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blasterpoard

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A member registered Mar 08, 2022 · View creator page →

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There are already solutions for most fo the difficult puzzles somewhere in the comments (even though I remade "go home", the trick is still the same), and they're both optional.

For "Go home", one of the previous puzzles has shown you a setup to force the character to visit a square where you can't place a button.

"Full circle" is really more about execution than a specific trick, and there are many solutions, but pushing a box onto the goal and making it immovable from all directions for a time with three walls and one box is a part of them all. After that, it's mostly a matter of adjusting the puzzle until you find a way to remove all the shortcuts.

My only complaints are that I'm not sure that it really fits the theme, and sometimes it is possible to get shot through the yellow walls; otherwise, I found it to be one of the more enjoyable games in the jam.

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Sadly, I wasn't able to understand how exactly am I earning money, which is a problem when it's the goal of the game. Also, it appears the shop is a bit broken (often price shown != money spent)

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A fun short game, but it has a couple of shortcomings that made me temporarily feel like it isn't working properly.

 - the mouse no longer controls the camera after alt-tabbing or pressing esc to leave fullscreen; this can be fixed by entering the menu with esc -> clicking the 'X' button (might just be my browser, you never know with this kind of a bug)

 - without any text, it is sometimes unclear what are the UI buttons going to do; e.g. I wasn't sure whether the aforementioned 'X' is going to close the game (might be useful when not playing fullscreen not in the browser), or close the menu; the same goes for the 'charges' of changing the player's size - by the time you can't change your size, the indicator of the number of charges is gone (maybe making it black on when used, and then making it flash or playing a sound effect or something when the player tries to resize themselves would make it more obvious that the resizing has a limited number of charges)

 - the second puzzle containing a box is a bit janky; there are only a couple of frames to press E to interact with the button during a jump, and the timing is hard to get right (browser input delay?), I wasn't sure whether I should try jumping and pressing the button again or my solution was wrong; also, in this puzzle it is possible to get stuck under the box by walking under it when 'medium-sized', costing one resizing charge and therefore requiring a retry.

 Overall, I still liked it and I'm going to rate it quite highly in the jam despite these nitpicks, which are expected with such a short development time; I'm just worried that some of these might make the voters think the game is broken, while it is in fact very much beatable.

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https://imgur.com/a/Yd58BLo it's a much more difficult version of "Highway construction" ... and letting the player place the unused items might have been a bit evil from me

I don't see any technical problem with this; quick math tells me that a level code would need to be up to 50 characters long (+ another 50-70 to be able to verify that a level shared using a code is beatable). However, even if I decide to do this, it won't be anytime soon.

That's absolutely an unintended solution and I'll have to think about whether I want to fix it or not - it might be a good thing that it's solvable without doing this: https://imgur.com/a/BIiTJdu. I thought that you can't avoid building this setup, but apparently I gave the player too many walls to place. The other two are very similar to the intended solutions (the same idea, a bit different execution - as expected).

The only level where I'm really concerned about alternative solutions is 'Couldn't do it without you'. I've already found all the correct puzzles for most of the levels (30/38) - my program can usually brute-force them in a couple of minutes, but the time required grows exponentially with the number of the placeable items (and also a lot, but not quite exponentially, with the size of the puzzle), so sometimes it's not viable without renting a couple of VMs.

Not during the development, because maintaining and testing multiple builds takes time (because of what I'm doing with the game engine, it's not just pressing one button to generate a build) - but yes, if I one day decide abandon this, I will release a linux version. For now, I've heard that multiple people have managed to run the game with both proton and wine.

I thought that the previous stages didn't have any solution where the 'player character' moves up or down, but that's difficult to verify, especially for the more complicated levels. I wouldn't be too surprised if such solutions exist (even though they're unintended), and it's probably cool to find them earlier. I'd still like to see them - mostly for a chance to create alternative versions of the levels (like what I did in 'That solution had a better puzzle' or 'Monochromatic').

Technically all the 'mechanics' exist almost from the very beginning, as there are only boxes, walls, and buttons (for now), so if you find an interaction before I force you to use it is OK; I just wanted to be sure that from some point on, the player is aware of it.

As for your problem with a convoluted path in the last level - this is the simplest solution I could design to force rebuilding an 'elevator' by moving a box upstairs - getting rid of alternative solutions is hard. I hope that showing a line that follows the solution will help with it a bit, but I'm not sure about it (I'm still slowly working on the update...). When the solution is too long or doesn't follow a simple pattern, the game just stops being fun and 30+-step puzzles are already pushing it quite a bit. Anyway, that one is more like an optional puzzle - it doesn't stop you from unlocking other puzzles, and there are no credits or anything hidden behind it.

I posted the solution for "go Home" in one of the previous comments, as it's the level most people couldn't beat; I'm strongly considering somehow making it easier without neutering it - e.g. by focusing only on returning to the starting position and removing the rest of the level, or by adding more 'tutorial' levels before it.

Thanks for the feedback (it's hard to balance the game without it), and for sticking with the game for so long. If I can ask a question - did you spend a lot of time only on the optional levels, or also on the ones that are required to progress? I'm aware that I'll have to change some of the levels and also the the level progression, so knowing whether there are any levels that are intended to not be too difficult, but are, would be helpful.

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You're not alone, it's the first really difficult level in the game, despite using only the basic mechanics (which is why it's relatively early in the game). Anyway, the intended solution puzzle is here (spoiler): https://imgur.com/a/FiXOIMC (it's probably the only solution, if I don't count swapping the colors or putting something in the 2 empty squares).

I did consider making it easier, but I want the game to have a couple of really difficult puzzles, which is why I made this level optional instead.

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Could you please let me know which puzzle made you feel like you didn't understand the rules? I tried to introduce every mechanic/interaction with a very small puzzle to make sure that it's hard to get it wrong, but I might have missed something.

About the line showing the solution - yes, this is coming probably sometime in late January, along with some other updates due to the feedback that I've received. I didn't include it in the first public build because keeping the line readable in puzzles where you can visit one square 5+ times while not obscuring the puzzle itself is not trivial.

Unlikely.

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Thanks for the feedback! Originally, the right click worked just like you said, but then I couldn't both display the preview of the object that can be placed by left-clicking, and highlight the object that can be deleted by right-clicking (or at least, it was a mess when placing a wall, and I thought it could be misunderstood). I want the player to be sure about what will happen whey they click on the puzzle. However, now that I think about it, I could make it an option in the UI settings (same as hiding the controls hints) that the player can enable once they're used to what do the buttons do, and don't need a highlight for deletion.

One of my testers managed to run it on linux with wine; sadly building the engine for linux doesn't work on windows for me (scons tries to run commands longer than the windows command line's limit), and I need to do it in order to include my custom C++ puzzle-solving code.

Building it in a VM, or clearing enough space on my PC to dual-boot is somewhere deep down on my to-do list (but once I'm happy with the state of the game, there will definitely be a linux build!).

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That level requires building a puzzle in a very specific way, and if puzzles were sorted by difficulty it would definitely be later in the game (instead, I usually put these optional levels in as soon as all the interactions needed to solve them are introduced). I can only advise you that one of the previous optional puzzles, "Backtracking revisited", was intended to show you a way to force 'the guy' to go to a square that doesn't contain a button.