Flipfall in your browser, and puzzles that hold together

The last entry ended with a list of what was next for Flipfall. All of it is done. Nudgeberg went through three more playtests and now has the real store services in place. Here is what happened in the last two and a half weeks.

Flipfall

You can play it right here

There is now a light version of Flipfall on its game page: the run, the coins and your best distance, nothing else. It is not the Unity game squeezed into a browser but a small rewrite in JavaScript. The sections, speeds and coin lines come straight out of the Unity project, so the track is the same one you will play on your phone. Your record stays in your browser and never reaches me.

I have not tried it on many real phones yet. If something feels off, write to contact@brackwater.games.

Sound, splash, first run

Sound. Music is “Heavenly Loop” by isaiah658, the effects come from Kenney, both free to use. A flip is a soft plop, and a chain of coins climbs up the scale. Music and effects have their own volume sliders.
Splash. The Brackwater eyes blink while the game loads, the same blink every Brackwater game will use instead of a spinner.
First run. The very first run holds the obstacles back. After three seconds a hand shows you where to tap, and only once your first flip has landed does the corridor start fighting back.

All 50 sections

The corridor is built from 50 sections now. Every one of them goes through a checker that makes sure there is always a way through with enough time to react.

Two of them move:

Pendulums swing a block up and down across the corridor, timed to how far you have run, so they always meet you the same way.
Lock gates are two pillars that meet in the middle. As you approach, one of them sinks into the floor or ceiling. When a gate comes into view it is never fully shut, but you have to pick the right side.

Next is the final check of the whole game, then the real ad and store services, the same ones Nudgeberg just got.

Nudgeberg

Harder in the right way

The playtests kept saying the same thing: from level 100 on, the puzzles were bigger but not harder. Measuring it confirmed it. Late levels needed no more nudging than early ones, they just had more penguins.

So the game now measures how tangled a level is: how many penguins can only reach the water by being nudged by another one. From level 100 that share has to climb, and in the late game it is close to every single penguin.

Two new pieces, and none for decoration

Snow piles from level 156 stop a penguin like an ice block, once, and then they are gone.
Ice slides from level 206 turn a sliding penguin, so chains can go around corners.

Brittle ice, snow and slides only appear where a level cannot be solved without them. If you see one, you need it.

The restart button is gone too. A wrong move is rewound on the spot anyway, so the board can never get stuck.

A smarter level builder

All of this made levels much harder to find. Rolling random boards and throwing away the ones that did not fit would have taken more than eight hours for one pass over the catalogue. The new builder starts with a small solvable board and changes it one step at a time: add a penguin, turn one, move a block. It keeps whatever is not worse. Levels 106 to 300 now take about 100 minutes, and the difficulty never drops from one chapter to the next.

Past level 300

After level 300 the game used to build new levels on the phone. With the stricter rules that would have frozen it. Now levels 301 to 400 ship with the game, and after that they come back mirrored, which makes 400 more before one repeats.

Ready for the store

Ads, the consent question, purchases through Google Play and the cloud save are all built in with the real Google libraries now. The game still fits under 40 MB. What is left is testing all of it on a phone and the Play Console side of things, then a closed test.

Until next time

No dates yet, as before. The newsletter opens with the first build.