Chispa, PowerPoint game for July 2022

NOTE FOR ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLE: THIS GAME USES SPANISH LANGUAGE, TRANSLATING ITS CONTENT IS SUGGESTED.

Hello, people of PowerPoint Creative. I have arrived here with this post to showcase the third PowerPoint game I developed with my friends. We present you Chispa (Spark), released yesterday to the public.



So what is this game about? In each of the 7 levels this game is packed with, you will help the titular protagonist, a ball, to get to the goal (A green pipe with an exit sign). To get the ball to the aforementioned goal, you must use some blue buttons that release some pistons, these push the ball from his current point to another one. Take note that each blue button has a light that indicates when you can use it; You can use the button when the light is turned on but you can't use it when the light is turned off, the light will only turn on when the ball gets in front of the button.

When pushed by the pistons, the ball can bump with the walls where he can rest until you send him to another point. However, there are also obstacles like electric beams which can result in a game over if you aren't able to stop the ball from heading towards these. As of level 2, a timer will appear near the bottom right corner of the screen, you will have to beat it or it's game over too. Another obstacles are red pipes that speed up the ball and yellow pipes that lead him to another part of the level he is in.



Yeah, this game was rather hard to explain, you can also check its promotional video if you want to get a better idea about it.



And of course, you can download and try the game by yourself here:


Any review or tip on this game will be appreciated, have a good day, afternoon or night! 

I pass level 1 and then with level 2 it's game over for me . I can't move my mouse so quickly and additionally hit the button. It's harder for me than a headshot in CS. I will be able to review the game with a (much) slower version to try out  

Overall, it looks good enough to be mistaken for a commercial game you buy in the store!

Just a thought:
Can you try to add English to what you already have in Spanish and make it bilingual? I know your text is hard-coded and you will have to make it smaller to fit the page so it means additional work for you. But, hey! You're reaching out to the WHOLE WORLD through the PowerPointCreative Forum and most of the people out there don't speak Spanish... but all speak English... more or less 

Jarek wrote:I pass level 1 and then with level 2 it's game over for me . I can't move my mouse so quickly and additionally hit the button. It's harder for me than a headshot in CS. I will be able to review the game with a (much) slower version to try out  

Overall, it looks good enough to be mistaken for a commercial game you buy in the store!

Just a thought:
Can you try to add English to what you already have in Spanish and make it bilingual? I know your text is hard-coded and you will have to make it smaller to fit the page so it means additional work for you. But, hey! You're reaching out to the WHOLE WORLD through the PowerPointCreative Forum and most of the people out there don't speak Spanish... but all speak English... more or less 

Thanks, Jarek! I gotta admit that the game has a quite large difficulty spike between level 1 & 2, we will try to avoid something like that in the next games to not make them frustrating.

About the games' language, the only thing I can offer is posting a bilingual or English version of the games here, guess they will stay exclusive to this forum as most of our works will be published in our own site using Spanish language. We appreciate your comments though! 

One suggestion is to use symbols and pictures instead of words in one or two languages. You can still use Spanish, but the more symbols and pictures you use to explain game mechanics will go a long way. For example: Things you want to collect can be grouped in a green box with a green check or green smile face. Obstacles and enemies that will hurt you can be found in a red box with a red x or frowning face. You can also do this showing two animations where the mouse stays between the walls with a green check, and the mouse touching a wall with a red X.

I made it to level 3, muwahahaha!

(Ok, I have the slight advantage of a touch screen laptop, and I still struggled with it lol!)

This game was really well done, very polished! I'm even more impressed that this was all done without the use of macros and just only animations. I also noticed you have a timer that adds more to the difficulty. The music ties it all together and feels like it'll fit well with the other frustrating action/puzzle games on my phone.

I do agree with the rest in that the game's difficulty jumped a LOT between levels 1 and 2. Slower motion animations would help a lot, especially for the first couple of levels. Repeating what I said earlier is you could have an introductory slide with a short animation showing how to handle the new additions to the game. Show a mouse "click" the shape, and then quickly move over to the next button to "click" that before the square touches the wall with a green check or happy face. Show a similar animation but the mouse isn't quick enough to click the second shape and shows the retry with a red X or frowning face.

The Play or Next Level buttons could have an arrow pointing right, and retry would be a circular arrow that looks like the refresh button on your browser. Back to the main menu could look like a home or the 3 horizontal lines you would usually see on mobile websites.

