Thanks for the response. I will try to be more concise now. The control type for me is not the problem (I too am glad it is not tilt). Where I felt they let me down was being occasionally unresponsive to swipes, resulting in crashes. Yes, it was the jumps and slides. It seemed to happen a bit more that I was comfortable with. As for the obstacles, where I found it 'misleading' was the small logs on the sides of the run where it sometimes appears you can go on the outside of them when in actual fact, you can't. Maybe I will get used to it the more I play but I find not knowing funnels me into the middle of the runs. Also, there seems to be a lack of any tutorial. While easy to understand, I still have no idea what the yellow feathers are for and I didn't know about acorns until I got the achievement. With regards to the accumulation of paper clips (currency), my frustration lies in the fact that you can do a 2-3 minute run and only get 5 clips. In addition, I can't see how that is worked out becuase there is no indication until the crash screen how many you earned. What is it based on? Should I be trying to collect as many leaves as possible or going as far as I can? Which leads to more clips. Questions, questions... If we knew it would probably lead to more strategic runs=more fun instead of simply trying not to die on the run. I do understand your rationale with the 'free' decision but I think you have the balance a bit off. I think you should adjust the clip accumulation rate and if worried, bump up the shop prices to compensate. It gives players more of a sense of accomplishment to be earning stuff for each run. Additionally, as most of the things in the store are currently cosmetic, I never mind in these kind of games that some of them are IAP only...it is a way to support the Devs. Something to think about. I want to love this game as it looks cool and should tick all the boxes for me. I love that you are listening. I can't wait to see where you go from here and hopefully I will continue to have a reason to play it. Great effort.
Really helpful feedback Bilboa and Tonk. It's clear that there are things we can improve on both the mechanics themselves - and in getting the message across. We'll be looking at this for the first update (due in 3-4 weeks) but in the meantime we've recorded a quick how to play video which you (and anyone else of course) can look at to see how we envisage the game being played: http://youtu.be/hC8xZl4bkwk Bilboa we tested extensively on all screen sizes, and the swipe distance should take in to account screen sizes and resolutions. Looks like we can still do more with that algorithm though. Tonk, on the tutorial front, what we wanted to avoid was making it too long. We wanted to get the basic control systems over and then let people discover the rest. Perhaps that wasn't the best call. Easy for us to know what to do because it's our game !. A couple of things we'll find a way to highlight in the first update, but here's the info for you: 1. Doing a trick jump at the brow of a hill earns 5 Clips. 2. Grabbing an acorn earns 5 Clips. 3. At the end of a run, you get a % of a new high score in Clips. 4. Each stage has three feathers, collect them all and there is a leaf bonus between the stage. That of course helps you boost your score, and the chance of getting a clip bonus at the end. Numbers 1 and 2 are a good way of building your clips - but that's not a great deal of help if people don't know that Hope this all helps. Shred It! Support
I was just going to respond to Tonk pointing this out. Doing tricks is the easiest way to boost your clip earning rate by a lot, and they're fun. I still haven't figured out exactly what's required to make them work though. When I jump at the brow of a hill with a trick sign, sometimes the character does a trick and sometimes it just jumps, and I haven't figured out exactly what makes the difference.
It's a timing thing Bilboa. There's a sweet spot just before you hit the brow - get that right, and it triggers the jump. As you say, it's a good way of boosting clips; as is collecting acorns - although those carry a bit more risk as there's always a chance the critter coming for it will knock you over!
Wow, not sure how long it would have taken me to find that out. I think I saw a help hint between levels once, but it went by so fast I couldn't read it. I agree with the balancing critiques, clips come by way too slowly (particularly if you don't know how to earn them). I would love to see both thumbs to jump, but I know a lot of folks hate that as a control - and I don't know how you'd do slide... I definitely second (or what am I third, fourth?) pay to kill ads, would do that in a second. I detest buy "extra acorns" or gems or whatever (the only time I do it is if it's the only way to slide devs some $$ for a free game), but have no problem with a one time payment. Having said that, the ads themselves are pretty unobtrusive. Anyway, all that aside, very nice looking game. An update or two and this will be fantastic. Overall great job guys!
