itch.io

This is really scratching that detective itch (the post-it board is a great mechanic) and I'd love to be despatched to various apartments to solve all sorts of mysteries.

My only issue is that I'm not really sure how to advance past the next bit in the absence of some sort of feedback. I feel like I have enough information to place everyone at their events, figure out what happened to the competitors at event one, and make some inferences about two and three. Will the game advance once I've got everything in the right place?

That was cool! Thoughtfully designed, deceptively complex old school block-pushing with a nice difficulty curve.

I got there in the end, but only when my brain had fully embraced the wrongthink.

All hail the David Lynch of Puzzlescript :)

Quickly and delightfully went from SML golf to FML golf, but I holed out in the end ⛳️

Up to the orange squares, I thought the precision was hard-but-fair. There's a surprising amount of subtlety in the controls and I was eventually able to make my ascent largely repeatable. With that said, I do think you should offer a way to survey the pachinko-style drop that precedes accessing the entrance to chapter 4, otherwise the randomness of your first interaction with it just feels a bit unfair.

Once I got to the orange squares, I just found it impossible to get the timings repeatable. To the point that I'm wondering if the precision required is either outside of my physical abilities or outside the technical limits of puzzlescript on OSX Chrome. I ended up screencapturing that section with my inputs displayed on screen and hit the first tricky part once in 8 or so attempts. Looking at the inputs frame by frame, I can't really see what was different about the time that worked.

https://file.io/3m08wrJGkqQm

All that said, I thought this was v cool and was technically impressive :)

Instant puzzlescript classic! So many things to love — the ingenuity, the twists, the puzzle design, the accumulating mechanics, the fact the crowd gets excited when you produce some iconic sporting moment — but the thing that delighted me the most was that I had to throw puzzlescript target-looking things.

100% would participate in this ancient sport again 🥏𐃆🏌️

To clarify the scope of the puzzle: the pink block has to remain on the left and the blue block on the right, and it can't ever enter the 1-square wide tunnel or you will get trapped. The problem you're really trying to solve is how to move the block down once you've got it above its target.

If you weren't hologram-proof on that level, what would you do solve it?

Is there anyway to achieve the equivalent of the above using what you've got? 

Last proper level was 🔥

This is v cool and I'm looking forward to working my through the whole game. One thing I did find myself yearning for so far though is that Super-Meatboy-style instant restart — the gameplay is very fast-paced and when you're going for a flawless run, you want to get into that flowy  state where you die, restart and go again with no delay. Perhaps there's a design decision I'm overlooking, but I feel that the hold-to-restart and the level-start countdown both work against that and make the game feel more stop-start than it could do.

Ah -- just a joke about the delightful ubiquity of that one level from David Skinner's microban level set. It's like 'The Lick' in Jazz music and crops up all over the place in sokoban games. Which I think is testament to its design. I just thought it was cool that all of the novel mechanics built that level within the larger level.

Hello darkness my old friend
Skinner's come for me again
Because this level's so small seeming
yet its boxes defy all my scheming
And the movement that can solve it's still a strain
Always in vain, that's just Microban One

Love it — really inventive and some lovely puzzles towards the end :)

There is a slightly delirious pleasure in battering Skinner's little masterpieces into submission with their very own walls :)

That was great fun! Lotsa cool pushing and pulling mechanics and some really interesting puzzles to explore all the interactions.

Hope you keep making puzzles :)

That was intense towards the end! I assume my role as Tetrarch, having assembled the seven tetromino shapes, is to snap my fingers to make the lines disappear in regular tetris.

Like every great Knaller, my attempts to produce difficult minesweeper levels end only in tears 💣

Wonderful puzzles! From the new design, I'm now really curious how people were cheating the old level 7, as I definitely tried to make that shortcut work and couldn't figure it out!

I'm on my second loop and I seem to be stuck. There are no battles left to fight (I've cleared 120 of them) and no sense of when the *spoilery* event starting the third loop will happen..

EDIT: Okay, I think the underlying progression math might be going wrong somewhere. The boss showed up at 15,000C since last encounter, by which time I was at 37 grid units, 48M population, 184T military power and had won every battle. And I destroyed it in about 10 seconds. I had only purchased a single galactic secret.

The objective is to get stuff off the brown rectangle that represents your bed (box? catmat? designated sleeping zone?) so that you can comfortably sit within it.  As is common with all members of the cat family, pressing X will cause the cat to change which paw has the claws out.

