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“Pipes meets Tetris,and greets loopZ on the way. Create closed circuits by rotating tiles with the trackball and placing them on the playfield via the touchpad.”

note: on the non-android versions, the rotation is done using the mouse-wheel, the cursor keys or the keys S and D.

FREE Windows Version (recommended for windows users) FREE Windows NO-Installer Version (alternative for people who can’t use the installer) FREE python/pygame source for linux and macOSX

Donations are always welcome

Demo ANDROID Version (market link)

Genesis

Circuits was the third game I wrote for the Android OS. Technically, it was not as complex as “Pin It” : apart from finding out without using deep recursions ( the T-Mobile G1 can run out of memory very fast)  whether a circuit was closed or not, the game was relatively easy to write. What it lacks in technical finesse, though, is made up by its very addictive gameplay and the additional features present.

A video review by shinobiwan23 on youtube.

There are three different gameplay mode, all of which require different tactics, there are also eleven awards the player can earn for completing different tasks. Those range from the very easy (make more than 500 points) to the incredibly difficult (“make more than 2000 points” or “make more than 600 points while using less than 3 seconds per tile”). As with all the games I make, I made sure that all the goals can be achieved. (Although, to be honest, I *NEVER* got the 2000 points award. My personal high score was 1964, so it’s a safe bet that someone CAN beat 2000 points).

The gameplay

Upon the start of a new game,  the screen is filled with empty tiles. The next tile the player must place is shown in the middle of status bar. The player can rotate it via the trackball (left/right movements) or by pressing the arrows on the touchscreen beside the tile display. Left of the tile display is the score, right are a timer, showing how much time the player has left to make his move, and a number of lives.

Once the tile has been rotated to the player’s satisfaction, he can select where to put it by touching the playfield, and a new tile to be placed appears.

If the timer runs out before the player places his tile, he loses a life, but get (hopefully) a different tile. At the start of the game, the timer takes ten seconds to run out while playing on easy mode.  Every 100 points, a heartbeat can be heard, signifying that the timer was shortened by half a second (down to two seconds). Every 1000 points, the player receives an extra life (but he can never have more than three lives).

Once in a while, bonus fields appear which the player can take by placing the next tile on top of them. There can never be two bonus fields available at the same time, and they will always appear in empty fields, which, incidentally, means that it might become a curse instead of a blessing when your screen is nearly full and a bomb appear exactly at the wrong place.

The bonus fields which can appear are :

The Gift : Straight forward : gives you 10 additional points. Note : if an award description doesn’t explicitely forbid to use the gifts, then it is safe to assume that you can use them and still get the award.

The Bomb : this will erase the entire play field, but will keep the tile you used to activate it. Very useful when you have many ~orphaned~ tiles, incredibly annoying when you want to finish a big circuits and it blocks the field you need.

The Eraser : pauses the game (the screen will be tinted red) until the player chooses a tile to be erased. (hint: you can also see what the NEXT tile will be!). Note that you MUST remove a tile if you activate an eraser, even if it’s the tile you used to activate it in the first place.

The Dirty Bomb : this will erase the entire play field like a standard bomb, but will then block parts of the field with red blocks in one of 5 patterns. You won’t be able to put tiles on those red blocks. You can use a standard bomb to remove everything, a dirty bomb in the hope to get a ~better~ pattern (some of the patterns are more difficult to play with than others), or an eraser to remove single red blocks. Note : the dirty bomb only appear after your score exceeds 500 points if you’re playing on EASY.

The scoring for each tile is as follow :

• Crosses: 8 points

• T-tile : 4 points

• Straights : 2 points

• corners : 1 point

Playing on HARD grants you a x2 bonus on all points made from circuit tiles, playing on INSANE grants you a x3 bonus, but HARD starts with a 5 second timer, INSANE with a 3 second timer!

The game modes

Additionally to the standard no-limits gameplay, you can choose to play in “Jump Mode” and a “Timed” mode.

In “Jump”  the game stops when your score exceeds 200 points, and only the points over 200 are coutned. The best tactic is to build up until you get (in a perfect world) 199 points, and then try to build the biggest most complex circuit you can, using as much crosses and T-sections as you can get.

“Timed” is limited to ten minutes. A bar will appear on the right side of the screen and will shrink slowly to show you the time remaining. I couldn’t find any tactic that is failsafe in that mode. It really depends on what kind of tiles you get.

Each of the game mode has a separate Highscore, which can be seen scrolling in the back of the main menu. use the trackball to change the opacity, speed and direction of the highscore display.