PixlBitStudios

@fortius54 Awesome! Glad you dig it!

It's nice to get feedback - when it's two people in a room with very little outside feedback, whatever works between the two of us is what goes in the game. Now that it's out we've received a ton of information and have been able to sit down and add/tweak stuff to accommodate things we missed. We want everyone to enjoy the game and don't mind putting in the extra effort to ensure people are happy with it!

@fortius54 "The final annoyance is in fact trying to finish these puzzles under time to get the full achievements. I agree with most on here that the only way to get it under time is to already know the puzzle."

Sweet, sweet justification. I told Chessa ahead of release that these times were too aggressive. Granted, she did go through a round of making the times easier than she originally had them, but I told her they were still too fast.

Nick: 1, Chessa: Well, this number isn't all that important. The important part is that I was right this time! Wooo.

In any event, Chessa is now sitting down and tweaking the achievement times to something more reasonable. While she has some sort of super human Picross solving abilities, the rest of us need some more time to even dream of achieving the times she's set. The patch you've been hearing about should include this as well (it's almost ready to ship off to Nintendo, just putting the finishing touches on things).

@Late You should keep trying to build your game! More Picross is always a good thing. We definitely have the same principles in mind and we think that's what makes for the best kind of Picross game.

At least for us on the drawing the line thing, that's kind of what the time achievement helped for us. Basically it was our gauge for how hard things are. Chessa would make a puzzle, play it, and get her time. Then I'd play it and since I'm not quite as good at solving them as she is, we'd take a time somewhere in the middle and that helped dictate the challenge level of the puzzle. After that, it was just a matter of lining everything up in order to determine what puzzle should go where.

In any event, if you don't decide to finish your game, we'll obviously look forward to your creations in the community mode of the game, but we're excited to try your stuff one way or the other!

@JaxonH Still trying to get translators on the hook for Italian, German, and French. I'm hoping once we do it doesn't take long to get the translation back. I've set the game up so that all the text is external to the code, so bringing in the translated text will be no more effort than doing QA to ensure it didn't break anything and everything still looks good.

@ThomasBW84 Gladly! Thanks for fostering such a great community and giving us a space to talk about our game

Just wanted to leave a quick comment to let everyone know that we've got button controls working. Needs a few small tweaks to work on the big puzzles that require scrolling, but that should be relatively easy.

Next step is getting everything showing up on the TV. The good news for you folks in Europe is that all of this stuff will be rolled right into the initial submission, so you'll get the game with all of the tweaks and updates.

@sinalefa As for the hints, have you tried tapping the little orange boxes? They will pop out so you can see them without scrolling back and forth.

I talked with Chessa and the plan is to also make the TV screen work for playing the game. It'll add a bit more work, but it's likely for the best. I'll likely be posting updates as I work on Twitter (@PixlBitStudios), so be sure to check there to see progress/screenshots.

Thanks for picking up the game and the feedback!

So... quadruple comment for the win, but I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to the community here. You've all been extremely kind and warm, which is incredibly refreshing. You guys rock!

@MrSands Thank you, sounds great!

@sinalefa Hi there! Yes, the game will tell you instantly if you get something wrong. You get a certain number of errors before you "fail" the puzzle. Failing just means you don't get any achievements, but you can keep playing the puzzle till completion. The number of errors you can make goes up the harder the puzzle is. Thanks for the question!

@JaxonH Thanks for the questions! Please, feel free to keep asking away

The numbers will grey out as you complete hints. So if the numbers were like 2, 8, 2, and you got the middle 8 filled in, it will grey that one out. When you get the whole row, all the numbers will grey out.

The hinting is a touch different from the Picross games. Those basically highlight rows/columns where you can make a move. The way we did it is by giving you a set number of hints to use depending on the puzzle difficulty. Once you activate hint mode, you can tap any block on the screen and it'll automatically fill it in with whatever its true value is. If you decide not to use any hints, you'll get one of the achievements on that puzzle, so it's currently optional in that regard.

@JaxonH Howdy! Thanks for the kind comment and the support!

