Feedback for Topple for Windows beta

[Ber]

System: Windows 7 64-bit

Topple installed easily and played nicely.

Only issue I could see was installer said 'Wordstorm' instead of Topple in a couple of places, and put Topple in a start menu folder called 'Wordstorm'.


Sooo I see you're working your way through your iPhone games and doing DirectX / Windows conversions ... is Slay by any chance coming up on that list soon?

[Sean OConnor]

Thanks for spotting that installer issue. Should be fixed now.

I am tempted to start using DirectX 9 in all my games but I'm still worried that there are a fair few computers that don't have it installed (my father-in-law's Windows XP machine didn't for example). I have to weigh up how much better one of my games would be with DirectX and how many people would be put off playing if they were asked to install something before even being able to play.

I think Vista and Windows 7 always come with DirectX 10 and 11 installed and they both can run DirectX 9 apps so the problem may lessen over time.

I'm also worried that MS may change things in the future (maybe drop support for DX9!) and my games will all need a re-write! If I stick with simple GDI then the games will be slower and jerkier but at least they should always work.

My DirectX code does detect if you don't have DirectX installed and use GDI+ instead (see http://www.windowsgames.co.uk/blitz2D.html) so it should look the same but run more jerkily.

I've uploaded the new DirectX version of Football-o-saurus which I've been holding off for a while because of my concerns. I'll see what feedback I get and maybe gradually update the other games.

[CoffeeShopFrank]

I really like this game!

Will there be more quotes added in the future? There are already 960 puzzles to solve, so I can't complain about a lack of puzzles. It would still be nice to see quotes from more famous people.

I can't think of any real complaints at the moment. I guess I can say the title screen could be improved, but that's not really a complaint.

Overall, this is an awesome and fun puzzle game, and I hope you'll develop more fun games in the future!

[Ber]

No worries re: finding the installer issue

I can see why you would be worried about requiring DirectX unnecessarily, you're right there are quite a few Windows XP computers still out there that don't have it installed by default (although quite a lot of these would have it installed from some other game). I think this is changing fairly rapidly though - Windows 7 is about about to overtake XP for total install base soon, and it's been gaining market share from XP at an accelerating pace.

I don't think you need to worry about MS dropping DirectX 9 support anytime soon though - it's used in Xbox 360s, so most Xbox 360 games that are ported to Windows are using DirectX 9. That is a LOT of very recent and current games, so I'm sure MS will support DirectX 9 for an extremely long time yet...

Lastly, I just saw your facebook comment about doing a Slay rewrite in DirectX - Yes! I am very excited!!!

[ovc89]

Hey,

I'm having a problem with my Topple. It has stopped working altogether. When I open it, after loading, it only gives me the background, the right hand pane, and a black square close to the center (in X) and close to the top. If I hit any of the buttons, the program crashes and gets closed. I tell Windows to try to find a solution online but (as expected) it finds nothing and simply closes the program.

Is there a simple way of fixing this? preferably without re-installing all the games...