Level 9 through 16 all had beteen 5 and 6 minutes left on the clock when finished.
It appears that the 'repeat the lights' bonus game has an issue that for like 20 seconds or so, it doesn't respond to *any* mouse clicks, and then tries to do all of them at once.
Oh, noticed some other bugs:
5) On level 12, after a multi-match cascade, one of the squares at the bottom of the grid remained empty. The next time I had a match everything did shift and the empty square got filled again.
6) Upon closing the program, I hit ESC a few times to cancel the active level and immediately pressed 'exit' in the menu screen as soon as it faded into view. Upon doing so, it dropped my back to the desktop but I was left with an 800x600 unresponsive black box in the upper left of the screen, and the exe was still running in the process list and had to be killed manually.
When I started the game again after that, I started hearing the music but didn't see the game itself until I clicked on the holiday swapz taskbar icon. It then switched to the full-screen game mode, and all looked fine again.
Anyway -- After playing this for a while I must say that it is fairly polished overall although it does have a couple of bugs (some of which are more annoying than others)
Having played a number of other match-3's over the past year, I do feel like this one gets a tad monotenous. Other than level 6 where I ran out of moves, there has been no time where I felt even remotely hurried since I always had a ton of time left on the clock.
I like the aspect of having to clear each square at least once, like in big Kahuna Reef -- it makes the various shaped levels a lot more challenging, since certain parts of the board are a lot trickier to get to. In your version, you can just ignore those corners and focus on the 'easy' parts, which is more than enough to get you by. I'd would also be more challenging if there were some squares that were harder than others -- like the frozen squares in Grey Alien's game, or the chained up squares in Big Kahuna Reef.
Additional bonus actions (like the firecracker) would be nice for variety as well, although you probably shouldn't add these unless the overall difficulty is increased a bit first.
But please don't take me the wrong way -- this was just some constructive critisism. It does look very nice, and does well. It's also very nice of you to release it for free, and hats off for actually finishing a complete game, something I personally haven't done. :-)
It appears that the 'repeat the lights' bonus game has an issue that for like 20 seconds or so, it doesn't respond to *any* mouse clicks, and then tries to do all of them at once.
Oh, noticed some other bugs:
5) On level 12, after a multi-match cascade, one of the squares at the bottom of the grid remained empty. The next time I had a match everything did shift and the empty square got filled again.
6) Upon closing the program, I hit ESC a few times to cancel the active level and immediately pressed 'exit' in the menu screen as soon as it faded into view. Upon doing so, it dropped my back to the desktop but I was left with an 800x600 unresponsive black box in the upper left of the screen, and the exe was still running in the process list and had to be killed manually.
When I started the game again after that, I started hearing the music but didn't see the game itself until I clicked on the holiday swapz taskbar icon. It then switched to the full-screen game mode, and all looked fine again.
Anyway -- After playing this for a while I must say that it is fairly polished overall although it does have a couple of bugs (some of which are more annoying than others)
Having played a number of other match-3's over the past year, I do feel like this one gets a tad monotenous. Other than level 6 where I ran out of moves, there has been no time where I felt even remotely hurried since I always had a ton of time left on the clock.
I like the aspect of having to clear each square at least once, like in big Kahuna Reef -- it makes the various shaped levels a lot more challenging, since certain parts of the board are a lot trickier to get to. In your version, you can just ignore those corners and focus on the 'easy' parts, which is more than enough to get you by. I'd would also be more challenging if there were some squares that were harder than others -- like the frozen squares in Grey Alien's game, or the chained up squares in Big Kahuna Reef.
Additional bonus actions (like the firecracker) would be nice for variety as well, although you probably shouldn't add these unless the overall difficulty is increased a bit first.
But please don't take me the wrong way -- this was just some constructive critisism. It does look very nice, and does well. It's also very nice of you to release it for free, and hats off for actually finishing a complete game, something I personally haven't done. :-)