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.
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
Hypothetically speaking, is a level editor something that might be coming up in the future? Or is the AI currently incapable of functioning in let's say higher dimensions? (Even if it is not multiplayer accesible, maybe the maps could be shared via "seeds" of sorts)
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.
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.
Some levels are very tedious to come up with solutions. I spent hours on some. "go Home" just seems impossible to force the player back to the starting position, considering you cannot place anything on the start position tile, and any button pressed on the way from the intersection to the starting position would be pressed twice making them do nothing, really. This is a very cool game though. 9/10 assuming it is actually possible, lol.
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.
I finished the level later on. It was a lot more simple understanding that it used the mechanic from the previous stage. And it's all right if there are challenging levels in a puzzle game, especially considering it is an option stage.
Regarding your question, i went back to all of the non-optional stages for review, and from what i remember those were fairly straightforward. That being said, i also have seen part of the game before in a youtube video, which might have helped my decision making in those stages.
I will let you know if i find out about something later on in the game, after all i haven't even progressed with the main levels that far, insisting on finishing those optional stages. (fulll circle and self-sabotage seems really difficult too, i like the challenge though)
So i only seem to be stuck on the very last main stage. It seems that the moment the solutions get really long and convoluted, it becomes very difficult to even come up with strategies to start with.
I should also mention that when i got to a level called single use downward elevator, it seemed to be introducing a mechanic, that i have already used in multiple stages before. Maybe i completely missed intentional solutions to previous stages?
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 went through all the main stages and it seems that i only have encountered future introduced mechanics in side missions, that i haven't even completed using those mechanics, meaning those might not even be solutions for those. My bad.
I just finished the final main level, and it was by accident. I was just trying to make the path possible, and it just happened to be the solution to the puzzle. I don't even understand how this is the shortest path or one of the shortest paths.
It is ridiculous how puzzling a game can be with such few mechanics. This game gives off very similar vibes as babaisyou or N Step Steve, maybe with a little less depth reached with only 4 possible objects. It is the sort of game where i really wish i would come up with considering how simple it is. 9.5/10, there is always something to improve.
So i have 37/38 done, lowway blockade being the last not finished. I can send you solutions to the puzzles i have found particularly difficult, if you want to compare solutions, see if anything unintended works, or if those were all expected solutions for those puzzles.
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.
I'm sure especially with this much free space, and considering how long the solution is, there might be other ways to do it.
I experimented with this for a few hours and i only seemed to have come up with this, kinda locking the player out of one color button, forcing the loop around. I could not force the player to push the box into the button in any other way, it seems that with my solution the ai kinda just does it because it is in the way.
I was wondering how complicated it would be to just bruteforce the algorithm to find the possible solutions. Interesting how that one map was an problem to solve. Well it also was one of the most difficult maps in the game, so no wonder i guess.
Just in case i will leave some of the other difficult ones here Again, it is a spoiler and i suggest you try to solve the puzzles yourself, as difficult as they are
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.
Extremely interesting, but frustrating in implementation.
I understand not wanting to overwhelm the player with information, but it feels like I'm missing puzzle solutions because I don't know the rules of the game more often than just not having the right ideas.
I also hae quite a lot of trouble trying to balance thinking of what the AI will actually do in response to my layouts with trying to remember what they're supposed to do, in the youtube video that I learned about this game from there was an arrow on the floor showing the intended path which seems to be absent from this build? Seems like it would be extremely useful for not getting headaches.
As the game is, I often feel like I'm brute forcing the puzzles as much as I'm reasoning out solutions and it's not very satisfying, though I suppose that's a pretty accurate feeling when trying to design levels for players.
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.
Fun game, interesting concept to see the intended route and try to figure out how to force it rather than trying to just make it as long as possible like most similar games in the genre. One UX request tho: make right click remove whatever is under the mouse currently without removing the selection. So if you would want to replace blue block with a pushable block you can just have the pushable block selected and right click then left click the spot with the block. Other than that it controls pretty nicely already.
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.
Anybody got it running on linux? I tried importing it to steam and run it with proton (both proton 8.0 and experimental). Sadly it crashes after showing the godot-logo. Btw. Godot supports linux natively so a linux-build would of alread-solved would be nice.
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!).
Game runs fine via Wine and Proton 8.0/experimental on Fedora 38 (KDE spin), using Nvidia proprietary driver (GPU RTX A2000, version 545.29.06) and running via Xorg (I haven't tried Wayland).
This could be a driver issue. Plus game is running on Godot 4, which uses Vulkan by default and many older GPU don't have Vulcan support.
I can think of 2 possible solutions:
Run game with command line argument --rendering-driver opengl3 . It forces Godot to use OpenGL3 renderer (I used it on Win 10 on a computer with an old GPU and it works). If you're launching the game via Steam, just add this argument to the Launch options.
Is the level "go Home" even possible? Every single solution I have made the guy just ends up backtracking onto one of the buttons placed, trying to block him from doing so isn't possible because of the beginning spot not allowing you to place anything on it due to the guy being there, and any solution that can be created the guy refuses to go back to the beginning area. Any time a block is place the guy will just use that block going down as a spot to backtrack on or if the block does block backtracking he will use the spot in front of him instead
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.
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can't do go home and full circle
need hints
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.
i hate it , its way too hard
I'm stuck in lowway blockade, spent a few hours trying but I really couldn't find the solution. Does anyone have the solution?
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
Hypothetically speaking, is a level editor something that might be coming up in the future? Or is the AI currently incapable of functioning in let's say higher dimensions? (Even if it is not multiplayer accesible, maybe the maps could be shared via "seeds" of sorts)
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.
Great game! But could you please make it compatible with linux?
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.
Can confirm for anyone reading that the game seems to run just fine on wine.
