I didn't initially understand what the flip/rotate buttons at the left side of the field were for. I thought they allowed you to flip or rotate the selected part of the level, which would be really nice for symmetrical constructions - so here's my feature request.
Sorry - the UI can be confusing. The buttons actually do that, though in an odd way - drag a selection over them and hover to make them work. (It's weird and clunky, but it's probably too much work at this stage to change it.)
Alternately - and more simply - once you've selected
and are dragging something, you can use space to flip and the direction keys to rotate it, as the help text says.
Also, the Malevolence Engine seems to try empty strings for levels where they don't seem to be appropriate (e.g. where the level description explicitly refers to a "first" or "last" element)...
There's usually a logical reading for each of those levels. For instance, for 'robocoffee', the level description tells you to accept if the string begins with blue - the empty string clearly doesn't, so you should reject!
It can be a little unintuitive, but there's a reason to the Malevolence Engine's working. (Even before I added it, most levels tested the empty string anyway.)
Does solving "Generals" get you a different ending if you solve it before "Engineers"?
Nope! That'd be rad, and I've had it suggested before, but I never thought of it as an ending - Engineers was always the planned ending, and Generals only ended up on the same column by the quirky whim of my AUTOMATIC MENU-LAYOUT GENERATOR. An alternate ending would be a cool thing to add, but I'm restricting myself to bug-fixes these days, so I can work on my
next game.
Another idea: would it be hard to have the game use the OS clipboard when you press Shift+C/V? Just make it encode the tiles to an ASCII string. Then you can save fragments ("components" if you will) as snippets you can copy and paste between levels!
Hm. Probably not! Though I do like the idea.
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