The Daily Click

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Author:	Bjorn Morrison	Submitted:	24th April, 2012	Favourites:	0
Genre:	Puzzle	Downloads:	187
Rated:

Hello!

Tickle Dice is a new solitaire, dice-rolling, poker-hand-making card game from Purple Dog Games. I'd love for you to play it, write about it and tell your audience what you think.

Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuZ3x3zpaM4
Here's the website: http://www.purpledoggames.com
You can use the discount code "reviewcopy" to get a review copy for free.

What's the game about?

Place cards in a 5 by 5 grid to earn dice per suit. Use those dice to battle your opponent. A unique card game with endless replayability. Yes it's casual, but there's a layer of strategy that's deceptively deep, and nicely addictive.

Features:

• Solitaire meets poker meets dice. With suits. Don’t worry, it’s very easy to learn.
• Arrange and re-arrange cards on a grid to make numbers go higher. Higher numbers are great.
• An extensive tutorial and 9 campaigns to play through.
• 60 opponents for you to battle against.
• Beat your friends’ highest score in Challenge Mode.
• Beat your own highest scores in Challenge Mode (for those without friends).
• 10 fiendish puzzles to solve, in the cleverly named Puzzle Mode.
• ‘Total one handed mouse only control’ ™ means multitasking at lunchtime just got easier.
• It costs US$2.50. No need to wait for it to go on sale or to part of some bundle, grab it today.

Who is Purple Dog Games?

It's me, Bjorn Morrison. I used to work for Auran, The Creative Assembly and Sega Studios Australia. I've been a QA monkey, Associate Producer, Scrum Master, Writer and Designer. Before all that, I wrote Digital Policy for the Australian federal government in Canberra, and also worked for Creative Commons Australia. I changed my name from Bjorn Bednarek to Bjorn Morrison when I got married, which screws up most internet searches and credits listings for me, but kept my wife much happier.

Thanks for you your time, I hope you enjoy Tickle Dice.

If you'd like more information, an interview, or just want to tell me what you thought, please email me back. This is the first time I've done this (made a game by myself, asked people to review it, asked people to buy it!), so any tips would be welcomed.

Bjorn Morrison.

Review This Download

http://www.purpledoggames.com/tickle-dice (7 mb )

Posted by Rick (AntiMatter Entertainment)

3rd May, 2012

Looks pretty cool! The mish-mash of poker/solitaire/dice/battling sounds very intriguing and is certainly different to what this site is used to. Downloading now, and although I haven't played this yet, I applaud you for trying something different.

Posted by Rick (AntiMatter Entertainment)

3rd May, 2012

I really like this game, there is a lot of content to get through and the humour at first felt out of place but soon grew on me. I love that you have episodes to complete, a challenge mode, and a puzzle mode - it really adds longevity and variety to what would have been an otherwise straight-forward game.

You really need to think about each move in the later levels and although there is an element of luck for how well you do with your dice rolls, you help the player feel in control by adding the ability to gain advantages such as 'tickles' and extra rolls through clever positioning that can help cement your victory. I think the fact that there's no guaranteed victory in any situation - apart from the limited rolls of the tutorial characters - is half the game's charm, I like that you need to build up your advantages before making the decision to battle and that there is always a degree of uncertainty, that you might be able to re-arrange your grid more efficiently.

This is really a breath of fresh air, and I think you've done a superb job. The mish-mash of genres works together quite well in a way that I'm pretty sure nobody's ever thought of. I do have a few niggles, though, as much as I hate to taint my praise with them. I hope you don't mind that I'll begin to list them now.

The first is that the presentation feels a little bit unpolished for a game that you are actually selling. I will do my best to say how without insulting your hard work, as you clearly worked hard on this. Your character art is clean and crisp and perfectly fine, but some are of distinctly different styles - the chick and the lamb of the farm episode, for example, compared to the bold-outline style of the rest of them. There's also something about the positioning of them on the side of the screen when you select an episode that doesn't look right - I think it would look more cleaned up if you had same-size icons of each opponent instead, all lined up nicely. As it is, they're kind of 'slapped on' if you know what I mean, again the Farm episode is a good example because the pictures of your opponents are not centered horizontally or spaced evenly. Clearly space was an issue here, but having same-size icons would fix this. Also, in the description scroll for each level, the stats on the bottom of each one look a bit cluttered or 'wall-y' considering all the empty space filled mostly with jokes. I think the fact that all text is bold (or looks it) also slightly decreases readability, but that's probably just personal preference. One more thing that may be more design choice than oversight is that some of your opponent pictures overlap the description of the episode, like the bat and winged ghost in Anti-Red.

In the tutorial, the fact that your opponent and the tutorial box are both telling you things at the same time isn't exactly confusing, but it breaks the continuity of your interface and it feels disorganized. Also in the tutorial, the fact that it leaves out certain steps may be a small barrier for some - picking up the next card after checking what the row advantages are may seem obvious, but I was waiting for some sort of prompt or indicator that I could continue before I realized I was supposed to just play on. Maybe I'm just too reliant on step-by-step tutorials.

I also found a typo, which I assume you'd like to remove from a professional product. The description for the "Awesome" episode says "apart from that silly endless mode in Episdoe 10". (That's the 'd' and 'o' in "Episode" mixed up, in case you don't see the bold text)

One last note, I think this sort of thing would be better off on iOS or another extremely popular mobile medium. Buying games from an indie developer's site tends to only happen with people who have their thumb on the pulse of the indie community or for developers who manage to get their names very well known, such as Mojang. I for one would like to see this game get more downloads, but I feel that too many people will be afraid to take the risk of paying for a slightly underpolished new take on a well-established genre.

I really hope that I'm not coming across as overly nit-picky. I just really like this game and the idea behind it, and I just want to give you some feedback that I feel is of particular importance to a selling product. Presentation, while not as important as gameplay, is often overlooked and I feel it is one of the most important parts of a selling product when determining how well it will sell... and I hope it is not unfair for me to say that this game is slightly lacking in presentation. I hope you take my criticisms into consideration instead of to heart, though, because I wish you nothing but success on your indie development venture and I think you have a very unique, rock-solid game here.

Comment edited by Rick (AntiMatter Entertainment) on 5/3/2012

Author

Bjorn Morrison

Registered
24/04/2012 03:40:13
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