Some levels are very tedious to come up with solutions. I spent hours on some. "go Home" just seems impossible to force the player back to the starting position, considering you cannot place anything on the start position tile, and any button pressed on the way from the intersection to the starting position would be pressed twice making them do nothing, really.
This is a very cool game though. 9/10 assuming it is actually possible, lol.
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.
I finished the level later on. It was a lot more simple understanding that it used the mechanic from the previous stage. And it's all right if there are challenging levels in a puzzle game, especially considering it is an option stage.
Regarding your question, i went back to all of the non-optional stages for review, and from what i remember those were fairly straightforward. That being said, i also have seen part of the game before in a youtube video, which might have helped my decision making in those stages.
I will let you know if i find out about something later on in the game, after all i haven't even progressed with the main levels that far, insisting on finishing those optional stages. (fulll circle and self-sabotage seems really difficult too, i like the challenge though)
So i only seem to be stuck on the very last main stage. It seems that the moment the solutions get really long and convoluted, it becomes very difficult to even come up with strategies to start with.
I should also mention that when i got to a level called single use downward elevator, it seemed to be introducing a mechanic, that i have already used in multiple stages before. Maybe i completely missed intentional solutions to previous stages?
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 went through all the main stages and it seems that i only have encountered future introduced mechanics in side missions, that i haven't even completed using those mechanics, meaning those might not even be solutions for those. My bad.
I just finished the final main level, and it was by accident. I was just trying to make the path possible, and it just happened to be the solution to the puzzle. I don't even understand how this is the shortest path or one of the shortest paths.
It is ridiculous how puzzling a game can be with such few mechanics. This game gives off very similar vibes as babaisyou or N Step Steve, maybe with a little less depth reached with only 4 possible objects. It is the sort of game where i really wish i would come up with considering how simple it is. 9.5/10, there is always something to improve.
So i have 37/38 done, lowway blockade being the last not finished. I can send you solutions to the puzzles i have found particularly difficult, if you want to compare solutions, see if anything unintended works, or if those were all expected solutions for those puzzles.
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.
Spoiler warning!!! Try to solve it yourself, the game is cool!
Here is my solution to Couldn't do it without you - https://imgur.com/a/5tnIBrg
I'm sure especially with this much free space, and considering how long the solution is, there might be other ways to do it.
I experimented with this for a few hours and i only seemed to have come up with this, kinda locking the player out of one color button, forcing the loop around. I could not force the player to push the box into the button in any other way, it seems that with my solution the ai kinda just does it because it is in the way.
I was wondering how complicated it would be to just bruteforce the algorithm to find the possible solutions. Interesting how that one map was an problem to solve. Well it also was one of the most difficult maps in the game, so no wonder i guess.
Just in case i will leave some of the other difficult ones here
Again, it is a spoiler and i suggest you try to solve the puzzles yourself, as difficult as they are
https://imgur.com/a/WzpUcFY From all sides
https://imgur.com/a/doRytz0 Full circle
It reminds me of Turbowarp for some reason (that's a Scratch mod)
wait no I just beat the level.
you soukd make a number two because i like creating a puzzle that gave you thesolution and also got stuck at level vally
I’m stuck an level go home anyone have the solution
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
solutionpuzzle 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.
Extremely interesting, but frustrating in implementation.
I understand not wanting to overwhelm the player with information, but it feels like I'm missing puzzle solutions because I don't know the rules of the game more often than just not having the right ideas.
I also hae quite a lot of trouble trying to balance thinking of what the AI will actually do in response to my layouts with trying to remember what they're supposed to do, in the youtube video that I learned about this game from there was an arrow on the floor showing the intended path which seems to be absent from this build? Seems like it would be extremely useful for not getting headaches.
As the game is, I often feel like I'm brute forcing the puzzles as much as I'm reasoning out solutions and it's not very satisfying, though I suppose that's a pretty accurate feeling when trying to design levels for players.
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.
Is there any way you could add WebGL support (play in browser)? Thanks in advance.
Unlikely.
try tho plz, or make it acsessable by crome
Fun game, interesting concept to see the intended route and try to figure out how to force it rather than trying to just make it as long as possible like most similar games in the genre. One UX request tho: make right click remove whatever is under the mouse currently without removing the selection. So if you would want to replace blue block with a pushable block you can just have the pushable block selected and right click then left click the spot with the block. Other than that it controls pretty nicely already.
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.
Anybody got it running on linux? I tried importing it to steam and run it with proton (both proton 8.0 and experimental). Sadly it crashes after showing the godot-logo. Btw. Godot supports linux natively so a linux-build would of alread-solved would be nice.
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!).
Game runs fine via Wine and Proton 8.0/experimental on Fedora 38 (KDE spin), using Nvidia proprietary driver (GPU RTX A2000, version 545.29.06) and running via Xorg (I haven't tried Wayland).
This could be a driver issue. Plus game is running on Godot 4, which uses Vulkan by default and many older GPU don't have Vulcan support.
I can think of 2 possible solutions:
Is the level "go Home" even possible? Every single solution I have made the guy just ends up backtracking onto one of the buttons placed, trying to block him from doing so isn't possible because of the beginning spot not allowing you to place anything on it due to the guy being there, and any solution that can be created the guy refuses to go back to the beginning area. Any time a block is place the guy will just use that block going down as a spot to backtrack on or if the block does block backtracking he will use the spot in front of him instead
It's definitely possible, but it took me a while to solve
would you like to see my solution?
I'm good, mostly just venting out loud. I figured it was possible but after an hour got a bit frustrated. Going to attempt again at a later time.
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.
I managed to get it, was definitely a head scratcher though
Really neat puzzle game and I love the idea of reverse puzzles 😀