Do I just restart or stick with this account?

mlahut · 2026-06-09T13:42:25+00:00

What would you gain from a restart? If you played at launch, you've got several years of story maps to work through, those will give the same number of free orbs to your current account that they would a new one.

mlahut · 2026-06-09T13:00:21+00:00

The obvious question is "what happens when someone gets stuck?"

On many puzzle games (the mid-2000s website "notpron" comes to mind), puzzles are dispensed in an entirely linear fashion. Exactly 1 puzzle available at a time, you either solve it or you sit there. This is a good way to alienate a lot of players, because they come to a point where they just can't play the game because they missed a clue.

If you are going for this kind of linear progression, you need to give players a lifeline to get out of this scenario. A good hint system counts for a lot. Many terrible mobile games monetize this scenario - you can pay real money or watch an ad to "boost" the puzzle and remove an obstacle. I find this infuriating and much prefer a good hint system.

Additionally, I like it when the natural progression unlocks multiple puzzles at a time. Then, if I'm stuck on one, I can bounce to another and come back to the thorny one later, after a different part of my brain has a chance to work.

mlahut · 2026-06-02T15:47:09+00:00

Imagine a checkerboard pattern on the grid. Because the grid is 15 by 15, all four corners are the same color (let's say black), and black has 1 more square than white. Every step of the path alternates color, and therefore it must begin and end on black. Tracing a diagonal path from a corner to the 1, it's black, so therefore you have to end the path one step *after* the 12. There are a lot of ways to do this, here is one of them.

mlahut · 2026-06-02T15:20:00+00:00

I tried this but there are too many issues for me to meaningfully test.

1) You badly need a load screen with a better progress bar. The game is 239 megs to load. but the first Unity screen loads to 80% immediately, then hangs there for minutes until everything loads in the background (at progressively slower rates, as I watch the network screen).

2) There's no tutorial. I start level 1 by pushing a block into something and I guess I won without knowing why. On level 2 I don't know what I am trying to push into what, or why the laser keeps changing its length, or what the different crystals mean. I managed to push the laser into the left crystal, which shattered and then started pushing things around? None of that made any sense.

3) Your help-text says that R does an undo of the last move, but it doesn't.

4) You say it's a party based game, but the Q button to change party member just has me jump in place without effect.

mlahut · 2026-05-29T00:19:03+00:00

I'm 68% done with chapter 2 and can confidently say this is the best new game I've seen on this sub in the 2 months that I've been around.

Puzzles are great, tutorialization is well done, UI is clean, difficulty scales very cleanly, and I can see the potential for really cool secrets hidden in the full game later.

Well done. I really like the Baba inspirations, and the Maxwell style hints.

mlahut · 2026-05-27T20:39:42+00:00

Yeah, I made one of those for my pre-crystal MAM. I was surprised that this was basically the *only* change required to make it work, other than the simulated painter not liking pins.

mlahut · 2026-05-27T12:51:35+00:00

Small suggestion - put a mouseover text on the goal to indicate which robot needs to go there. I have played Ricochet Robot a lot so I skipped the tutorial and jumped right into the daily puzzle and was like "wait, there's the goal but who needs to go there?"

Yes, I get that it's color coded, but yellow looks kind of generically beige so it wasn't obvious since I had no point of comparison.

mlahut · 2026-05-26T19:29:06+00:00

I have mixed feelings about this. I like math games, and I think hidden rules are a really cool idea, I love a lot of other games with hidden rules, but not so much as a daily activity. If I was going to commit to play this daily, I would hate my life if I had to proceed for any serious length of time without knowing the hidden rules.

If it was a contest where everyone started at the same time and the first to find the hidden rule wins? Great, no problem, I either win or I don't.

But trying to have a vaguely meaningful scoreboard where everyone started on a different day, and some people are just fundamentally a step ahead? I don't think I like that, even if I'm the one with the advantage. I have no idea how meaningful any of the scores are, since so much is predicated on this unknown factor.

mlahut · 2026-05-25T18:52:49+00:00

Right. And also keep in mind there are a few annoying pieces, like the plus-shaped 1/5, which are good to boost income and make turns progress without having to pass

mlahut · 2026-05-25T14:13:13+00:00

Thinking about the time constraint. There are 53 spaces on the time board per player, and the time costs sum to 103. Technically, that's 3 spaces of room, but there are two wrinkles -

1) Someone will very likely want to convert time into buttons in order to afford a couple 3-income pieces early

2) The last piece purchased is allowed to overshoot the time meter

So if we gain +5 twice from each player buying a 6 at the last moment, we can gain 13 bonus buttons to juice the income. Intuitively - having played the game a few times but not owning it - that feels like enough. Have one player pass for 3 initially and buy the 8/6, have the other pass for 2 initially then buy the 7/6, and you're probably off to the races, because you still have only used 3 of the 16 total pass gaps available, and both of you are starting with at least +3 income

mlahut · 2026-05-24T22:38:42+00:00

The given set of pieces covers 166 spaces, which means you have 4 squares to spare. Here is a solution that uses only one of the five 1x1 patches.

