Cognitile - by Express Media

[EXM-Matt]

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Cognitile is a new twist on the maze/puzzle genre. Draw a path to the goal on your touch screen, but be careful since what could be a safe grid tile on one move might be a deadly trap on the next!

Numerous hazards are present in Cognitile levels including crumbling tiles, fire or poison traps, snakes and falling boulders. The game's core mechanic involves a "move counter", where passing from one tile to another is considered 1 move. Each hazard is designed to trigger at various stages of the move counter, and may reset itself to a safe tile a few moves later. At the beginning of each level before they can draw the path, the player is shown the exact sequence of hazards. Once the preview is complete, the tiles reset and the objective of the game is to plan a safe route from the start to the goal from memory.

Features:

• Challenge yourself by playing through the 60 official levels with scaling difficulty
• Custom level builder allows a limitless amount of content to be easily shared and downloaded from within the app. Build levels with the same tools our developers used to build official levels, and outdo us!
• Over 50 unique tile designs and 40 doodads are available in the game's 11x7 grid.
• Original soundtrack by BeatScribe
• Cognitile is a universal app.

Release Date: December 18th, 2012
Cost: $0.99
Website: http://cognitile.com

[EXM-Matt]

We're wrapping up development (currently in QA iterations), things are looking good for a mid to late December release. I've added promo screenshots in the first post and will be adding a trailer at some point this week.

[EXM-Matt]

Trailer & release date added!

[background]

Thanks for the promotion code, just tried the game, it is well designed. Different from other maze games, it needs you to focus your memory to clear the traps, i will keep on playing.

[enelya]

Thank you for the promotion code. I've tried the game and played about the first 15 levels with an iPhone 4S and it runs beautifully. The game design is well achieved and the premise refreshing from the mainstream memory games. I'm enjoying it very much.
What could be improved: tutorial, we mainly have to figure out by ourselves which tiles the explorer can move on (one level confused me, looked like the outer tiles were a wall, but explorer could use them), or how to redraw a path we didn't do correctly at the first time. Boulders falling are also easy to miss, I died more times from them than other hazards.

[EXM-Matt]

Thanks for the comments!

Originally Posted by enelya

What could be improved: tutorial, we mainly have to figure out by ourselves which tiles the explorer can move on (one level confused me, looked like the outer tiles were a wall, but explorer could use them), or how to redraw a path we didn't do correctly at the first time. Boulders falling are also easy to miss, I died more times from them than other hazards.

Yeah, we intended the first 5 levels to introduce you to each type of hazard, but the QA also identified the "baptism under fire" could be a bit too open-ended and confusing at first. We'll look at adding some well placed text bubble tutorial tips in the first few levels for an update.

Boulders are tricky since at first we intended all the hazards to essentially be equal, but when we first implemented it, it didn't have the shadow and was MUCH harder to see. This was a problem, but it also added an interesting dynamic that I kind of like, the subtle nature of it makes it more difficult to notice unless you're paying close attention. I think we can maybe darken the shadow some more though.