Tiles and Patterns - small puzzle game with 20 levels

Kongregate: Play Tiles and Patterns, a free online game on Kongregate

“Click on any colored tile with an arrow to change the color of every tile the arrow is pointing at. The goal is to have each tile share the same color. The amount of times you can click tiles is limited by the ‘turns’ at the bottom of the screen.”

Progress is saved automatically. Also, I heard you gain +50iq if you beat the last level.

Fun fact about the background:
The background is on a different layer that uses the ‘Reflection’ effect. These effects are really a godsent to make my programmer art look less shitty.

This is the background without effects:
bg

and this is the background before I put a paint dot net filter over it:
Unbenannt

It doesn’t look perfect but better than anything I could have done without these effects. I mention this because making backgrounds was always impossible for me and I thought this might help someone else make a nice looking background.

Hope someone enjoyes playing this. Designing levels for a puzzle game is a lot harder than I thought initially, and there are some problems for sure. Any feedback on the game (visually, mechanically, difficulty curve, level design,…) is greatly appreciated.

4 Likes

Very nice little puzzle game. (And I’ve got to try that background thing, thank you)
My suggestion is the ability to play previous levels…
For a game like this to be commercial, you might want to add (graphic) themes, ambient sound loops, and a tutorial.

1 Like

Thank you!
Sadly anything music related is out of my capacities.

A level select seems to be a pretty important thing for a lot of people. Even for small games like this. After hearing that a few times now I will definitely just add one to all my games in the future.

Is there anything specific you would have liked a tutorial for? I am honestly a big believer in teaching through level design but if it doesn’t work I need to change that.

For the tutorial, I just remember that some puzzle games have a needless one and it was on the top of my head.
(I’m on level 13, So far the difficulty curve seems great.)

After playing some more, I have a couple more suggestions, a “won/lost” layer, (because I didn’t notice that I was out of turns a few times.)
And a “how many times it took you to win this level” Variable, not necessarily shown to player. But you might want to show it in a player_stats screen if you choose to include one.
(I play board games on my phone, and they always have one.)

Thank you. I completly overlooked the running out of turns thing.
I fixed that now by adding autoreset. I will start working on a visual indicator for when a level is beaten now and probably post the new version later today.