Thanks for all the positive comments guys! I was afraid no one was going to like the gameplay.
Quote: "What is the twist??"
Haha... not too sure yet really. >< I would say that entrapping the AI on an island of blocks is the easiest way, but as it is, he'll probably kill you before you even get a chance to fire. You may also notice that the block-fall lag time is proportional to the number of blocks you're causing to fall. (eg: it takes less time to drop a single block than an entire row of 8 blocks). You can use this to your advantage too, as you can give yourself more time to escape a highlighted block than your enemy.
I do however need to balance out some of the block fall timings as well as the AI's intelligence to make it a little more manageable.
EDIT: Doh! I didn't get the real message to your comment. >< Thought you were talking about the secret to beating the game =P After an enemy loses all his lives, an entire ring around the board gets highlighted and falls off permanently. It makes the board smaller and harder to fight on. =)
Quote: "Also if you need any help on media give a bing bang wizzle. And I will be there quicker than the speed of a ninja. And nobody knows where a ninja goes.-Matasuma-Ninja Gaiden 2."
Any help on the media would be greatly appreciated as you can obviously see from my current demo. =P I'm somewhat of a j-rpg fan (as you can probably tell from the messageboxes), so I was hoping to replace all the current player objects with chibi-styled figures, and to have them holding magical wands / staffs for the attack animations. (how else are you to randomly drop an entire row of blocks? =P )
Every level-set I was hoping to give a theme too, so i'll probably group levels and have them use different block textures, different skyboxes, and different environmental effects (eg: wind, rain, clouds).
If you'd be willing to help, that'd be amazing. I'm somewhat of a decent modeler, having dabbled in it before, but I'm not terribly artistic which is where the real problem arises.
Any attack / enemies /level suggestions would be wonderful too! (if you even want to make them yourself, you can poke inside my scripts folder "./media/scripts/" to take a peek)
Currently I don't have that many ideas. I know I want to implement a few new attack patterns -- perhaps one that goes out in an X pattern, or have a boss character that can cause random blocks to highlight.
Also, for the enemies, I've been thinking perhaps a 2x2 sized tank (i'm currently working on support of enemies bigger than a single grid-space) The tank could have an independent turret and fire bullets that cause large 3x3 splash damage grids, which I think would be really cool. Beating him also might be hard as you'd have to highlight _all_ 4 blocks underneath him. =)
Anyways, thanks again everyone for your support!
Cheers,
FinalEp