Micron - (by Apparition Games)[Universal]

[knoids]

Originally Posted by Exact-Psience

Hmm.. interesting.

My thoughts exactly

[apparition]

Thanks for the review, syntheticvoid!

For anyone who wants to try Micron, I posted some codes on the previous page. Only a few have been claimed so far.

Also, check out this new video review from CGRundertow:


Youtube link | Pop Up

[polycontrale]

Just got a chance to try this.

A couple things:

No auto-rotate? This is a personal pet peeve. Don't make me turn my device upside down.

How to play was fairly obvious to me, especially having played Ichi recently, but the game could use a how-to-play (even if it's just a text link on the menu).

[apparition]

Originally Posted by polycontrale

Just got a chance to try this.

A couple things:

No auto-rotate? This is a personal pet peeve. Don't make me turn my device upside down.

I'll see what I can do about this.

Originally Posted by polycontrale

How to play was fairly obvious to me, especially having played Ichi recently, but the game could use a how-to-play (even if it's just a text link on the menu).

I agree! Micron v1.1 has a brief tutorial at the start. I submitted the update five days ago so it should make it to the App Store in about two more days.

[Poly]

Marvelous game! I am addicted to this game.

[fizzd]

i'll admit my main motivation of getting this was to see, as a developer, if unity was suitable for rhythm-action games. (on the pc at least, unity seemed to suffer the same latency problems as flash..) playing around with your game it seems there is a little latency with unity, just from feedback in pressing buttons etc. but anyway!

all the promo codes seem to be used up so i bought it for my iPad 2. (having a quote by me on the website made me feel obligated anyway )

i've just played for an hour and am up to level 48, but i haven't played almost half of the levels yet; hoping to go back and finish them up later. first impressions: having played pulse extensively already, i was a little disappointed by how similar the new early levels were; they seemed to use the same concepts as pulse did and acted more like intermediary stages than fresh levels.

Once i got to the portals though that's when i found the levels to suddenly switch gear and become much more fun! Simple yet devious level design at its best. Level 47 in particular is great in the way it gives next to no obstacles and very few tools and yet has me completely stumped; the very best kind of level design. The latter half of this game is well worth the money.

Not to mention that the music is pretty good. The music in the last set is my favourite; the level complete sound of the first set feels a bit off but that may be just me.

Finally just to nitpick, the graphics seem really low-res on my iPad.. i don't mean pixelly (obviously given the graphic style it is pixelly) but the textures seem a bit muddy and not very sharp (due to using sprites in unity maybe?). the walls' shadings seem inconsistent (e.g. level 48 the walls next to the three gates are not shaded at the top) .. but these are really tiny details which can probably only be seen on an ipad anyway I'm also not a fan of the juxtaposition of the two fonts. oh and the reset and pause buttons have artifacts on their tops.

but none of this of course affects the refreshingly original gameplay. congrats on getting on the app store, and hope your game gets the publicity and sales it deserves!

[apparition]

Hey fizzd! It's been a while. I hope you don't mind that I quoted you on the website and app description. Your enthusiasm for the original Pulse was just the message I wanted to get across and I felt you really understood the puzzle/rhythm hybrid concept that I was going for. You should've contacted me for a promo code! (Or I should've contacted you, sorry!)

You raise a lot of interesting technical issues here.

Audio latency is much better in Unity than Flash. However, Unity doesn't have the excellent StandingWave audio library, so you have to do more work to keep your sounds in sync. You still need to play the sounds ahead of time, but in Unity I was able to get away with playing the sounds just 1 sixteenth note ahead instead of 5 or 6 notes ahead like in Flash. (Button sounds in the GUI feel like they have more latency because those sounds are played instantly, without any pre-buffering.)

The bigger audio problem for Micron turned out to be app size. I mean, the game has a ton of sounds. If I didn't use audio compression the game would probably be over 100 MB, which seems kind of nuts for a puzzle game (as it is, Micron ended up at 45 MB on iOS and about 30 MB on Android). So I compressed the background audio, and this led to weird looping and sync problems that I had to solve. If all your sounds are in wave format you get pretty much perfect sync in Unity.

The game sprites had to fit into a single 2048x2048 pixel texture to get good performance on mobile devices. This limited the resolution I could use, but there's still some room for improvement here.

Can you send me/post a screenshot of the wall shading issue in level 48? This is news to me!

It's great to hear you're enjoying the new levels! Yes, the original 16 levels from Pulse are still in there, but even those were touched up (both the level designs and the sounds). I added some new levels in between the originals to better teach some of the concepts you need on the harder levels. I'm sure you remember there were a couple of levels that everyone got stuck on in the original game! Micron was an opportunity the fix the difficulty curve (having optional side levels helps too).

I think I've rambled on long enough so I'll just add thank you for checking it out!

And for anyone wondering about this Pulse thing fizzd and I are talking about, it's the original Flash game that Micron is based on. Micron was a complete rewrite of Pulse for mobile devices. It's a far more polished game, runs way smoother, and has a bunch of new content. Check it out if you're interested in seeing the origins of the game!

[fizzd]

just played the final level. loved it. you sure know how to reward! •••Spoiler:  the guitar riffs were a very nice surprise. i like how they only play when the reflectors are in the correct places! I still would've been happy if the price was up a tier actually (£1.50 is the next tier I think). 60p seems to me like you're shortselling yourself a little, now that i've played till the end.

Thanks for the crystal clear explanations once again. The shading thing is just a lack of a dark line above the walls of the gates, whereas everywhere else the dark lines are there. It may be intentional, i just felt it a little off since there were shadows on the interior sides of the walls everywhere else.

I was always considering iOS for a music game seeing how low the latency can get (explaining why music DAWs for example are so much more successful on iOS compared to android) so a native version of pulse shouldn't need any sort of pre-buffering since games like Beat Sneak Bandit do insta-sound at a tap of the screen. All in all Micron and your explanations have taught me I can't rely on Unity if i want virtually no latency, which is sad but is gonna save me lots of time Don't worry about the promo code and quoting stuff; paying is the least i can do for the knowledge, and who doesn't like to have their quote on a quality product?!

[apparition]

There was much trial and error involved in making that final level. Designing a puzzle that works out like that is tricky!

I see what you mean about the lack of shading. That's intentional. That's not to say I won't change it at some point though.

I tried out Beat Sneak Bandit and wow, that's an awesome game! I don't know how they achieved that low latency but the lack of an Android version suggests it probably wasn't made with Unity. Still, Unity is no slouch, and I'm pretty sure you can get better latency than I did with Micron (on both iOS and Android).

Also, version 1.1 made it into the App Store recently so I have new promo codes!

R63FKLYKFLPN
FXHTH6WW39W6
FXKWWX47Y469
YA6RY3EEPLMJ
YMEW44JFHX4R
H4EFKMTTHYH6
33ER7JLX9JTP
R9K3KKXHR6N9
4THTJ3N6EJJ3
AFFNFAFH9MT4

Please reply if you take a code. Thanks!

[Khamous]

Got R63FKLYKFLPN, thanks