Well as I said I've been playing through several of the games from Kidfriendly software to write up for audiogames.net, often paying for the coins and other upgrades when the game appealed to me personally.
Barnyard was one that surprised me for the idea of the game and how much random fun sliding around looking for animals was, especially in the matching, indeed I like the fact that the game uses the touch screen so uniquely. I actually introduced my Fiance to the game today, sinse as an animal lover and because she's getting used to the hole touch screen concept on her Iphone, I thought it might appeal, and she really rather enjoyed it (indeed she got far more addicted than I expected and spent half an hour trying to beat her previous high score). Her first comment however (which I promised to pass on), was "why are there no dogs or cats?" As a lover of both she was quite disappointed, and in fairness I can see her point sinse while it's very cool to have Sea lions, Dolphins and rattle snakes on a farm, not to mention loons (good company for me), it would be rather logical to have a farm dog or cat :d. I also did have a couple of thoughts myself. Firstly, sinse the game employs time limits, it might be nice if we could make the information spoken more concise, and thus be more able to get higher scores. So instead of hearing "bullfrog to the north west" have a setting to just hear "bullfrog, northwest" or maybe even "bullfrog n w" Secondly, I wonder why some aspects of the game which are controlled in settings have not been used to create different various types of game to play? For example, instead of having the player choose how many animals, have games with increasing numbers of animals, eg, 3 minutes 5 animals, 3 minutes 6 animals. It might also be fun to have games that alter the number of animals while playing, so that players have to more quickly make judgements on the fly and cannot prepare for new sorts of animals turning up. So for example have a game that starts with four types of animals, and then add another kind after a predetermined time, say 2 minutes, then another kind after another two minutes and so on until the player messes up. Likewise, I rather wondered why both the size of animals and the spoken instructions were not factors used to create harder games to challenge the player, as opposed to be alterable in settings. Personally I'd much rather myself have the option to get higher scores on different modes of play than to have the same modes of play but need to alter a setting, sinse it creates more variation in the game and gives me more options when I start, not to mention making the game progressive by giving harder levels so that I can advance to the next hardest category when the previous one becomes too easy (I really like the setup in Hopper and Pong for this). I've actually thought the same in breakout, that the speed of the ball and whether the paddle grows when it hits the back wall should be factors that alter in different levels, however Blindfold Barnyard, sinse it is based on managing increasing levels of more complex circumstances would be a really nice game to play around with in this way. INdeed, speaking of complexity, there could be some rather fun ways to expand the game. Firstly, at the present moment there is no reason why a player cannot simply keep clearing one fence of a given animal type and accumulate more and more score on another fence. I was thinking therefore of inserting a factor which forced players to keep evolving which fence they stuck animals too. What I was thinking is that at various intervals, a player could hear a wind sound and be told "wind from the north" (or whichever direction). At this point, if a player didn't immediately move all animals on that fence to the barn, the fence would be blown down, all the animals run away and she/he would lose them. This would be complicated by the fact that the wind could blow at random intervals, and at any time, meaning higher scores were far more difficult. Another thought I had which may be used either instead of, or as well as the wind idea, is the idea of animal feed to earn bonus points. The basic idea would be to again give players another factor to manage according to which fence which animal got hitched to. the idea is that at times (or on specific levels), players would hear a truck sound and would be announced "insert animal name food at insert direction fence", eg "Canary food at east fence" For the next short while, say several seconds, players would get extra points for hitching animals of that type to the specific fence, say double points. of course, the problem would be that if that fence was full, or if the player already had a collection of the given animal on another fence, then it would be time for a value judgement. just some thoughts. As I said, my fiance and I really rather enjoyed Blindfold Barnyard, a very unique principel for a game and look forward to seeing any other newly designed games from Kidfriendly software (I'm planning to try out my fiance with Hopper next). All the best, dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