The game actually does do the tandem thingy - like Pokemon Picross and the e Series. You can use R/ZR, L/ZL, Up/Down, or X/B. Probably should've called out the fact that you can do Up/Down and X/B in the tutorial, but it was a late addition and we figured people used to playing these games would just instinctively use those buttons despite what the tutorial said... anyway, in the update we'll properly call that out so people know.

We agree though, options are good. While our vision for the game was specifically touch controls, we totally understand that people have been playing with buttons for a long time and expect such a feature. Hindsight being 20/20, we would've added that ahead of release. We still hope people give the touch controls a whirl (after the update comes), but we'd rather people play the game than not!

@james_mueller Awesome, James! Please share whatever you create online - we'd love to check them out

@Danrenfroe2016 Glad you're enjoying it, sir! There is something of an expert mode in Bonus. I believe there are 10 puzzles to be found that are absolutely brutal. Not to mention the back end of Hard, where every puzzle takes nearly an hour to solve.

We'll be releasing some levels via Miiverse, so keep an eye out there - plus, she can always check out some of the puzzles the community has made. There's a few we've really enjoyed, "Mr Powgi" comes to mind specifically.

@Miiamoto Please do! We'll be patching the game to include button controls because so many people seem to want to play the game that way, but we still feel very strongly that the game is best played with the stylus.

@UsualNoise Howdy - what I was specifically mentioning was using the D-Pad in conjunction with the stylus controls. However, there seems to be a lot of demand for D-Pad + Button input, so I think I'm going to sit down and add it as well.

It's going to probably be about a month before that's available due to Nintendo's process, but the aim is to work on it today and through the weekend for a submission to Nintendo by Monday.

Thanks again for having us on this interview, guys. Just wanted to say that now that the game's live we're getting a bit of feedback on a couple things and will be making some tweaks. Namely, giving some speed options on the auto-scroll, actually stating somewhere in the game that you CAN use the D-Pad/Face Buttons instead of the shoulder buttons (like Picross), and doing what we can to reduce the loading times, which seem to exceed what we were seeing on the devkit.

If anyone has picked up PixlCross, please let us know your thoughts! We want to make the game better and address any concerns you may have. We've put a ton of work into the game already and we want to get it as close to perfect as we can. As stated in the interview, we want the sharing community to be vibrant and long-lasting, so we're willing to put in the effort to keep refining anything we can.

• Nick @ PixlBit Studios

@AENIGMA We felt that way about stylus controls in all of the other Picross/nonogram games we've played as well. So part of our goal with PixlCross was to make really awesome stylus controls that surpass button controls. We think we've accomplished that goal, but we'll let players decide that when they give it a shot. If there's enough demand we'll certainly consider adding in button controls as an option.

@argh4430 We targeted the Wii U exclusively first because it was actually the easiest system for us to get started on. Because we could leverage Javascript and HTML5 for development, it was easy enough to actually get something built fairly quickly.

Of course, all of the online stuff turned out to be a much different story and some of the limitations of that platform revealed itself over time. Hindsight being 20/20, we probably would've opted for Unity and built something cross-platform compatible.

@Ambermoon We're targeting mid-May at this point. We're securing translators at the moment and once we've got the scripts we'll be submitting to NOE Lotcheck. Being that we're building on the NOA approved ROM, it should be a smooth pass through there.

@LordGeovanni Glad to hear you're excited for it! We are the developers of the game and we will absolutely take the 3DS suggestion under consideration.

One of the mistakes we made was not developing the game on Unity. In hindsight, it would've made it considerably easier to bring the game to other platforms and probably would've simplified development.

Now that we have a game releasing, we can purchase a 3DS devkit and potentially make a play for a future 3DS title. Though at this point, like most Nintendo fans, we're patiently awaiting news from Nintendo on their future platform(s) before committing to anything in particular.

Glad to hear everyone's excited for PixlCross! We can't wait for you all to play it. It's been a long time coming and though Lotcheck was... painful, we're glad that it afforded us a bunch of opportunities to make big improvements to the experience pre-release.

