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MiniMines
NOTE: DOWNLOAD doesn’t work. CLICK THE GAME IMAGE ABOVE TO VISIT THE ONLINE VERSION.
This is a game to practice factoring and multiplication. On each level you’ll see some red faces that are sad and smiling green faces. Click on a green face to make the red faces which have it as a factor happy. It starts getting harder around level 11.
AVERAGE RATING
(4 votes, average: 3.25 out of 5)
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The Download link above points to http://g4li.org/archives/ for me in IE, which page says that “this post cannot be found”.
October 27, 2009 @ 2:54 pm
Ah, clicking on the image instead of the Download button worked.
Nice game! I thought it was going to be boring (sorry!), but the way the red faces turned green with a cool little animation was very rewarding. I especially liked the levels where patterns of red faces turned to green for small factors.
Scoring seems like it would add to the game. On one or two levels (11 I think, where it all the sudden was like 10 x 10) I just started clicking around until it was solved. You probably want to discourage that with a max tries countdown. Also, a few levels were solvable with just one factor; I thought you should get a bonus for doing that correctly. Of course, any “score” here is entirely external to the gameplay, so take the suggestion with a grain of salt.
When I first started, I didn’t know how to play, and tried clicking on the red face, then green ones and found that I needed to click on the green one that is a factor of the red one. Maybe I didn’t read the instructions carefully, but a little picture showing a mouse “clicking” (highlighted yellow or something) on the factor of the red face could help illustrate that. But with no negative aspect to clicking around, it’s not really a problem right now.
One small bug: On the huge levels, I would always click 2 (it’s like guessing “E” in hangman) and the animation took a while, so I clicked on a few other numbers. It looked like it was working at first, but then some high even numbers didn’t get flipped. So you either need to support multiple flips happening at once, or disable it (I suggest supporting it).
I’m interested to see where you take this one, and I’d love to see more levels!
October 27, 2009 @ 3:08 pm
Download link for me points to a png of the game…
The animation but more the sound was very rewarding. Since I missed the “factors” part of the game during my first play, I just ended up clicking all of the green ones to make the poof noise. I played like this for an embarassing long time.
That said, the factors part of game concept was easily missed on the splash screen and since there was no way to go back to that screen I had to relaunch the game.
Also I thought the first level was actually a level and I just couldn’t choose 1 or 4. Maybe a real menu screen would clear that up.
Once I understood the game to be about factors not only was I better at it, I actually lost interest because there was no punishment for making too many guesses. A timer, but better maybe a danger meter or a limit on gueses per level would really make the game feel less like a task.
October 27, 2009 @ 6:53 pm
The idea is really amazing. I have fun to play with this game.
However, I hope to have some more challenging aspects, such as scores or some penalties, such as limit of how many times you can click the faces.
October 27, 2009 @ 8:00 pm
I agree with the comments on discoverability of the game play. I think many people tend to just skip through informational screens.
When starting a new level it is a little odd to have to hit ‘space’ as the game is mouse driven.
October 27, 2009 @ 10:20 pm
Pretty interesting game..in fact I didn’t think it would be interesting until I started playing it. The sound effects are pretty cool as well.
As mentioned above, some sort of scoring and penalty system would help since right now I can just click all numbers until something matches. Also a timer would make the game more interesting.
I discovered the bug as well where I click on multiple factors and it seems like something is happening but the later numbers are still “angry”.
October 28, 2009 @ 12:41 am
“Also I thought the first level was actually a level” should read “Also I thought the first level was actually a MENU”
October 28, 2009 @ 3:01 am
A really polished game in terms of look and feel. Perfect for teaching kids about factoring.
The only suggestions I have are irrelevant ones, like extend the difficulty of the levels by including fractions or something, or creating a alternate mode for binary numbers to help CS students familiarize themselves with base 2.
October 28, 2009 @ 12:25 pm
THis is a great game, very intuitive. I agree with the scoring / penalty addition suggestions. Else I can just click on the numbers 2, 3, 4 ,5 and most of the angry characters are happy. A suggestion would be to have the player click all the factors of the number instead of just one. The face changes from angry to a less angrier expression as the factors are clicked.
October 28, 2009 @ 1:17 pm
The game is very addictive. At one point, I thought I figured out a simple way to go through it, by just clicking the prime numbers, but the levels are designed very nicely. It always makes you count the factors. The game has a good pace. I think there is no need of keeping scores here. The game is fun as it is.
October 28, 2009 @ 3:55 pm