my first thoughts

[ardonite]

Sofar it seems like a more casual game, so I would encourage you to look for ways to get first-time users into the game with fewer button clicks.  I thought world of goo did a great job with that.

e.g.

 1. since all puzzles are locked except the intro puzzle, maybe it should skip the stage select screen the first time?
 2. achievement and challenge info isn't really necessary for the casual / first time player, so maybe skip that the first time too.  (world of goo's system was a little excessive, but is closer to what is best, imo)

Perhaps tabbing out should pause the game?

Locking my computer (ctrl+L) and then returning to the game the screen didn't refresh (all black)

[Gemedet]

I totally agree that ease of use should be a primary concern.  In particular, maybe the "Award Targets" could be shown when a level is highlighted in the list, without having to manually press a button to select it?  That way, you'd only have to press the button once to start the level, rather than twice.

Also, I'm a big fan of keyboard use, and it surprised me that ESC didn't pause the game.  Generally, you tend to see ESC being used to backtrack through menus, and ENTER being used to select (in this case, start whichever level is highlighted).

Also, a technical issue:
When I choose 1280 as the resolution, the whole game darkens, like it lost brightness.  I can't determine if this is a setting on my machine somewhere, but I don't think it is.  This happened whether it was fullscreen or not.  Is it 1280x800 or 1280x960?  It'd be helpful to see the whole resolution, rather than just the X value.

All in all, really fun game, and clever puzzles.

Greg Nishikawa

[ardonite]

I like the thematic solution to many of the puzzles, but some of them I have difficulty keeping track of what's on the opposite side of the puzzle piece.  It would be nice if there were some visible differentiation for all pieces when theres something on the other side.

Good visibility:
 - Churn (the silver gears-front pieces are multi-sided, the wood ones are not, and the back-side-only ones have a visible thing on the front)

Not-so-good visibility:
 - Woven Pipes

e.g. on Woven Pipes every piece basically has pipe up or pipe down on the back side, so ideally there would be a visual difference between the two on the front side, but even if it saved me the trouble of putting the two blank-front + thing-on-back pieces into filler squares I would be happy