Play Circle Code!
Switch on all the circles to solve the creative puzzles, with 6 special circles and complex puzzle structures!
There’s 49 levels to beat! Can you do them all with as less clicks as possible?
You can also create your own levels to share with the world!
Instructions: Click on a circle to switch it on. The circles above, below and on the sides will get switched as well! Special circles have special behaviours.
I actually finished this game a long time ago, back in 2011. Everything except the levels. I couldn’t figure out how to do many puzzles on my own. I even asked in the previous forums for some tips on puzzle design.
Then, in summer 2013 (about a year ago) I showed this to my cousin. We’d started making games together, him as a game / level designer and me as a programmer. We’re still together, and I’ll guess you’ll be seeing more of our cool work :)… but back to this.
So Axel, my cousin and pretty much my best friend as well, was interested in the concept, and he wanted to try making some levels for it. There’s a simple editor in-game I did, so it was pretty easy. He started making some puzzles in his free time, on train rides and such. He ended up making about 50 or so. I’d also made a few for the game (around 10). We playtested them a bit, ordered them more or less by difficulty and by introducing new pieces progressively… and it ended up like this.
We then posted it on FGL to see if any sponsor would be interested. Not anyone. I had some analytics in game, and I knew most sponsors wouldn’t even be able to get past level one or two. Too difficult? Probably.
See, the problem is the concept is a bit hard to grasp. Not much, but it requires to focus. And to apply that concept to solve the easiest puzzles is a bit hard to learn as well. Once you get it, you can start solving the puzzles. But it’s hard. Really, you do need to think quite a bit in order to solve it all. (and the last ones are pretty hardcore).
I guess most sponsors aren’t interested in this kind of games. Nor many casual players. This would probably only interest the avid puzzle solvers. A very niche audience.
And so, the game was pretty abandoned. We could have added some tutorials in order to make the initial curve a bit easier, I guess, but we were a bit let down by the really low interest everyone had on the game. Nobody cared. And we didn’t want to spend much time in making the tutorials and everything in a proper way, because we weren’t confident that the game would succeed at all anyways. So yeah, abandoned in the dirt.
Now, a few days ago, we were talking and sort of started talking about this game again. Circle Code. A pretty much done game, just abandoned. Why? We were wondering. Well, no one wanted to sponsor it or anything. So we decided we’d just publish it anyways. Axel wanted to have a finished game, and I wanted to finally show it to someone… because it meant nothing if it just stayed hidden in my computer, and eventually forgotten.
And so, it has been released. At first, we’re just doing Kongregate. A limited release of sorts. To see how it does at all. See what people have to say about it. We might release it everywhere later, we’re not even sure how it will go. But well, here it is! Hope you enjoy it a bit, see if you can solve a few of the puzzles.
That’s it. This kind of post-mortem turned out longer than expected. I guess I just wanted to tell the story behind this game, and share it with you all, the FlashPunk community. It just feels like home here… been here (well and in the old forums) a long time.
I think this would make a pretty cool casual mobile game (in the vein of games like 2048).
. Thanks for the compliments!