In the end it was the final hurdle of level 4 that gave me the most amount of bother — hadn't quite realised the extent to which claw-pawed wool manipulation is taxing work!

I really like this subgenre of sokoban that takes a simple physical world interaction and transforms it into delightfully cumbersome puzzles (cumberban?) 

My push-pull brings all the ban to the sōko, and they're like it's better than ours, alright we'll pull a box of jars, er wait a minute.. good god.. what new purgatory is this? how can it be even harder than when we can only push them?

10/10

While I appreciate the user-friendly option of just starting the level over when I accidentally cause Gerald to fall down a hole (that may or may not also be a toilet), I really think that the game ought to admonish me on Gerald's behalf.

Otherwise: 10/10 (would happily provide Gerald gainful employment)

Loved this from start to finish and the last level was really something :)

At one point I started to wonder if there was going to be some Pipe Push Paradise type shenanigans going on with rotating my little waxy constructions (Candle Combustion Catechisms?)

Very cool! I love mechanic-discovery puzzlers and this one was a lot of fun. I'm a little sceptical of the procgen approach in general, but the combination of artisanal puzzles and a single procedural room seems like an interesting approach. I slightly wish the top room had its own arc & ending, whether upping the size or complexity of rooms, but I assume you're working against some of the limitations of the puzzlescript engine.

I was a bit surprised by the lack of undo/restart, though I'm guessing the pushing mechanics mean you can't failstate yourself? Though looking at the presentation you gave, I might actually have been doing some high-stakes puzzle-solving :)

hint: The rule for the red plus squares isn't being met

This is very cool! I think softlocks are a slightly inevitable consequence of this sort of design, but it's interesting to look at how other games with meta-puzzles — A Monster's Expedition, for example — cater for it. I think allowing players to reset a room (and designing the puzzles to account for that) ends up being a player-friendly way of dealing with the problem. It can increase the potential for shenanigans, but better to deal with those than to subject players to massive undo-chains!

(speaking of which: I'd consider allowing a more rapid, gently accelerating undo if the player holds Z. There were a few occasions where I had to backtrack a lot and the single tap Z was a bit annoying)

Anyway, those are little gripes and the main thing is that the individual puzzles, and broader puzzle, were very fun to figure out :)

lol! So obvious in retrospect.. cool game!

I'm pretty stuck on this level — is there a mechanic I'm missing with the small box in the bottom left?

As far as I can work out, I need to be able to reset the red stopper in the bottom right in order to exit the level. The assumptions I'm making are:

• The red, blue and green blocks can only move left and right, not vertically
• Once I'm round the corner, next to the exit, there's nowhere I can move the red blocks. 
• The block in the bottom left can move anywhere in the bottom half of the level, but it can't go down a 1x1 corridor, which means it can't get into the top part between the red and blue blocks, and it can only block the right-angled corridor in the bottom right.

Confused!

Those false walls created one of the great indignities — the dawning realisation that I had actually reconstructed David Skinner's Microban 1 from a totally different starting level, and only on seeing that did I figure out the final manoeuvre to defeat it.

I think the current last level might have an unintended solution.. Mostly based on how quickly I solved it compared to the previous ones :)

My end result was:

sbbbs
bbbbb
bbbbb
sbbbs

And I didn't have to do a lot of conceptually-challenging silver block manoeuvring to get there

Really liked the addition of the final mechanic, as the enforced finishing position adds real complexity to the levels. (Reminds me of that one level in Stephen's Sausage Roll which seems weirdly easy until you realise that it's almost comically difficult to solve it and reach the exit tile)

Why do I need to right click and left click to shoot? It makes the game unplayable on a trackpad..

Glad I came back to this — it's excellent. Top left took me a while but I finally cracked it!!

I think I got to the end (with the help of an elaborate diagram)? Is there a non-purgatory ending?

Finally finished this one! The last series of manoeuvres were extremely satisfying to puzzle out :)

Really fun — and very well designed.  I love games that pull off this sort of thing :)

I somehow managed to miss a subtle but vital mechanic in my first attempts. But when I came back this morning, it finally clicked! It's a very satisfying puzzle and impressively designed so that the simultaneous movement feeds into the puzzle as well as complicating it :)

Excellent stuff -- the end was really fun to figure out :)

The middle section took longest to deduce, but eventually we made our escape! Cool game :)

The source code is included in the html scripts and there doesn't seem to be anything in terms of win conditions, plus there's no player position on the level map:

https://pastebin.com/CmtiWzrG

Does that mean the plot might thicken? Awaiting new logs :/