Welllllll... you can play any of them from links I posted here, does that count? XD

In more seriousness, I do have games for Trisphee in the works, but none of the games I've linked here are really good for hooking in with the Pandora Tokens. It would be too hard to make sure that they're fair, well-balanced, resistant to cheating, and have a good prize structure.

Cheat Resistance: The crane game is cheat-resistant; at best, a cheater who knows what he's doing could potentially skip the process of actually using the crane, but he wouldn't be able to get any better rewards than anyone else. If I were to style up Gravity Runner, Invader, or Shells in such a way that it fit the Trisphee style, though, there would be no way for the server to tell the difference between a really good player and a cheater. (Also Shells would be legally problematic because I don't actually own the commercial rights to that particular piece of code since I wrote it for hire.)

Balance and Fairness: I could make Same Game and Lights Out cheat resistant without TOO much difficulty. But would they actually be fair and balanced? I don't think so. Lights Out isn't balanced; some puzzles are way easier than others. I can't even solve some of them and I wrote it so I KNOW that there's always a solution. And Same Game isn't fair -- not every initial board configuration is solvable, and the maximum possible score varies rather widely from board to board even if you could have perfect play.

Prize Structure: It's also hard to derive ways to give prizes to players that's reasonable. The Crane Game is a good example of the RIGHT way to do it. You know what the prizes are before you spend a Pandora Token, and the prizes are worth the price of admission but not worth TOO much. If we added another game we'd want to make sure that the prizes are good enough that you would WANT to play the game, but not TOO good or else no one would ever play the Crane Game anymore. I honestly can't think of a way to give out prizes for Lights Out or Same Game that would make them feel like they're worth playing, except to give out aurum based on your score in Same Game and that would be TOO good compared to the Crane Game. (I CAN think of how to do it for Gravity Runner and Invader, but I've already established that those games wouldn't work for other reasons.)

Now, this isn't all doom-and-gloom here. I actually DO have ideas for games that would actually be able to address all of these requirements. I've got the writers working on one already.

I've got two other Trisphee games in the works as well, but neither of them would be played with Pandora Tokens so they're under a different set of needs. They still have to be fair, balanced, cheat-resistant, and have good prize payouts, but they don't have to be balanced for playing with limited resources.

well would it work if instead of giving scaling prizes you just got a single prize for playing to completion or playing by stage? then it does not mater if you did well or not as long as you play?

That becomes better than the Crane Game at that point -- who would want to play anything else if you could just put in your token, die without even trying, and get a prize? At that point it's not even a game, it's just a gashapon machine.

Or from a different perspective, it's worse -- who would want to play if you don't have any control or foreknowledge of the prize you might win, when you could just play the Crane Game and pick the one you like best or not even spend your Pandora Token at all and come back later when the prize selection has changed.

That's the kind of balance stuff that we try to keep in mind while we're working.

i did not say die i said to completion, that means succeed

who wants to play more than once or twice when you already know what all the prizes are without playing?

I will say, Zosa has a potential point...hmm...

XD thanks. i know i play switchem on gaia and i dont mind that i dont know what the prize is or that the prizes are only won by surviving to certain levels, it is fun to be surprised

The crane game is still random -- the prizes change up randomly every hour. But since Pandora Tokens are a limited resource (you only get three per day) we want to make sure that they're worth spending, and that every game is EQUALLY worth spending them on.

I do apologize about misinterpreting what you meant by "completion" -- for games like Gravity Runner where you play until you die, dying IS completion.

The mechanism I was seeing for Gravity Runner was to show a list of possible prizes before you start the game, then give you three lives with which to collect them from where they've been scattered in the level, then you get to pick one of the ones you picked up to keep at the end. This would be fair, it would work, and it would reward skillful play, especially if the higher-value items were held to where they wouldn't show up until later. But as I had mentioned, it's impossible to make a game like Gravity Runner uncheatable. You literally only have to type one command into your web browser to turn gravity off and then you'd hover at the top edge of the screen eternally. Alternatively, one command and the game tells the server that you got a score of two million points without ever having to play. I could make it more complicated, but it won't stop cheaters. (It is for this reason that I refuse to even implement so much as a leaderboard. It WOULD get hacked.)

The same thing would be true of Invader -- destroying enemy ships could cause item balls to drop, and you have to shoot them or collect them to win the prize. But Invader likewise could easily be cheated.

... actually, I suppose I did just think of a way that Invader and/or Gravity Runner could be done to make cheating no more of an issue than it is in the Crane Game... I can't keep cheaters from cheating, but I CAN make it to where cheating doesn't give you much advantage.

... hm. Now I have to think about this.

i am glad our conversation has given you ideas~ you should share any good ones you come up with

Oh, I meant it as a technical thing. From the user's perspective, it's exactly like what I described there. :P

Oh gosh Coda the Gravity Run one is so difficult. ^o^' I just played it and got to 86.

86 is really good! (I think my best ever is like 152.) It's supposed to be hard -- it's intended to be a fairly short high-score-challenge game. It makes dying less of a barrier (you can just jump right back in and try again).

It's easier than Flappy Bird. ;)

Ah, yeah. With Flappy Bird you have to tap and that's more of a pain than pressing keys on my keyboard. XD

Flappy Bird is also much less forgiving of mistakes and has smaller targets. Gravity Runner gives you an "oops" button -- if you miss landing on a platform you can flip gravity to try to land on the bottom of it or on a later one.

Aye, I thought that was a cool addition! :)

Personally I tend to switch to the bottom of platforms when it starts trending toward the top of the screen to get me more visible space to work in.

Yeah towards the end I switched a few times, but on accident I double clicked and I messed it all up.

... gasp! I just beat my Gravity Runner high score, substantially. XD I got to 184. MAN it gets going fast.

