hey just bought your game.
+ gratulations for the high level of polish.
+ really nice physics and easy controls.
two things i like to see in an update would be:
- a more polished background gfx and
- fixing of the the chain slider
which worked but had a lot of bugs, where the chain visually broke after the second ring from the top, but still was connected to the rest of the rings!
this app really rises the standard of what is possible with istencyl, well done!
First off, thanks for the kind words!
Each new level pack will introduce a new background to go with the theme of that level pack. Right now iStencyl doesn't support repeated backgrounds so it tends to look a bit wonky when the level is bigger than the screen bounds (the image is static while the level pans). I made the background so that it would look seamless when it's repeated, and it does that in the flash version I'm working on, giving a much nicer look to the level itself.
From what I've learned lurking around cocos2d and box2d forums, the separation you see is really from the limitations of the box2d distance joints (or stick joints as they're referred to in Stencyl). Distance joints are not completely rigid, they're meant to keep two actors at a minimum distance, but not a maximum. Different weights of the actors combined with different forces of gravity can sometimes have very odd effects on them. I tried to adjust everything so that it did the minimal amount of stretching, but I would like to see the added support of box2d rope joints in the future (
b2RopeJoint). It behaves in a similar manner to a distance joint, but keeps the two actors at a maximum distance, recreating the behavior of a non-stretchable rope.
