Puzzle Lords is Out!

Last week I released the local adaptation of my ADC2 entry Relativia. It's rebranded Puzzle Lords, and it's a free RPG/puzzle hybrid that lets you create a character, fight enemies through a puzzle game combat system, level up, buy equipment, etc.

There are a few kinks that still need to be worked out. Quite a few people were reporting crashes late in combat. On the hunch that the looping music played during combat was causing a memory leak, I disabled music during combat. Several people report that fixing the problem. I think going forward that I'll plan to have no looping background music for games...just short themes that signify the opening and ending of stages or rounds. The media player in Android is not that great, and the looping wasn't seamless anyway.

Also, at least one spell is still overpowered, giving you enough mana from casting it to endlessly recast it. I published an update, but it's still messed up, so that's on my to-do list, along with some general balancing issues (some users are reporting they are able to two-shot enemies at higher levels). Enemy HP is supposed to scale, but it's apparently not keeping pace with the damage scaling.

And of course people are already asking for more content, which is good. I think it got as low as a 2 1/2 star rating before the bug fixes, and now it's up to 4 stars. One user said they would have been willing to pay for the game, but was glad it was free. That's nice to hear, but since it was a relatively big, complex game (at least for one person to test and debug), I wouldn't have felt right charging for it out of the box. It's serving up ads, and performance is doing pretty well for the first week, so I'll probably keep it that way in the near term.

Anyway, if you've got an Android phone, check it out!