i can’t do 10 or 12.
i don’t know what the sign on the last lock of 10 means
i find it very hard to reason about the movable teleporter blocks. i had developed the understanding that a red face meant nothing could pass thru from that direction. 12 disabused me of that notion, so it was good in that way.
i understood what that block means at a later level but knowing that just makes the puzzle even more incomprehensible. at first i thought all my problems where in the southwest corner, but now they are up in the north too and i can’t figure out either 
discovering i’m actually terrible at soukoban
Yeah, I def. need a level before 10 to explain what that symbol means. If you want it spoiled, it’s a door that opens when all other doors in a room are open.
Yeah, this was true for me when I was first designing the puzzles too. There are also a lot of layers of thought you have to operate on. Like, what are you trying to accomplish at a high level (e.g. what do the teleporters theoretically let you do that you can’t do without them?), and do the low-level specifics allow you to do that or not?
Specifically Sokoban where the available space around you can change (and is obfuscated), so I wouldn’t beat yourself up too much for that.
Okay I played through a bit of this earlier today, although I neglected to do much of mental note taking along the way.
It seems to have more bits of animation here and there compared to what I recall from the earlier version, it’s nice and makes it feel a bit more alive.
I thought stages 4 and 5 did a good job of introducing the lessons they were meant to, well enough put together that I put “4!, 5!” on my little daily calendar I have next to my keyboard.
I forget exactly how the undoing and restarting things were handled before, but they seemed fine here.
…The purpose of feedback is to be both honest and hope that being honest is helpful. I don’t know if stage 10 is just a big difficulty spike or if it is just a case where my brain is simply failing to parse something that should be obvious but I put a bunch of time into it, stopped to actually break it down element by element, basically I put the work into it and felt like I got no closer to any sort of solution. If this was a game I was playing on my own that I happened to stumble upon or what have you I would say with… let’s say 75-80% certainty that I’d go “screw this” and be done with it. Again this could just be a me thing, I’ve played enough puzzle games where my brain somehow breezes through a puzzle that trips most up while getting hung up on ones other would consider to be easy to know it is always a possibility (especially when it is only puzzle ten out of forty or so).
I actually took screenshots of my process with stage 10, so while you probably know it inside and out on the off chance an outside perspective helps (if not skip)…
This seems to be the inevitable opening move based on my current understanding of how the game works, if there is a way to move those two teleporter squares from beyond I haven’t been able to figure it out.
Looking at that top section my belief is that I can only move that upper teleporter block once, either left or right; once that is done so it isn’t possible to be able to push it left or right again and I haven’t stumbled upon any way to pull them. This suggests to me that the first shape sent up there needs to be the heart in order to clear out that central space. If I send a different shape there like the circle it seems to block me being able to step through the teleporter after it, and I have not found a way to push a teleporter on the side that teleports so I can’t move it down a row. Hence it seems to be that the heart goes through first, then either other shape can be next and go where the heart block previously was. Afterwards I move the teleporter left or right so that last shape is lined up with the matching block, which should allow me to take care of all three of them.
There is no real way I can see to get to the heart to the teleporter without moving it. Moving it down would seem to be the only valid move if this is true as if I move it to the right it is against the edge. If this is true then the only valid next move would be to push it and the circle left one square. At this point I would note the two restrictions I see in place that limit my options a good deal. The yellow diamond cannot be moved to the right as that would get it stuck in that lower corner, and while that would allow me to push the teleporter from behind into it that leaves me with no way to follow after it as that would mean the active side is against the edge itself (I really thought I had it solved before this point). That suggests that the diamond’s movement is restricted to those two central lower squares.
Also as noted before as far as I can determine at this point I cannot figure out a way to push a teleporter back on its active side, which means that I cannot move the teleporter to the right until the diamond is accounted for. At this point it feels like the diamond can only be teleported while it is on the square pictured above while the teleporter is on the square to its immediate left, although I am not sure that is a 100% fact. Once the teleporter goes to that bottom row it will be stuck there, which I think means that until the diamond is addressed the teleporter has only two-three moves of freedom: where it is, one block down and eventually that bottom row one.
This is where I keep ending up moving after this which on the surface seems like the only valid one but where I worry the error in my judgement may be. This allows me to get the heart to its matching block without much difficulty and would appear to leave me some options with how to deal with the other two shapes, but…
If I then try to move the circle out from behind while it gives me full freedom to move it where desired I can’t see a way to then use the diamond in any useful way.
If I instead move the yellow diamond back to its original location, either next move I have seems ruinous. If I move yellow another spot to the right I am done, but if I move blue and teleporter up the teleporter is than stuck. So clearly this is all wrong as well.
Which suggests heavily this is wrong as I feared. The issue is this seemed like the most promising course as all the others were problematic.
The other move I had here was to move the teleporter down a spot and push the circle and heart through, but that seems to get the circle stuck in the left corner in the area to the right which seems like a dead end.
After a while of this I got frustrated, shut the window and moved onto something else. Looking at these images and trying to piece things together I am pondering if perhaps the job is simply to move the circle over to the right area, move the teleporter and then move the circle back to the bottom area in a more beneficial position but that appears to have some issues as well (would require using up that falling square, red would likely end up directly above yellow with blue in the spot red initially was). Regardless I used up the mental energy I had to spare on this for the day so maybe I’ll go poke around more tomorrow).