@Late That's awesome! Looks like you made some great progress for a prototype on a technology you just learned. Your pixel art also looks fantastic - hope it's something you can leverage in the future. I'm sure any of those would make phenomenal puzzles.

@AshFoxX & @Henmii Thanks for the kind comments. As far as price, we're targeting $5.99. Hopefully that's reasonable enough for you guys to consider it at launch!

@linforcer Thanks for the detailed response. I can understand just generally not appreciating the art style. We did work very hard to create a cohesive style and went through many iterations before arriving at the final product. Of course, like anything creative, it's not always going to appeal to everyone. The feedback caught me a bit off guard because the interface has been the thing we've gotten the most positive comments on.

That being said, despite your feelings on the art, if you like this style of game, I do hope you give ours a shot. We think the actual puzzles are pretty great and we've made it an effort to create a product that we believe is both feature rich and a good value.

@linforcer If you don't mind me asking, would you be willing to elaborate on what you don't like about the interface?

@Ernest_The_Crab I'd say that the designs for the puzzles get quite interesting and tread new ground when compared to past Picross games. As Picross enthusiasts, two of our biggest complaints about those puzzles have been that many are very similar and a lot of the puzzles don't particularly look like the thing they are supposedly depicting until color is slapped on it and it's shown in the puzzle select screen (or animated).

My wife, Francesca, made a point of making very diverse puzzles that actually look like the thing it says it is. I wish I had a way of showing that off without spoiling all the content in the game, but as it stands, we've tried to only spoil the stuff that's more mundane.

I'm putting together a little demo right now that will have a sampling of puzzles from the game, so when that's available, I'll be sure to let everyone know and you can see for yourself!

@Late Definitely true. While I wasn't the one making puzzles - my wife was in charge of that and all of the design - she spent most time fixing puzzles that were started from pixel art on graph paper. Doing stuff like eliminating (or emboldening) single pixel diagonal lines or adding other stuff to the picture usually helped make things more solveable. We also show the progress that the solver was able to make so that you have a general idea of how close you are.

A lot of puzzles we made for this game got left on the cutting room floor because they just couldn't be made to work in this two-tone system. Of course, we put those aside for our next release, which should be a bit more colorful

@Late Very cool! The solver I wrote for the game can solve puzzles very quickly, but it's only interested in puzzles with a single solution. Once it determines that there's more than one solution it stops and informs the user. I can believe that solvers looking for all possible solutions take quite a bit longer, because they need to use brute force to determine the solution.

Without getting too technical... my solver will take a look at a set of hints and a given line and attempt to line up the blocks/spaces as far to one side and then as far as possible to the other, then finds the places where things overlap and fills stuff in. It proceeds down the horizontal lines and then the vertical lines until it can either make no more moves or the puzzle is solved. So basically actions made on the horizontal lines will inform actions on the vertical lines and vice-versa, just like a human playing the game.

From a game design perspective, we thought it was more important to produce puzzles/enforce creation of puzzles that are without ambiguities. Those puzzles tend to be less frustrating to solve because all of the tools you need to solve it are stored within those hints.

I'll be sure to keep everyone here posted on our progress on a NOE release shortly after our NOA release (hopefully) soon!

Hey guys, this is Nick from PixlBit Studios. Thanks so much for the great write up. It's very exciting to see the reaction to the game so far. We've kept it under wraps for quite a while and didn't really want to show anything until we were sure it was up to snuff.

As mentioned, we're in Lotcheck now for an NOA release and after we make a little bit of money, we'll be filing for rating in Europe (it's really expensive!). In the meantime, we're running a Steam Greenlight campaign (also mentioned), so hopefully that goes well.

If anyone has any questions about the game, feel free to shoot them at me, I'd be glad to answer!

Also, @Late has it right - all the puzzles in the game are in increments of 5 to make counting easier. And to address your other point, the 35x35 max was really a limitation imposed by the Wii U. Despite many rounds of optimization, the experience suffered greatly on any puzzles greater than that. The PC release will likely have the limit bumped up thanks to both the better performance and the increase in screen size.