

Show HN: Is this puzzle too hard? - babuskov
http://bigosaur.com/blog/puzzle.php

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DanBC
Hard puzzles are fine. Unskippable hard puzzles are less fine.

You might want to make it much clearer what the aim is, and if there are
multiple solutions. Bullet points might be useful? I don't know what I'm
supposed to be lining up - vertical colours? Horizontal colours? Vertical
shapes? Horizontal shapes? Vertical colours and horizontal shapes (etc etc).

Sliding block puzzles normally start with very simple levels - move one block
to win. Perhaps if I'd played a couple of tutorial levels I might stick at it.

Sorry this all seems negative! I'm trying to at least be constructive.

~~~
babuskov
Shapes and colors (independent of each other) can be matched horizontally and
vertically. Maybe I should somehow indicate when they are "locked" and that
would be enough.

Actually it's a one-off puzzle to unlock a door to another level and it does
not repeat. So, there's no time for tutorials.

I guess I will make this one optional, and maybe just create a simpler puzzle
(say, colors only) for the unskippable door lock.

Thanks.

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jgeorge
No offense, but it's not fun/interesting enough to get over the challenge.
It's hard, to me, since the tile movement isn't intuitive to me, but it
doesn't really keep enough of my interest to try to figure out how to solve
it. And I consider myself a fair fan of puzzles like this.

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john_butts
It's not "hard", it's just obfuscated as it stands. I chose one of many
plausible success conditions to work towards and got one step away due to what
seemed like a parity error and quit.

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babuskov
There's no parity error.

If it seemed that you only had to switch places of two pieces to solve it,
then you merely reached the hard part. :)

~~~
john_butts
Yeah I figured, but I didn't know if there was an actual parity error because
I was working (impossibly) towards the wrong solution, or if there was a hard
part that I might still work through and still arrive at a wrong but plausible
solution. Does that make sense? There are enough ambiguous elements in the
puzzle that make it kind of cat-mustachy and unrewarding. Do the symbols mean
anything, or are they just differentiators? One of them is the reverse-space
image of one of the others, is that significant? One of them is a unit block -
maybe they go in order of unit block count? What's the physical analog or
metaphor of the lock, like pins and tumblers or? Should colors be aligned
vertically or horizontally, or not at all? Is there a unique solution?

~~~
babuskov
I see. I guess I need to work on this, make the symbols more distinct or
something. You only need to align colors and symbols in either rows or
columns, so there's multiple solutions.

Great feedback. Thanks.

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sujanchowdhury
Dude!! continue with your puzzler!! good stuff!! polish up with gameplay
followed by graphics and then a a bit of mystery ambience> Best

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ghostberry
I don't know if it's too hard, since I can't figure out what you're supposed
to do.

~~~
babuskov
You need to align colors and symbols either by rows or columns.

~~~
ghostberry
I thought it might be something like that. I've never been able to do them. I
just find them frustrating and quit.

I do play various puzzle games, but I'm not a huge fan of this particular
type. For me personally, it would put me off your game, especially if the
failure to complete the puzzle stopped me progressing.

I can't speak for other people. I may just be weird.

~~~
babuskov
Actually I fear that other players might feel the same. The rest of the game
is 2D puzzle platformer which is a completely different type of puzzle game,
so I'm considering to make the door puzzles optional and not blocking.

Thanks.

