Your Guide in the world of Sun Stones

One of the central pillars of Sun Stones has been engendering a sense of exploration in the player.  Exploration drives the movement within the game, our introduction of stone mechanics, our writing aesthetic, our achievement and star mechanics, and more.  We carefully pull players through the game without pressuring them with specific goals, clocks, or thresholds.

In our recent glut of User-feedback, the calm atmosphere and potential for real learning at their own pace have been two of the most-appreciated elements of the game.

So of course we're changing them.

A small number of players tend to re-play puzzles over and over, trying for perfect mastery.  These players have been frustrated because the open-ended exploratory nature of the game does not lend itself well to dense information about performance over time.  Many iOS games focus heavily on the dense presentation of information, so Sun Stones, by comparison, seems a bit barren.  These players were often some of the most enthusiastic about our sparse aesthetic, so it's really a matter of wanting things both ways, rather than an indictment of how we're starting players off.

So our changes this week and last have been focused on finding a way to change the way we feed information to players, without changing anything for players who don't go specifically looking for dense information.

Navigating the Glyph Wall

The central hub of Sun Stones is the "Glyph Wall" - where players select a glyph to visualize, and create patterns over time from the glyphs they have finished.  These screens are simply groups of pictograms - touch one, and you are taken to that puzzle.  This is a very natural and simple way to navigate between puzzles for our players.  But some players want to know - which glyphs have I played perfectly, and which did I simply pass?  That information was available within the puzzle, but not visible on the Glyph Wall directly.  We considered putting additional information on the Glyph Wall - but it absolutely crushed our aesthetic to do so.

The solution we came up with was to create an "info box" mechanic.  If you touch a new glyph - you are still taken directly to that puzzle.  No change there.  If, however, you touch a glyph which you have already finished we bring up a small box with information about your past performance, and a small "Play" button.  This gives players a chance to check their past performance without leaving the Glyph Wall, but doesn't change our original play-experience for most players (who don't re-play puzzles).

We'll make the new version available to players soon.