SokoSoko

Basically quite nice, but with a few problems. Here's some feedback…

1. To me, the keys are the wrong way round in terms of the way they move the character on-screen. That is, if the functions of Q/A and O/P were swapped, it would feel much more natural in terms of how the movement of the character relates to the positioning of the keys on the keyboard. As it stands, I often press the wrong direction because it's the opposite of what I expect.

2. The alignment of the character and the pushable blocks is MUCH too fiddly. Unless you're perfectly aligned, pressing Space to push has no effect – and it's far from obvious when you ARE aligned properly. Initially, I simply couldn't understand why I couldn't find the 'fire' button; I expected Space to work, but nothing happened when I pressed it. It emerged after much frustration that I had to be positioned exactly correctly, to the pixel, before the block would move. It'd be far better if the game could reposition the player's character by itself, if it's slightly off-centre, when Space is pressed; e.g. if you're positioned one or two pixels away from where you should be. Think of how Knight Lore works, when you try to go through a door but you aren't aligned properly: the character first slides sideways until it's properly centred. If the same thing happened here, it'd solve a very annoying problem. Alternatively, and perhaps even better, you could allow blocks to be pushed without being exactly central to them, which is how other games work – even though that makes it more likely that the player's character will collide with a nearby enemy. NB This alignment problem also applies to going through narrow gaps: it's quite hard to find exactly where you should be positioned before you're allowed through the gap. Copy Knight Lore and other similar games, by getting the game engine to help the player with the positioning of the character and the movement of blocks!

3. It can be too easy to get into an impossible situation by moving a block up to a wall accidentally. If that happens, what are you supposed to do? With some games, pushing a block that's adjacent to a wall into that wall causes the block to bounce back by a space, leaving room to get behind it again. That'd be really helpful here. Otherwise, there needs to be a way to reset a level or quit the game back to the menu. I couldn't find any such Abort/Restart key(s), not even Break (Caps Shift and Space), so when I pushed a block into a wall and made a level impossible to complete, the only way out was to reload the game.

4. The Campaign mode is quite enjoyable (though the room layouts are rather dull and too repetitive), but very, VERY short. I completed it on the first attempt without losing any lives, and the only challenge at all was getting aligned properly to be able to push the blocks and move through gaps (see point 2).

5. The Random mode is fine for just playing a quick level, but there don't seem to be many levels to choose from, and the same ones keep coming back. Surely it'd be far better to have a series of individual levels of increasing difficulty for the player to work their way through. The Random feature could then pick one of those levels… but it should also be possible to address the whole level set directly, and for there to be a clear progression through the levels. At present, choosing Random just gives you one very easy level out of a tiny selection, and you end up seeing the same one time after time, so there's not much to keep you coming back.

Overall, I think there's a lot of potential here for a really good 3D Sokoban game, and actually it all works reasonably well in terms of mechanics, given the points I've made above. But it needs a bit of polish in terms of implementation, and the game itself needs a LOT more content and logical challenge.

The Campaign mode is actually a really nice idea, solving levels to open doors and allow progress etc., but it's FAR too short and easy, and the settings aren't very interesting. As for the Random mode, see my comments above: the randomly picked level should be from a much larger selection of levels that can be accessed directly, or unlocked in sequence.

Why not simply take all the levels from the basic game of Sokoban and include them in this game? Then you'd have a series of ready-made, excellent levels of increasing difficulty, rather than just a tiny handful of excessively easy ones. You could even potentially allow for the loading of level sets, which might easily be user-definable outside the game. In fact, there's a standard text-based Sokoban level-design format, XSB, with a run-length encoding option to make it more space-efficient, and also an XML-based SLC format for level collections. You could devise some way of converting levels in these formats for use in your game, whether or not you provide an actual 'load' option.

So actually I think this game is pretty good as far as it goes, and is a great start for something better… but it does currently need quite a lot of work to turn it into something that's really worth playing. But I hope you'll keep working at it and make it live up to its potential!

Nice game!

very good