Message #1313

From: Melinda Green <melinda@superliminal.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] 5D Pacman v 0.11
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2010 17:23:01 -0800

Andrey,

I’ve played a bit more with the program and I find that I like it a lot.
The 4D rotations are helpful when you find yourself in a corner shaped
like an arrowhead (3 lines radiating from a point) and you want to take
the middle path and gravity just won’t let you do that. You can then
pause and rotate the game so that the middle path becomes reachable and
then proceed to escape along it. It may not be a 4D puzzle but it’s
definitely handy to be able to change the board’s shape in the middle of
the game since the topology always remains the same. Here are a couple
new thoughts/problems.

I find myself clicking outside the window a lot because my navigation
dragging leaves the pointer outside the window and clicking to pause
then doesn’t work, even in full-screen mode. Worse is when this causes
some other window to come to the front while my little guy runs to his
death somewhere deep in my windows stack. So although I appreciate the
convenience of the one-touch control, I think I’d still prefer a
separate pause control that I can maybe work with my left hand. Seems
like some more experimenting with different pausing controls may be
called for.

It’s funny too that after playing for a while, I sort of expect to be
able to rotate my other windows around like your Packman UI. I guess
that means I found it to be an immersive game. Seems like it could be a
fun multi-player game too, possibly even on Android. :-0

One last problem that I found is that as soon as I ate the last dot on
the first level the screen went completely black. The buttons still work
but it seems like the game had moved completely outside the camera’s
view or something like that.

At this point I feel like the game play is good and usable, and I feel
that adding a good soundtrack and action sound clips would be the best
thing to add at this point.

Neat stuff, Andrey!
-Melinda