Gears Frustration

It's happening for me, too. I'll look into it.

In the meantime, take comfort in the fact that it ::is:: showing up on your profile page, right?

Happy gaming!

- Joe
PTI's Flash Developer

I'm taking comfort in that and the fact that, full of delicious food, I can play these wonderful games at all and whine to ya all if I encounter any little glitch.

You guys are the best...thanks!

Little frustration here, once I got the hang of it! Fantastic puzzle Joe!!! :D Can't wait for next week's gears!

Any tips for us who aren't getting it? I'm giving it 10 more min, then gotta get to bed!

The stacking of the gears is essential to gear speed, and each additional adjacent gear will change the resulting direction. Good luck!

Thanks, I kinda got that far already, guess I just haven't stumbled upon the right combo yet. Where's a nice easy jigsaw puzzle right about now? lol

Some are more straight forward than others. I think I just got lucky on a couple of them, finding the right combination. I like the extra challenge to the web-puzzles. :) It's "gearing" us up for this weekend's puzzles! haha :P

Hello,

I am having troubles even getting to the gears game. Every time I try to click on today's web game box, I am taken back to the home page. Help.

It works if you go through the "this week" link.

Thank you so much!! Now I can start my day off right :-)

I am also not recieveing the achievement for week 2 easy..
thank you for looking into it :)
Keep up the good work Joe!

My game has a temper-tantrum every once in a while... I'll have a few going correctly, then all of a sudden the middle gear starts spinning really fast and all the goal gears start flickering between "too fast" and "too slow." Or, in a recent twist, all my goal gears suddenly changed the direction they needed to go in. Strange.

I have another gears issue! I have two light grey gears, one stacked with a darker grey gear. However, both show as stacked with the "unstack" option. When I click on the one that isn't stacked to move it, the stack changes to that gear! Whichever one I click on is stacked for no reason.
Now, if I move the gear I don't want stacked into position on the final gear (since I've moved it, it's stacked) and then click on the other gear (transferring the stack) and move it so it isn't touching the other grey gear, the other grey gear starts turning the final gear even though it's in no way linked to the power source!

I have a screenshot if you want. Kind of a cool glitch. BTW, Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3.

Shilfiell - I had the same thing! My gears wouldn't unstack, even when I reset the game.

is there any difference b/w the light and dark grey...I have been tryin on and off all morning and I cannot get my gears on the right side of the week 2 medium puzzle to turn?

HELP!

All my Gears issues (except the front page portal) were cured on my MacBook running OSX 10.5.8 and Safari 4.0.3 :)

Now I can just stew over my Scavenger Hunt Points! :D

I just wanted to let you all know... I THOUGHT I was not receiving the achievement... because it did not tell me I did... but the points are on my Achievement list (even thought the puzzle is not registering green)
thanks Joe

mattandcassie - there is a difference between the light and dark gray. Not all colors connect with all other colors, and only different colors stack.

We're having gear problems on safari and firefox. We were very close to solving the hard week 2, when all of a sudden one of our compound gears disappeared!!!
Getting close to 8:00 pm, and very frustrated!

Hello all!

Thanks for hanging in there on this one! We held off publishing the Gears last week because it was far buggier then than it is now - and that's saying something. :-P

The boxes linking off the Online Games section of the Main page (with the paper sculptures) to the Gears page should be fixed now. I'm still working on the other issues you've discussed - and should roll them out sometime Saturday - certainly before next Friday comes around.

I have two things I'd like to bring up here from other threads:

1. If the gears game is acting sluggish on your computer, try Right-Clicking (PC) or Control-Clicking (Mac) anywhere inside the Gears game window and adjusting the Quality setting on the menu that comes up. It may not look as pretty, but it should behave a lot smoother!

2. Rochrach suggested a couple useful features. I plan on adding buttons that will increment / decrement the selected gear one tooth at a time. This will help you concentrate more on solving the puzzle at hand, and less at throwing darts at my face for designing such a deviously clunky gear-sizing interface. :-D

I appreciate the feedback, apologize for the frustration, and hope to have this game running like clockwork in no time!

Happy Gaming!

- Joe
PTI's Flash Developer

THANKS JOE AND KUDOS, You ARE devilishly clever and this IS a really complicated thing, and yes, my dartboard of you is getting pockmarked, lol, BUT it IS fun!

Hello again!

What'd I tell you? You knew I'd fix it!

If you check out the title page on the Gears game, and see "Version 9.26.3:07p" then things should be fixed for you. If not, you'll have to clear your browser cache first!

Changes with this version:

- Achievements should be fixed, and display correctly.

- Reset button fully unstacks gears.

- Stacking multiple light-greys on one dark-grey bug fixed.

- When you select a gear (it will have a light blue glow), you can now resize it a tooth at a time by clicking the buttons that appear down next to the reset button. Please note, though, that if your change causes the gear to expand into other gears it might treat that as an invalid placement and undo your change. Also, shrinking the gear might disengage your linkage and you might need to reposition other gears to get the whole train moving again.

Those plus / minus buttons were such a good idea! Why didn't I think of them? You can all thank Rochrach for the suggestion! Having this precise control over gear sizes should make the Too Fast / Too Slow dance a little easier to get right ... which just means I'll have to make the puzzles that much more intricate to compensate. Mua hahahahaha!

Happy to help!

- Joe
PTI's Flash Developer

Oh good, that should make things a lot less frustrating next week!

Good challenging puzzles. I had to give up on the intermediate and advanced puzzles; I wish the instructions were a little clearer. I spend 30 agonizing minutes moving gears a fraction at a time to try and get them to turn. Only after reading the forums did I realize that some gears don't turn others.

Thanks for adding the + and - buttons. Another thing that might be helpful is the ability to use the arrow keys to "nudge" a gear in a direction one pixel at a time. Sometimes it's hard to position the gear accurately enough using the mouse.

Kudos Joe, the gears are running great. From someone who got to play the week 1s before they were pulled, you have done a phenomenal job on debugging this game.

Another suggestion - the game this past week didn't seem to save the game state, so I had to send myself screen shots whenever I needed to switch computers (happens a few times a day). I'd love to see the game save my progress, especially since I saw that handy "reset" button for use if needed!

But did I mention I love this game? :)