I was looking forward to trying this but don't want to update my aging iPad 2 to iOS 7. I'll probably pick up the new iPad air 2 in a month or so when they are released but I'm interested in why a dev would limit his audience like this? There are big titles that come out every week that still support 6.0 and even earlier... Just wondering and I hope your game does well. On one hand you have a huge audience out there but they have been trained to not pay damn near anything for a game... and then without expensive advertising support your labor of love quickly disappears down the black hole of the app store :-( I think most of us (especially here in TA) appreciate the tough road most small devs face these days... wish I was smart enough to come up with a good solution.
Thanks again for the responses. I have played it a lot more last night so I could have a better understanding of what was bothering me. Thanks for the tip with the tricks...I was wondering how you did a trick. Speaking of tricks, this is something that is seriously lacking in the game that I would like to see. I am not talking about it being the focus but I kept finding myself wanting to do a grind off the top of the stumps and little hills and bridge rails. I guess snowboarding games have trained me to want to do this but it would be an awesome addition. I really really want to do tricks...other than the little hillocks. As for the controls, I have nailed down what bothers me. I want my little character to track my finger instead of just pressing the left and right side of the screen. If you can implement swipes, it would be nice to have the boarder follow your finger left and right. It seems more natural a control scheme. Also I realised that my difficulty with the edges is that the boundary of how far left or right you can go is not clearly defined in the white snow. As for the accumulation of clips, I still don't understand the paucity of them. I did about 40 runs and kept track of how much I was earning. In 80% of runs I received 0 clips. 80% = 0 clips! Apparently I did a trick without knowing it and received 5 clips once. I made it to the third level 2-3 times and the maximum amount of clips I got in one run was 32. Currently out of several hours of gameplay, I only have roughly 460 clips. Considering the next main character is at least 6,000 clips from memory, this will be a hell of a grind since only get clips if you beat a previous high score or do tricks at 5 clips a pop. In my opinion, this is a poor mechanic and considering the difficulty (at least 60% of my runs finished in the first stage). This is particularly poor as there are no items to buy that will increase your stats/abilities to help achieve a higher score. I can see most people giving up in frustration. You need a carrot. Another mechanic I am not fond of is your requirement to share your high score on Facebook which nets you 50 clips. This is more clips than I earned in my run, rewarding you not for playing or skill but rather for promoting this on social media. This is ridiculous. I detest this tactic. If a game is good, it will spread by word of mouth, not by requiring players to post on their Facebook account. By the way, I am one of those players who uses Facebook exclusively to contact friends and family. Games have no place on my Facebook page. Use Gamecenter please. This game needs more incentive to play and be a bit more fun.
For me, the last point you made, that the items you can buy are just cosmetic anyway, is exactly why I don't really mind the slow clip accumulation rate. If they're just cosmetic items I'm not in any hurry to get them anyway, and not having them isn't affecting my gameplay, so I'm fine with them being hard to get. In fact if anything, I'm a little concerned on the developer's part that they've been too generous, since so far I have no motivation to buy any IAPs in the game other than just wanting to reward the developer. I hope for the developer's sake that there are enough people out there who care about getting costumes or extra characters quickly that they'll make some money off the game. For me, the motivation to keep playing is just to get better at the game and get a higher score. I like high score games like this better when scoring is purely based on skill, and not what upgrades you have. In fact the one thing I dislike in that regard is that the ability to buy continues makes the leaderboards pretty much meaningless as far as I can tell, since you can't tell if the high scorers just bought their way to a high score by buying a bunch of continues. That's only a minor issue for me, since I'm usually more interested in competing against myself than the leaderboards, but it still would be nice to have some idea of how I compare to the best players. Note that I do like having continues in games, because it allows me to see the later stages of a game even if I'm not good enough to get there in one life. However the compromise I like is that when you use a continue, your score resets to 0, so you can't use continues to cheat the leaderboards.
