Show HN: Stig – a sokoban-style puzzle game

[mirrish]

https://lageb.itch.io/stig

Me and my boyfriend are making a game together in our spare time. We are building it in React without using a game engine, which has worked quite well so far, given the simple game logic and minimalistic style. The plan is to distribute the full game as a native app using Electron.

Try out the demo at https://lageb.itch.io/stig, would be really nice with some feedback! :)

[gourou]

What an excellent puzzle game! First of all, it's very beautiful and simple. The style makes it look like a child's game but it gets hard.

The first time I played I lost patience and gave up on the game because I couldn't figure out what the box on the top was for. I don't know why I reopened it but I'm glad I did. Instructions for what the game is about would be very helpful. I don't have a clue what a sokoban is.

The mechanics can be understood in context, they're simple enough. Kudos on being able to explain so much with simple square symbols.

About difficulty, I was ready to give up on level 9, but came back to it a few times and it worked. The undo button helps a lot. For less patient players, you could add a HINT button to find the first move.

Since the demo is only 20 levels, we're skipping very fast to the next mechanic therefore the game doesn't go by increasing difficulty. For example, level 16 is much harder (it took soooo much time to complete, the symmetry helped) than level 17, 18 and 19. I imagine the future game would focus on a mechanic and make it progressively harder.

Played on mobile and I wish there was a way to mute the game.

I found a bug. Sometimes, the game stops responding to swipe input on Safari iOS 17.3.1 so I need to reload it in a new tab.

Anyway, I had a blast! It's a very addictive game that requires a lot of patience. It'll be hard to wait for the full release. Is there any timeline set for it?

Also I'm curious, how did you guys create the puzzles together? Is someone the puzzle maker and someone the puzzle solver? It reminds me of "engine" John Carmack and "surgeon" John Romero who built the Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake games.

[mirrish → gourou]

Thank you so much! Really nice and valuable to get feedback like this!

Yeah in the full game we plan to make the level order more logical and have different branches so you can explore the mechanics separately.

We implemented a mute button, but forgot that it's not added to the demo, sorry about that. Clearly we should give the demo a bit more love, we've focused a lot on the full game recently.

Our goal is to release it this fall, although it is hard to estimate how much we have left, but for sure this year at least so we hope you have the patience to wait!

We are both puzzle maker and solver, usually one of us comes up with a puzzle and then the other one tries to solve it. Then we iterate until we get a good difficulty level. Generally I like coming up with mechanics more though and my bf prefers doing levels.

[melicerte]

Congrats on the demo. I must say the game becomes quickly difficult, which is nice IMO.

I may suggest you provide a tiny bit of information about the symbols (walls, full circles vs empty ones, ...)

[mirrish → melicerte]

Thanks for playing and for the suggestion! We like the idea of players learning the game gradually themselves without much help, so that's why we kept instructions at a minimum. But we have included a lot of different mechanics in the demo so maybe it makes sense with a little more info there!