Re: beta testing comments

[David Philippi]

On Thursday 31 October 2002 16:10, Nick Mann wrote:
> Definitely with a modifier.  I've never been a pause mode person ;)  I'd
> not thought of trying pausing.

It's too powerful as it is (although personally I don't mind it if people take 
their own fun away by cheating - it's theirs, not mine).

> Personally, I'd not consider it a feature, but I can see how some
> people might.  Certainly with some situations (trying to stop a pingus
> digging, for instance) you really want to select the digger an not a
> random one, but no matter how fast you are, by the time the digger has
> got down far enough, there will be many pingus in the hole.  An example of
> left/right selection is left as an exercise to the reader.

The situation with a digger hole filled with Pingus could pose a problem. But 
when do you need to apply an action to a Pingu in a digger hole? One could 
argue that the need to do so is a bug in the level design.

> In some ways your point is self defeating - you either have to be fast or
> -lucky-.  Pingus is one of those game which really doesnt rely very much
> on luck.  It'd be a shame to make is so (at least for us not so fast
> people ;)

Why not be both? ;-)
How much speed is required to solve the levels is a hard question in my 
opinion. If we make the game slower it might loose appeal to "faster" people. 
BTW I wouldn't count myself among the really fast people, I'm too lazy. So 
when I'm actually playing I don't like situations where one has to react very 
too.

What's probably not known by everyone - the game speed isn't balanced out yet. 
Some recent changes to the timing code by Ingo made the game running faster 
quite a bit. If beta testers complain that the game is too fast then the 
natural thing to do would be to lower the speed.

> Of course, throwing up ideas is the easy bit, so I'd not begrudge people
> ignoring me :)

Why do you think anyone is ignoring your ideas? You should not begrudge people 
rejecting your ideas but ignoring is another matter IMHO.

Bye David