I support the ability to skip puzzles for the benefit of others, I will almost never use it especially for early “game is still trying to teach you” ones. What this mean is there is a solid possibility I won’t be able to offer any thoughts on later puzzles if I don’t figure this one out within a half hour or so whenever I get around to it, so if that happens sorry about that.
yeah – as others have noted above (and many more through a discord i shared it on) level 10 is uniquely difficult. other players were getting to level 20+ without solving it. through your walkthrough (and a video of someone recording their play session) i do think i know why it’s so difficult.
don’t read this if you don’t want most of a solution, but the line of thinking most people get stuck in assumes that all reordering has to happen in the bottom left area, but they fail to consider there’s slightly more space than that. i also think that since the fatal mistake can happen so early in the puzzle, people follow dead-end lines for quite a while without making progress. i’m almost certain i would make these mistakes too if i hadn’t made this puzzle. the sequence of moves is too strict, and it’s hard to visualize since the areas are broken up. it also doesn’t help that i introduce a new door here and new mechanic (pushing teleporters), so people can easily assume they’re just missing something with the mechanics.
i’m def going to make a different level to fill the “intro to pushing teleporters” slot and move this one later or mark it as optional/hard or shave it down a bit – i think i got too excited iterating on it (and i iterated on it pretty late in the level design cycle so i had internalized a lot by this point). basically 90% of people thought it was too hard or couldn’t figure it out, or didn’t know what deductions they used to solve and it felt like “trial and error”, and 10% said they liked the puzzle but yes it was tricky.
thanks for your feedback; sorry that i didn’t give you more of a warning for 10!
I was washing up for bed and had an idea.
FWIW that idea was actually wrong but hey, got me close enough!
It’s not a bad puzzle, it’s actually a pretty clever one (I generally like multiple play area puzzles). It’s also I’d wager very misplaced which apparently everyone is agreement on (I tried to not read too much of what anyone else wrote before trying it). I think the error is that while you did a solid job introducing the individual objects and mechanics related to them before this puzzle you didn’t really do the same for some of the sokoban basics that form the game’s structural backbone. I’m and I assume some others are familiar with them but this is a relatively strict test of those in a game that hasn’t really required much in the way of them already, which combined with being stuck at I assume the tail end of the early “teaching” set of puzzles likely contributes to an almost subconscious “blindness” to them with one’s attention being drawn to other potential areas due to the timing and placement of it.
Or to put it in simpler terms: you likely got a ton of “feedback” on it with it placed at #10; if the exact same puzzle was placed at say 20 or 25 it might not have even stuck out at all.
Anyways next time the other levels~
It struck me after the fact that you had to read that giant write-up of my attempt at puzzle 10 where I go through just about the right sequence of realizations only to seemingly end up one step short of the right answer in the very last paragraph, except too tired to actually take said step. That must have been awful >_>
Played through the next several stages, various thoughts:
In the puzzles with multiple sets of teleporters it feels like color coding them or some other method of showing which ones are linked might be a decent thing to look into. It isn’t strictly necessary as one should be able to figure out which is paired with which via quick experimentation but it is kinda funky.
14 was a pretty neat way to teach the player that concept while not having it just be a pushover. 16 was also pretty well crafted, 15 is still neat.
17 is a good puzzle but feels like it might be showing up a step earlier than it perhaps should (it is where I stopped so I can’t say for sure). I say this as it feels like it requires one more “realization” than one would expect at this stage of the game. You had a puzzle or two about using shapes to set up teleporter movement already so perhaps having to realize where you have to switch the shape locations to move both teleporters to the right spots might not be enough on its own, but the various maneuvers required to get the three shapes in the right order in the right spots feels a bit of a leap in terms of more advanced technique compared to what immediately preceded it. I don’t think it needs to be dumbed down as it’s a fine puzzle, but unless it is just the start of a bit of a leap in terms of difficulty my initial impression is that it may benefit from being pushed back just a bit.
Think the framing of this is really cute. I got era of the golden sun for my first and a few others after (including distant stars which nettle got too.
I find the act of trying to find endings pretty mechanical since the answers I chose had some meaning to me, and picking the reverse of all those is easy to remember, but in reversing some of those it’s hard to remember which ways you’ve answered.
Yeah, in my next version Trev’s going to have more suggestions for things to try rounds 2 and onward; he has a lot of room for improvement.
So, context:
LA Craw is a rice and crawfish farming game set in the 80’s in Southern Louisiana. We aren’t going to do any played out vapor wave shit. The game starts in 1979 on one of our collaborator’s birthday.
The player farms Crawfish and Rice in the same set of ponds. In addition, there is a ‘miasma’ which can proliferate in your fields. It is bad for your crops and crawfish but sometimes the miasma surfaces artifacts which you can sell or which give you benefits or penalties.
I’m trying to figure out the parameters of our rice growing model. What this simulation shows is that planting rice throughout february is relatively optimal. The growth model is pretty simple: each plant has an age and a growth. In optimal conditions the growth moves at pace with the age. A rice plant which is 60 days old should have a growth of around 60. For each month and each growth phase there is a different scale factor between elapsed time and growth achieved. Additionally, there is a chance during any month that a rice plant dies. This is much greater in winter. Winter also has very low growth rates.
The model itself uses Mecs so I can re-use the components and systems in the main game engine.
The penultimate testing version of my game is now live for the next few days at the following web address; just click the link, then click “Play In-Browser” to try it out.
Hey I think something is broken? I’m just getting a 404
Yeah, it turns out that hosting expires automatically after a week. The IFDB page for the game will eventually have the ability to play online at some point in September, but for now, the best option is to download this .gblorb file from my Google drive and use any Glulx interpreter to run it. Personally, I use Gargoyle.
Edit: the IFDB page now has a working “play online” link, so interpreters are no longer necessary.
