Topic: Flight from the Robots | Play the new chapter 2!

[Wiggy]

Yes, chapter 2 is interesting. I like the way in which you MUST look at areas before a hotspot is revealed. I wonder if more developers could use that idea? The puzzles were damned difficult in the nicest way. When you see a puzzle and wonder "Now what is it I'm looking at, and what does any interaction accomplish?" Finally you conclude the desired outcome and take actions to do it. Certainly its "thinking outside the box"! A very good game.

Between this game and "The Will" I wonder if there is some AGSer out there giving lessons on how to make diabolically hard puzzles?

[sthomannch]

Yes, very different puzzles

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I liked that you had to find out what the objective of the game was, but this part was not too difficult

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Getting the different pieces in the right position was a bit more challenging, but I think the rules were clear once you started

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But it took me of course a few attempts to solve the puzzles. Still possible to do it in a not too long time

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It took me longer to get on the trolley, part of it to wait for an empty trolley and then also to fiddle around with the switches, but I eventually got it

All in all very refreshing

[fernewelten]

Very interesting, but a bit short.

Sorry. It took me a lot of time to get all those state machines interplaying correctly. When I find the time, I'll add some content for the locker room, making Ian work to turn up a hazmat suit. That'd also have to explain how Ian can't turn up an ID card in there.

Thanks for the feedback!

[fernewelten]

how to make diabolically hard puzzles?

So far, I've used classic puzzle dependency charts (Grumpy Gamer) to construct the riddle sequences. So I start at the end, e.g., Ego needs to be prevented from passing through a door. What might get him stumped? Let's lock the door with a combination lock and let's put shards in front of the door. What might prevent Ego from simply pulling out the shards? What would make it difficult to get at the combination of the lock? …

I often “look around”, as it were, and let myself be inspired by the specific mundane circumstances that I already have. For instance, in “Thinker”,

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I already have Ego being a robot without a voice module. How can I get a puzzle out of that? Ego would have to be stumped by a task that can only be done with a voice. A task that requires hollering. And that's how I arrived at the puzzle in the vending machine room.

It's dicey. I don't want to pose puzzles that are so illogical that they can't be done. OTOH, I don't want to pose puzzles that are insanely easy. I'm not strictly against “chores”. OTOH, I don't want to exhaust the player and give them headaches with overly tedious chores.

I find that hard to get right. I'm still learning and experimenting.

[sthomannch]

Well done, I enjoyed the game a lot 

The procedure you explain in your last post to find riddles seems good to me.

[heltenjon]

I finally got around to playing this. As usual, challenging puzzles, but not impossible. I liked best the first puzzle, where I had to outmanouver the gardening robot. The code for the door had me stumped for a long while, and when I saw the system, I didn't remember how to calculate such an equation, so I half-brute-forced it. I don't know if I wasn't in the mood for numbers or what, but I didn't enjoy that puzzle as much as the others. The conveyor belt puzzle was also very good - nice implementation of known slider puzzles.

All in all, a very good game. I've come to expect great puzzles from your games, and there must be some fairly advanced coding involved here to make all the contraptions work. I'd be happy to see more of Ian in the future. 

[fernewelten]

The code for the door had me stumped for a long while, and when I saw the system, I didn't remember how to calculate such an equation, so I half-brute-forced it.

Thanks for the feedback!

As concerns the door lock puzzle, I had some concerns myself. But TBH I'm running out of ideas for lock puzzles, so despite some misgivings I put it into the game. The official term is “Chinese Remainders” puzzle. I don't think that Wikipedia does a good job of explaining how to solve it, so I'll put an algo for it here:

Let's say we look for a number that

• yields a remainder of 2 when divided by 5
• yields a remainder of 3 when divided by 7
• and yields a remainder of 5 when divided by 8.

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1. Let's take the first remainder first. A great number that will yield a remainder of 2 when divided by 5 is the number 2 itself, so let's take 2 as the starting point.

2. Note that you can add 5 to the starting point as often as you like, the remainder when dividing by 5 won't change (of course). And that's good because that remainder is already perfect and we don't want to spoil that.

3. But each time you add 5, the remainder when dividing by 7 will change. So let's repeatedly add 5 to the starting point until the remainder when dividing by 7 is exactly right. We arrive at 17, let's call that the new starting point. Now the remainder when dividing by 5 is fine, and the remainder when dividing by 7 is fine, too. Let's keep both fine from now on.

4. Note that you can add 35 (or 5 times 7) to the new starting point as often as you like: The remainder when dividing by 5 won't change, and the remainder when dividing by 7 won't change either.

5. But the remainder when dividing by 8 will change each time. So let's add 35 to the new starting point until that remainder is exactly right. We end up with 157.

6. In this case, this number will work and is a solution to the puzzle. However, the keypad for entering the number doesn't have a zero. So what do we do in cases where we end up with a number that contains a zero? In this case, we can add 280 (or 5 times 7 times 8) to it as often as we like, it won't change the remainders when dividing by 5, by 7, or by 8. We'll do that until we arrive at a number that doesn't contain zeros.

[heltenjon]

The code for the door had me stumped for a long while, and when I saw the system, I didn't remember how to calculate such an equation, so I half-brute-forced it.

As concerns the door lock puzzle, I had some concerns myself. But TBH I'm running out of ideas for lock puzzles, so despite some misgivings I put it into the game. The official term is “Chinese Remainders” puzzle. I don't think that Wikipedia does a good job of explaining how to solve it, so I'll put an algo for it here: (snipped)

The way I solved it:

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First I tried to find the system on my own, filling a page with notes...until I discovered that Ian saw it right away. Then I could make three mathematical functions using the descriptions of the three digits. Normally, this could be solved by calculating (but I didn't remember the procedure) or by drawing three graphs and see where they intersect. But I couldn't be bothered to do that, so I found the lowest three digit number that worked for the 7 spot and kept adding 7 to it, skipping the numbers containing a zero. No, I'm not proud, but anything to escape those robots!

As for lock puzzles...how about revisiting the key in the maze lock you made for a MAGS, but with a more complicated maze? That one always seemed like a good idea to me.

[fernewelten]

The way I solved it: (snip)
No, I'm not proud, but anything to escape those robots!

I think your solution is fine. It does the job for problems of this size, and you can even see it as a preliminary version of the “Chinese” solution: The only main thing that the “Chinese” add is that they optimize the brute-force approach more by going about it iteratively instead of doing just one step, as it were. So it's a very good solution considering that you didn't know the approach and re-engineered it.