Overall, very solid game!

rusnakcreative wrote:One suggestion is to use symbols and pictures instead of words in one or two languages. You can still use Spanish, but the more symbols and pictures you use to explain game mechanics will go a long way. For example: Things you want to collect can be grouped in a green box with a green check or green smile face. Obstacles and enemies that will hurt you can be found in a red box with a red x or frowning face. You can also do this showing two animations where the mouse stays between the walls with a green check, and the mouse touching a wall with a red X.

Thanks for the suggestions, Rusnak. My friends also thought about that when we checked Jarek's take on the languages topic. We will look into that for future games.

rusnakcreative wrote:I made it to level 3, muwahahaha!

(Ok, I have the slight advantage of a touch screen laptop, and I still struggled with it lol!)

This game was really well done, very polished! I'm even more impressed that this was all done without the use of macros and just only animations. I also noticed you have a timer that adds more to the difficulty. The music ties it all together and feels like it'll fit well with the other frustrating action/puzzle games on my phone.

I do agree with the rest in that the game's difficulty jumped a LOT between levels 1 and 2. Slower motion animations would help a lot, especially for the first couple of levels. Repeating what I said earlier is you could have an introductory slide with a short animation showing how to handle the new additions to the game. Show a mouse "click" the shape, and then quickly move over to the next button to "click" that before the square touches the wall with a green check or happy face. Show a similar animation but the mouse isn't quick enough to click the second shape and shows the retry with a red X or frowning face.

The Play or Next Level buttons could have an arrow pointing right, and retry would be a circular arrow that looks like the refresh button on your browser. Back to the main menu could look like a home or the 3 horizontal lines you would usually see on mobile websites.

Overall, very solid game!

Thanks again, Rusnak! We are glad you liked it for the most part. Like I said before, we will avoid difficulty gaps in the future games to not make them rather annoying than challenging.

As for the suggestions and tips (such as the introductory slides, slower animations & symbols), thanks a lot! We are just starting with PowerPoint games development so we will consider to put in practice any advice given here. 

rusnakcreative wrote:The music ties it all together and feels like it'll fit well with the other frustrating action/puzzle games on my phone.

You play PPT games on your phone? How's that?

I can only agree with the previous comments here. I could not get further than two clicks into Level 2.

Having said that, I very much like the concept of the game. On a different tack to the other comments, I think a simplified version could also work as an educational question & answer team game where a question is asked and if the answer is correct, the button is clicked to push the ball and the next question is asked and so on. The aim being to answer a sufficient number of questions to get the ball into the goal. If an answer is wrong, the turn is passed to another team. (You don't necessarily have to show the questions on screen; they can be asked verbally).

Just a thought. It could widen the scope of your audience.

Ah, difficulty spikes. The bane of game designs.

johnr wrote:I can only agree with the previous comments here. I could not get further than two clicks into Level 2.

Having said that, I very much like the concept of the game. On a different tack to the other comments, I think a simplified version could also work as an educational question & answer team game where a question is asked and if the answer is correct, the button is clicked to push the ball and the next question is asked and so on. The aim being to answer a sufficient number of questions to get the ball into the goal. If an answer is wrong, the turn is passed to another team. (You don't necessarily have to show the questions on screen; they can be asked verbally).

Just a thought. It could widen the scope of your audience.

Thanks, John! (BTW, I learned a bit of PowerPoint games development from you, thanks for your tutorials!)

We like your suggestion for an educational game, even through we currently don't have much interest in making educational games.

Jarek wrote:

rusnakcreative wrote:The music ties it all together and feels like it'll fit well with the other frustrating action/puzzle games on my phone.

You play PPT games on your phone? How's that?

I can't play PPT games on my phone unfortunately. I was commenting at how well the game was put together that it feels like it could be it's own mobile game. I have a touch screen on my laptop that I definitely used but still struggled to get through the game.

I wonder if I could figure-out how to reverse-engineer the animation-rig to make the overall-gameplay slower using basic-algebra, and then add enough buffer-slides to paste-in the slower version, whereafter I could add a difficulty-picker with a matching colour-palette.

Though I'm sure it's very possible, I wouldn't-quite possess the patience to do it myself.  But there's the suggestion for anyone willing to give it a try.