huuuuuge thanks for the feedback. Some comments:

Nick Gravelyn:

Give some sort of instruction screen please. I had no idea how to rotate the blocks at first. I also didn't know that red blocks can't be rotated. What I would suggest is maybe the first time they play you can show them a screen and then remember they played it and never show it again or simply put a menu option for it.

Planning to do so mate, its on the "planned features list"

Nick Gravelyn:

Put in thumbstick support. It's a pain to use the D-Pad when there's that lovely joystick above it. I would say this is a must-have feature for you.

Same again!

Nick Gravelyn:

Add a pause menu. I pressed start while playing and nothing happened. I pressed back and the game totally quit out on me. There should be an easy pause menu that lets me either continue or quit.

And again, planning it

Nick Gravelyn:

Make the lines a bit darker. I can see them easy enough, but it'd be nice to have them a little darker.

Hopefully I should be redoing the tiles at some point, they are placeholder graphics atm

Nick Gravelyn:

Different backgrounds. Perhaps an options screen to choose one or you can simply have them fade into a new one every 30 seconds or so. Having the same background for a while can get a little annoying.

Again, planning to

Nick Gravelyn:

Remove the "Not Connected To EDN" logo when playing. It might just be me being very picky, but I don't think that's necessary to show after I've gone through the menu and begun playing. I'm a fan of minimal UI in games, so extra things like that ted to feel more like clutter than useful to me.

When it shows "Not Signed into EDN" it means the server can be reached but you haven't logged in. Its a warning that high scores won't be set - its also important for high score players to notice if their connection dies during play (it comes up "Not Connected").

As I say, this is a project for uni so I have to write a big report about the whole thing before I'll really have time for any major work on it. Again, thanks for the feedback :-)

Wow - I'm super impressed! The install experience is really really good, as Nick points out. I use Vista with the default locked-down settings and the ClickOnce deployment was configured properly so as not to give me the full-screen 'Are you sure?' which was very nice. For anyone else that wants to try this out, literally click and you're playing in 30 seconds.

The game is pretty cool too, the only thing it's missing imho is a control screen - I didn't use my connected 360 controller and it took me a while to realize z and x controlled the shape.

Definitely if you could write up something on Ziggyware about your experience with ClickOnce and whatever secondary downloading that was when the game first started up - the community would really appreciate it.

Great job!

Right, I've done some updates! There is now a full How To Play / Instructional screen (thanks for the feedback guys!), I've tweaked the scoring a bit and there is a nice pixel shader reflection under the game grid. Fire up lines from the Start menu and you can see how it automagically updates itself :-)

Oh, and there is a nice poster about EDNGames.com and Lines here: http://www.edandersen.com/stuff/Project%20Poster.pdf (this is for my Uni project and I've quoted Nick and John above in it)

Woot! MyFame++ :)

Looks great. Seriously you did everything incredibly right. Are you planning on releasing any papers or tutorials on it so others can follow in your footsteps?

Yep, some point soon when I have the time. Its pretty simple though, just alot of faffing about getting the content pipeline stuff working and installing XNA prereqs.

I don't use IE so, as an affected user, I think ClickOnce is not the best option to deploy applications. I think you should detect the browser, providing a ClickOnce download link or its alternative depending on it. Regarding the game, nothing to add to Nick's words. I think the game looks as nice and addictive as Lumines :-D

Abel García Plaza:

I don't use IE so, as an affected user, I think ClickOnce is not the best option to deploy applications. I think you should detect the browser, providing a ClickOnce download link or its alternative depending on it. Regarding the game, nothing to add to Nick's words. I think the game looks as nice and addictive as Lumines :-D

What do you mean? I use FireFox and ClickOnce works just fine.

My implementation of ClickOnce only fails on XP when Firefox is the default browser (I do already detect the browser and offer up the best ClickOnce launch method in each case). Visual Studio 2008 fixes this though, so I'm waiting for XNA 3 :-)

Nick Gravelyn:

Abel García Plaza:

I don't use IE so, as an affected user, I think ClickOnce is not the best option to deploy applications. I think you should detect the browser, providing a ClickOnce download link or its alternative depending on it. Regarding the game, nothing to add to Nick's words. I think the game looks as nice and addictive as Lumines :-D

What do you mean? I use FireFox and ClickOnce works just fine.

I use XP and Firefox as default browser but... a download manager too. I think that was the problem. The manager downloaded the installer, then I manually started it and, finally, y did click on the .application file. The process is not as easy as it is when using IE. How the process is without a download manager?