Noedz

This weekend I finished level 125 for my new game Noedz and thought I'd take a few minutes to introduce it to the internet.  So here goes…

Noedz is a puzzle game where you connect spherical nodes in a 3D matrix to build paths that connect like colors.  Basically a 3D game of connect the dots.  Sure, there are plenty of other games where you connect like color dots, but I think Noedz feels different because you manipulate the play space and navigate in all directions.  I know this sounds confusing so here's a video that hopefully makes more sense…

I started Noedz as an educational project to learn more about working with Unity, manipulating 3D objects in code, and working with touch based user interfaces.  I feel I've come a long way on in all of those areas and I think it's turning out to be a kinda cool game to boot.

The 125 levels are separated into three difficulties;  50 Easy, 50 Medium, and 25 Hard.  As I've built more levels it has become more difficult for me to objectively classify the difficulty so I'll be doing a lot of play testing in the coming weeks to make sure I've got levels segregated properly.  For the first forty or so levels I created, I did not have a level editor so I was actually creating new levels by editing a text file and running the app to test.  This was a serious pain and led me to create a simple in-game level editor that would also create new random levels for me to use as a starting point for new levels.  This has been a tremendous help as there's no way I could've come up with this many variations on my own.

I really like the game play that's evolved in Noedz although I'm pretty sure it's not for everyone.  It certainly is a path finding puzzle game, but when I play I find myself having to think several moves ahead to make sure I'm not doing something that will cause problems later similar to many strategy games.  Add in the fact that the path finding occurs in three dimensions and it can be down right brain melting at times.   I'm looking forward to getting it into the hands of players and hearing feedback.

Thanks for stopping by and I'll have more to say about Noedz as it gets closer to release.