I feel so much like a looser now.. my highest score was like.. 20 something xD

... okay, yeah, I can tell I'm bored when I'm playing my own games to beat my own high scores. XD 248!

After nearly a year, a Gravity Runner update! The original version is still where it always was. The new version can be found here:

http://greenmaw.com/webgames/kyun/runner.html

There have been a lot of changes!

For starters, I made the game a little bit easier by reducing the rate at which it speeds up. I also made the play control feel more like it has more impact on gameplay -- speeding up moves you farther to the right, slowing down moves you farther to the left, switching gravity isn't instant and gives you a moment of weightlessness. This doesn't make it directly easier but it makes it feel like you're having more of an influence on it, and that kind of feedback should make it easier to develop your skills.

I changed the scoring system a little, too. Points accumulate faster now (so you should all be beating your old high scores easily, although the high scores saved in your browser will have been inflated to compensate). Speeding up now gives you bonus points and slowing down reduces your point gains -- it was always supposed to work this way, but I wasn't aggressive enough with the bonuses/penalties so it ended up that you would always get the same amount of points per distance covered. Hopefully this should make the game feel more encouraging.

I also put a lot of effort into making the game run more efficiently. Laptop users should notice less battery drain and less CPU heating, and people not using Chrome (which already ran the game well) should see everything moving more smoothly and the controls feeling more responsive.

More obviously, the game looks totally different now! I decided to give it a bit of a Trisphee flair since you guys are currently my biggest audience. I came up with a new concept for the visuals, and Illusion provided me with some sprites to use. I'm particularly happy with the animations. They make the movement more visible and gives the character (now Kyun) a sense of interaction with the world. He squishes when he hits the ground! He stretches himself out a little to start a jump! He pushes himself to go faster! And flipping gravity now isn't nearly invisible, so you can have a better feeling for what's going on.

A minor negative: Touchscreen and WiiU support haven't been updated. They probably don't work. I'll get to it once I get the rest of what I'm working on taken care of so I only have to make those changes once.

-drools over gravity runner- ILLU and CODA YOU BOTH DID AN AMAZING JOB! -runs off with kyun-

Love you both! Kyun is so adorable! <3

I tested the game on my Samsung S5 the other day, when I tap the screen it speeds up... That's it. I somehow managed to get a score of 90 something even that I wasn't able to change the gravity.

My friend said it doesn't work on a browser called Comodo? She wouldn't really give me details other than the controls didn't work.

That's not really very helpful. And I can't say I know why, because Comodo's browser is based on Chromium, and it works fine there.

I suppose if Comodo changes how keyboard focus is managed for some reason it might cause the controls to appear not to work. Try clicking on the game in the window. (Once I add a title screen, you'll need to click to start anyway, which will hide this problem.)

OK.. she said nothing worked as in Nothing moved. it was just a pretty picture of still pixels. she tried refreshing and clearing her cache and stuff.

maybe that's more helpful than -nothing works- x'D

-will this be added to trisphee when its finished? *u*

... just to check, did she try unpausing the game? If it lags while it's loading it pauses itself. I really can't imagine why a browser based on Chromium would get far enough into the code to render a full screen and then stop working entirely.

Once I get a title screen in, this won't be an issue.

she tried all the controls even unpausing it. nothing worked and it was just a still screen.

Huh. That really doesn't make any sense at all. The only thing I can think of from here is to see if there's any information in the Javascript console about any errors that may have occurred, but I don't know that browser well enough to explain how to do that -- it's not something that's usually necessary for end-users.

Maybe I'll see if I can add some debugging features to the game so people can report crashes more easily.

I've added some crash logging now. It would be insightful to see what the result is.

my friend is ignoring me now so I dunno if she's trying to play it or not ><

sorry =(

Gravity Runner Crystal Caverns of Kalin updated!

There's a title screen on the game now! It gives information about the game controls and offers the choice between standard play and free play.

I rescaled how scoring works since this thread was last active; apparently I never posted about that here. If you have historical high scores, they'll be automatically rescaled to the new scheme.

I did some work on touchscreen support, so it should work more reliably now, but I haven't been able test it on any actual touchscreen devices yet, only a simulated one.

The UI controls give feedback when they're triggered now, so (especially for touchscreen players) there's more visible notification that you're doing something. It's a little thing, but I think it adds to the polish.

I think I fixed the bug where the game doesn't start up after the page finishes loading, and since it can sometimes take a few seconds I added a (quick and dirty) loading indicator to show that no, the game isn't broken, it's still working.

Looking awesome!
I'm glad the name was finally settled on.

I'll try that tomorrow, don't feel like it tonight.

Another big update!

You can collect prize bubbles now! They don't DO anything because the game isn't hooked into Trisphee's system yet, but you can pick them up and then choose one after the game is over.

And speaking of game over: There's now a life counter! You get three lives (with courtesy retries if you die very quickly after starting the life, much like in pinball) and you try your best to collect as many items as you can in those three lives. The more you collect during the game, the more options you have to choose from when it's over!

Basically, the game just needs hooked into Trisphee's systems now, so I'm REALLY interested in feedback (especially bug reports) on what's here now.

I was playing Shells and I got up to 22:5, when there was some kind of glitch. The blue cannon fired a shot, but it just stopped in the barrel, and then the game froze.

Huh. That's really odd. Sounds like your browser did something unexpected. Not sure I can actually do anything about that without having a Javascript crash log, and Shells doesn't have a crash reporter like Gravity Runner does.

Also, Gravity Runner won't load for me. It says Loading... and then never finishes. Could be because my laptop is potato, though.

How long have you let it wait? Can you check to see if there's something in the Javascript console?

How do I find the Javascript console?

First question is, which browser are you using?