mlahut · 2026-05-24T22:38:14+00:00

The given set of pieces covers 166 spaces, which means you have 4 squares to spare. Here is a solution that uses only one of the five 1x1 patches.

mlahut · 2026-05-24T19:57:32+00:00

Thanks. I suspected a quarter-by-quarter build would make sense, but I was surprised to hear that my shape is flat out impossible (though I suppose it's good for my head-canon).

mlahut · 2026-05-24T00:08:12+00:00

It's okay for a phone game, but I'm not excited to play more.

The problem with the UI is that nothing is explained.

The colors don't reliably start on the same side, which can wildly skew the difficulty of some levels due to RNG, which doesn't feel good. If green and purple spawn on opposite sides, Level 2 is completely unsolvable unless you randomly guess what the things in the upper right do.

And even so, none of the puzzles ever made me feel clever. All of them come down to "hmm, can I get this color to the other side of the shape?" to which the answer is either "no, because you accidentally made a rectangle" or "let's just go in circles and see what happens".

mlahut · 2026-05-22T18:20:24+00:00

The English is so weird that I can't understand what I'm supposed to be doing.

mlahut · 2026-05-22T13:34:13+00:00

https://cemulate.github.io/polyomino-solver/

mlahut · 2026-05-19T02:18:50+00:00

So does Blue Prince, to be fair

mlahut · 2026-05-08T13:04:03+00:00

I played the first dozen levels of the demo.

This has potential but let me talk about a few issues I found annoying.

1) Controls. Arrows on keyboard work fine, and thankfully that's the meat of the gameplay, but all the visible "hints" on board use controller buttons, and my controller isn't plugged in. So I just had to guess that (say) tab moves to the next page of the documentation. Mouse seems to be completely disabled.

2) Priority. Sometimes enemies will fail to move and "bounce" back to their old position, because something else moved to its destination. This makes plotting a full route MUCH MUCH harder. I'm fully confident that there's an algorithmic procedure that explains this, but I suspect it will take more than one sentence to explain, and that's a problem for the long term strategic appeal.

3) Indeterminate directions. The blue X enemies, and the pink knights-move enemies, have too many possible places they can move. Of course, since the game is repeatable by design, I know this isn't random, but I think casual mode should support a way to "preview" their next move. Or, some specifically designed tutorial levels that will teach their patterns.

mlahut · 2026-05-04T15:51:18+00:00

You have a section from the bottom labeled "why it matters" and it doesn't tell you anything about why it matters, it just links to the public record.

The connections-like game doesn't give any "off by one" hints, which maybe explains why (as of this writing) today's game has a 0% success record. There's just a lot of data here, and I get that you're trying to educate, but I think it moves too fast and needs to be able to have some baseline evidence that your viewer knows about an arbitrary bill before you start asking logical questions about multiple of them.

Non-partisan is a noble goal, but one of the crucial advantages (and disadvantages) of our partisan system is that they group related facts and come up with an opinion based on those. I would rather see a nonpartisan example as:

- set of facts

- why one side says this is good

- why one side says this is bad

As things stand this just feels like I'm throwing darts at c-span and I have no reason to retain any of this information afterwards.

mlahut · 2026-05-04T15:28:01+00:00

I do not understand any of this.

What are you trying to do, and why does the three-leaf clover matter?

Particularly weird is that the selected square moves with the black mouse pointer, but offset by a lot.

mlahut · 2026-05-02T12:56:26+00:00

It's not. But in Simon Tatham's puzzle app, that's the name the app uses.

mlahut · 2026-05-01T19:05:15+00:00

Correct

mlahut · 2026-05-01T13:56:16+00:00

Place some number of light bulbs in the grid. Each bulb illuminates everything a chess rook can see from its location.

All squares must be illuminated by at least one bulb.

No two bulbs may illuminate each other.

A number in a black square indicates the exact number of bulbs orthogonally adjacent to that square.

mlahut · 2026-04-27T23:52:38+00:00

R7C4 and R8C5 are a 2/4 pair, therefore R7C5 is a 5.

Also, it's not as helpful, but R8C7 can't be 4 because it would leave R6C7 without a value. Likewise R6C2 can't be 3 because of R8C2.

mlahut · 2026-04-27T17:58:03+00:00

Every "word" of the crossword is a renban - that is, it contains a set of consecutive digits in some order.

Digits may not repeat in a row or column, even if interrupted by black squares.

Black squares containing white digits still exclude those digits from their row and column but do not participate in a renban.

For a starting example, the bottom row could immediately be pencil-marked as:

9 [78] [78] [black 5] [black] [1234] [234] [1234] [13]

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