Ok, after playing this some more, I think most things about this game are great, and I really want to like it, but the swipe detection on the iPad is just ruining it for me. Even after at least a couple of hours of practice and trying to pay special attention to how I'm swiping, it still seems like at least 1 out of 3 crashes are because it doesn't register when I swipe to jump, rather than because I made a wrong decision or didn't react quickly enough. I don't have this problem on my phone, but I really don't like playing games like this on a tiny phone screen. If the devs could make the swipe sensitivity on the iPad more like it is on the phone, I'd really like this game a lot. Maybe you could even make the swipe sensitivity adjustable, since apparently some people are fine with it the way it is. Another option would be to maybe add an additional control scheme, like one with buttons. There could be left/right arrows on the left side of the screen, and jump and slide buttons on the right. A third option would be to add controller support, though of course that only helps people with controllers. I'm on an iPad 4 with iOS 7.1.2 by the way.
Hi Collider, Thanks for the feedback. Yes, we definitely need to make the currency generating elements clearer. Not sure about the double thumbs, but controls in general are definitely something we will be looking at to see what we can improve. On the general IAP front, we're with you on that. We thought long and hard about finding a balance between being fair to players and at the same time having a chance to recoup our development costs. We will continue to listen to players and try to find ways to do that. Shred It! Support
Hi MasonHurst, The reason we specified iOS7 was to ensure people had at least iPad 2 or iPhone 4S. Even to get the game to run smoothly on those devices was a lot of work, and indeed we needed to introduce quality settings. If you do come up with that solution please let us know ! Shred It! Support
Thanks Tonk - lots to respond to On tricks/grinding etc, this is on our update schedule. Our main goal initially thought was to try to do something that looked good and was easy to pick up and play for a broad audience. We've spent 8 months making Shred It! and there are so many things we'd like to add, but we figured we needed to get the game out once we'd reached a certain level, and then take player feedback in to account when working on updates. A big part of that is the two things you've highlighted - controls and currency. All I can say is that we are looking very seriously about the feedback we're getting from our players and will be doing what we can. I should also say that we have made alternate boards and outfits more affordable so there are things that players can do with earned Clips. And the sharing awards are one offs (in the case of the 50 clip ones, like using leaderboards) or once per day (like sharing a new score) as we don't want people to game the system - and alienate their friends. This is a big (and tough) balancing act. Please believe that we've not take any of these decisions lightly, and that we are listening. We do use Game Center by the way, and the Facebook share for leader boards is completely non-intrusive. It does not post anything to your Facebook page. Hope the above helps. Shred It! Support
Hi Bilboa, We did actually consider having ways of separating players on the leaderboards based on those who had and hadn't used continues, but couldn't find a really elegant way of doing it. It is still something we're considering though. And on buying stuff in the shop, yes boards and outfits are completely cosmetic, but each character does have a special ability which helps a little during the game. Again, in the name of balance, we didn't want to make these too strong as we didn't want to force players to have to buy characters to be able to compete. Cheers Shred It! Support
I figured out one thing that accounts for some of the times when my swipes aren't registered. If you're touching one side of the screen while you swipe on the other side, the swipe doesn't register. This happens to me sometime when I try to do a left turn immediately followed by a jump, since I always swipe with my right hand. My left thumb will still be on the screen when I swipe up with my right thumb, and the jump won't register. If I try to be very deliberate about lifting my left thumb up before doing a jump, then I avoid the problem, but it's hard to always make sure there's a gap between lifting my left thumb and swiping with my right when things are happening fast. I think it would be better if the game didn't have this limitation.
