Games: Slider on Wiicade

I released Slider onto Wiicade.com last week and made it past its probation period with a rating of 2.7/4.0. Over 1000 sessions have been played so far. The Flash project was resurrected to see what type of results I could expect from wiicade and the opera browser on the Wii.

The puzzle game is a solid implementation of a classic. The first time I played the physical puzzle I concluded it was going to be really hard and thus went about writing a computer program to solve it. Unfortunately a bug in the code led me to the incorrect solution that the puzzle was unsolvable. The next week, after I told this story about the unsolvable puzzle, a co-worker quickly found the solution.

The most obvious change made for this version was the addition of an easy and half-way mode that makes the 116+ move puzzle more accessible to first time players. The easy mode requires just 17 moves and the half-way point is around 62 moves. I didn't add any logging functionality to trace the success rate of various users.

However, the second major change was to give out colored stars when a user completes one of the puzzle modes. A big gold star is awarded for the perfect solution. Large silver stars go to users getting close. And everyone else solving the puzzle gets a bronze star. The ratings may not be obvious enough to motivate a second attempt though. I suspect if I showed the number of moves actually required, Type A personalities would try again. Another limitation is that the stars are not persistent. However, I think that this is a really good first pass at ranking system.

The third change was to add sound. A quick prototype changes into a polished product with some quick sounds. The sounds are not great but enough.

The traffic to SiriGames hasn't been changed much but I expected the growth to be slow.