Puzzle-Platform game with Basic for severe Critic, please, please, please

[Nikolas]

Well this is an old game of mine, which I remembered with the help of Esper in the gen forum.

The purpose is to see all the levels. In order to pass the level you have to turn every square red. Initially it's black, then green and then red.

The catch is that you cannot pass for a third time over a square, which means that once a square is red, you cannot pass through there again. So you need to think in order to beat this game.

A little more explaining:

Black tiles: You can pas twice
Green tiles: You can pass once
Red tiles: You can't pass anymore
Light blue tiles: Walls
Dark blue tiles: Movable walls
Yellow tiles: Switches. You have to test them in order to see what they do.
Movement: The cursor keys, on the numeric keyboard with NumLock pressed!
S: Save the level you're on
R: Restore the level you've saved
Q: Quit

Please forgive my stupidness to not include any readme file in but, I just forgot about it so...

The game was made with GwBasic!
To run the game double click on SQ.BAT

Any critic is welcome. What I'm actually looking for is if the game is worth making it better, completing it, putting music on, some decent sprite, more levels, etc. etc...

Link with ACE:
http://rapidshare.de/files/6003715/Squares.ace.html

Link with ZIP:
http://rapidshare.de/files/6003763/Square.zip.html

Note that you might enjoy it, and if you consider that the ZIP folder is 100 KB (0.1 MB) and the ACE is 70 Kb (0.07), I would imagine that it is worth trying out...

Cheers...

[Nikolas]

I'm so sorry for double posting.

But i know that 3 people downloaded this lttile game. Would any of those three tell me what they think?

Otherwise I'll let the thread fade into the second page... :'(

[esper]

Well, since my "Your first Project... EVER!" thread made you remember this, I guess I should have the honor of posting about it here. It's fun, but annoying. As I sit here typing this and making mistakes, I keep being afraid that after I hit backspace I won't be able to type forward anymore since my cursor's already been there.

I beat the first three levels, but messed up on the fourth. You really needed to include a "restart level" for those people who aren't keen on saving every time they get to a new level. Other than that, I think if you made this with GameMaker it would be pretty decent. I'll even throw together a mockup of the first level to show you what you could do with it tomorrow during my spare time.

[CodeJunkie]

Sorry, I did play it as well, but I wasn't planning to post until I finished it.  Got to about level 7/8 so far.  It is a fun game, I think my main criticism is that the levels are too similar, and every level can be solved in many, many ways.  Perhaps a few more features would make the game more interesting - teleporters, more shapely levels, one-way arrows, or more original things if you can think of them.  That is assuming that you don't have them already
Here is a similar game that might give you some ideas: http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=3563
There was also an old DOS game, I think it was called 'pod', might want to take a look at that too if you can find it.  But I will carry on playing this game, I like puzzle games.  To be honest, I'm not sure about how it would turn out in Game Maker.  About 99% of games made with it come out as shoddy crap, and it raises the file size a lot too.  If you can, hand-coding it would probably be the best option, but I'd still play a version in Game Maker.
Sorry I've ranted a bit, but I hope some of it helps.

[Paper Carnival]

I didn't play it much, I got to level 2, I might play it more later. It's a cute fun little game, though a bit irritating at times.

This isn't something you should do in Game Maker. Even though it will give you a lot more possibilities (especially in the graphics area), this game is fully functional as it is. The executable will be at least 1 mb and will eat too much memory for a simple game like this, I'd recommend it if the game was more complicated though.

[Nikolas]

SimB: It does get more difficult over time, and there are movable walls, trigers (which telleport you, or change a wall, or a tile, or whatever...), but these are found later on, so you have to hang on a little bit more. And by the way, I think  and I'm terrible sorry for that, that level 25 does not work... When you get there, or whenever you are stuck PM me and I'll let you know a simple strategy. BTW I didin't know about that game in the underdogs. I took the idea from sokoban...

To everybody, I think that the best idea is to rewrite it again in BASIC (but maybe with better graphics and higher resolution), and make it... better. In this case the whole thing will remain bellow 100 Kb zipped which is great!

And esper I will add a restart option as well. It is so easy to do, I just never thought of that... As for now, alwasy press first s and then r, just in case...