Two weeks ago, I launched Mira’s Journey, an isometric puzzle game built with Phaser 3.
I didn’t get a lot of response, but the analytics show that people are playing it. I did some play testing with friends and recently hooked up more advanced analytics which was fascinating: The game is highly addictive and players don’t give up easily when getting stuck. I’ve seen people playing over 20 minutes, resetting levels many times before giving up.
I’m looking to bring out a major update with more hints, easier skipping of levels, and more levels soon.
If you like tough, spatial puzzle games, give it a spin. Let me know if you manage to clear all 20 levels, or when the rage of getting stuck finally caught up with you!
Puzzle games are my favorite genre. I cleared all the levels except 18. Level 18 doesn’t seem to work correctly to me. After the first turnstile, it forces you to push a barrel on top of a button that is supposed to stay yellow. If there is some way around that, it’s beyond me.
Sound and Music
The sound design is a little strange to me. The dissonant, avant-garde jazz soundtrack is confusing to listen to and doesn’t fit this type of game. I would expect something less intrusive and more soothing. The sound of footsteps on levels with NPCs is distracting. I would love to be able to disable the sound, but you can’t. You have to be able to hear switches and doors.
Bug
On one level, one of the switches disappeared after I retried the level and I had to refresh to get it back.
UI and Control
I think you should implement tile-based movement. Later stages have Sokoban puzzles. Without tile-based movement, it’s extremely easy to move stuff around by accident, which for me would be a deal breaker for the game if the puzzles became more challenging. It’s also weird because the boxes appear to have it, but the character doesn’t. More importantly, because of the perspective of the camera, there are times when you cannot see the switches while moving boxes around. Attached is an example. The character is standing on a switch, but you can’t see it because of the box. For me, the isometric perspective is a little weird for a Sokoban puzzle anyway, but not being able to see the objective makes it a bit unfair.
I’m so sorry you had to listen to my rookie attempt of composing my own music for over an hour! There’s a toggle in the settings to disable the music, and another to control the sound effects separately.
Despite all that, you’re the first to clear all 20 levels without me being there as far as I know. I can really see it’s your favorite genre. And you didn’t have to write feedback, but you did. I really appreciate that!
Level 18 is possible to solve, I checked. The barrels don’t have to trigger the toggles, you just have to time when you push them in front of NPCs. The toggles should all just match certain color patterns. Let me know if you want me to send you a playthrough video.
I’m sorry about the bug. Was it level 14, 17 or 19? I can’t piece together more from the anonymous analytics.
Thanks for the suggestion about tile-based navigation. My play-testers struggled with that as well, but I thought it would make the game a little more interesting if mira had more freedom. You’re right to say that the later levels are challenging enough on their own. I’ll also see if I can prevent the toggles from being view blocked. The barrels should help with that, but they can be pushed through the gates.
Again, huge thanks for playing all the levels and writing feedback. It’s deeply helpful.
I believe 7 and 14 had the issue with the switch. I was able to get through 18. It’s weird because I thought I tried pushing the barrel in front of the NPC before.
On the music, yeah…I just disabled it so it wasn’t a huge issue, but it would be nice if the music was a little different hah. I’m a musician myself, so the music and sound in a game is huge to me. It’s more of an eerie\unsettling\unresolved composition. So for a puzzle game, I’m not sure it fits. There’s this mobile game called Tiny Room Stories Town Mystery that has a pretty good soundtrack for a puzzle game.
I think I solved the bug in level 7 and 14. Some other levels suffered from it as well, but it didn’t happen there as much. The cause was a classic Phaser memory issue: Stopping and restarting the scene wouldn’t reset the matter bodies. This was a problem when toggles got added dynamically mid-level. I now manually reset dynamic toggles to null when the level is shut down. And just to be sure the toggle listeners, body and state is also reset when the object gets destroyed, just like some level stuff.
Thanks a lot for pointing this out! I think it would have taken a lot longer for me to find this issue without your help. I saw players drop out after level 7 and 14, but I thought it was just because those levels might be too difficult for them to solve and they didn’t know about the hints and skip options
Personally I hate isometric games because movement confuses the heck out of me. I got stuck in the first level on the bridge. To be clear this is not a bug, this is me problem and I did play more than one level
This week I worked on tile-based movement for the game to prevent frustrations like yours. With tile-based movement it will be impossible to get stuck on things like a bridge. I already had some test players frustrated with the free movement, and John also pointed out it would be unfair in later levels as blocks could be moved accidentally.
So I already started on that and finished when I saw your comment. Moreover, I also pieced together that after fixing a bug, analytics still showed people were dropping out early, which might also have been because the navigation was frustrating.
I’m also going to add some more levels and maybe add some scoreboards, rating and sharing options to each level, then bring out a bigger update. That way I can draw new people and returning players to the game. I might even take the game out of beta after that.