I agree that separate leaderboards would probably be confusing. The way I favor is how a lot of high score games I play work. I have several shooter games from Cave and some other companies, which allow unlimited continues. However every time you use a continue, your score resets to 0. This way if I feel like it I can sit down and play through all the stages of the game even though I'm not that good at it, but I don't get to rack up a huge score by using continues. As it currently is in this game, I don't feel like I can meaningfully compare my high score with anyone else's on the leaderboards, since I have no idea of how many continues they used to get it. Even just for competing with myself, I might like to use some continues at some point just to see what later stages look like, but I'd also like to keep track of what my top no-continues score is, which currently the game won't do. I appreciate that you wanted the characters to be balanced. I think that's absolutely the best choice in a high-scoring game. I also think the monetization is completely fair. If anyone really wants the extra stuff without grinding for it, for $3 you can buy enough currency to get the extra character plus all the accessories for all the characters. Also, since I've gotten the hang of the game, I usually get about 25 clips per run. On my best run I got 95 I think. This means I can earn enough for most accessories in just a few runs. I think maybe the only problem is that the game doesn't do enough to make people aware of what's required to earn them. If you made it clearer that people should try to do tricks, and collect feathers and acorns at every opportunity, most people would probably agree that the earning rate is pretty reasonable.
Hi Bilboa, Yes, this is something we noticed in testing too - that some people will still be touching the screen with one finger whilst trying to jump with another. This is actually a much trickier thing to deal with than it might sound because we don't always know what the player is intending, and being able to handle what essentially are multiple inputs happening at the same time - and to make proper sense of them - is open to misinterpretation of the player's intent. For example, if your left thumb is touching the screen - it should move the character left. If you jump with your right thumb while that's happening it'll automatically move your character left as soon as it's in the air. Now some people might WANT to do that, but others might not realise they're doing it, and so see the player move left when they didn't mean to. We thought the simplest/safest solution would be to make each gesture distinct. However we are discussing, based on feedback from you and others, how we might further improve this. Shred It! Support
Thanks for your response. I understand what you're saying, that either choice -- allowing simultaneous turning and jumping, or disallowing it -- could lead to mistakes in some situations. However I think allowing simultaneous turns and jumps is the better option. Here are my reasons why. 1. It's what's normal. I've played many games with a controller which allow moving around with a joystick/d-pad and jumping via a button, and I've never encountered a single one where the jump button is disable while giving a turning input. I think just about anyone would consider that a bug in a controller-based game. I don't think there's anything fundamentally different about touch screen controls in this regard. I realize that it's easier to accidentally make an input on a touch screen, but see below for why I still don't think that changes anything. 2. It's more intuitive, even if the user does make a mistake. From the first minute I play the game, I know that touching the left side of the screen makes the character go left. If I see my character going left when I didn't intend it to, my intuition will immediately lead me to notice that I still have my left thumb on the screen and to lift it up, so it wouldn't even occur to me to think it was the game's fault. On the other hand, if I swipe to jump and nothing happens, it's not at all intuitive that that's because my other thumb is still on the screen. It's even harder to diagnose because the overlap only needs to be for a fraction of a second, so by the time I finish my swipe my other thumb might not even be on the screen any more. It took me hours of playing before I realized that's what was going on. I suspect some of the other users experiencing missed jumps are running into the same problem. 3. What's more, missing a jump causes a bigger problem than the reverse situation. If I realize my character is still moving left when I don't want them to, I just lift my left thumb and it immediately stops, and there's a good chance I can stop turning in time to avoid trouble. If I swipe to jump and nothing happens, I just completely missed the jump, and there is certainly not enough time to do another swipe. 4. Finally, aside from mistakes, there are times when it would be useful to jump and steer at the same time anyway. That's my reasoning for why allowing jumping while giving a turning input makes more sense than disallowing it. Hope you take all this in the spirit it's intended. I really like this game overall, which is why I'm motivated to give detailed feedback on the one aspect that seems to be causing me problems.
