The pause-on-failure thing is now in! It's a placeholder, and honestly pretty hideous, but it's better than nothing. Let me know what you think!
I FEAST ON YOUR FEEDBACK.And it looks like you've got a lot of feedback to give! Let's get to it. Om nom nom nom:
Also it should say "accept" instead of "output".
That's what I get for copy-pasting! Fixed.
I've been tossing around ideas like this for a bit. Two screens, actually: one for when a robot fails the test (which would let you see the test it failed, what the output should've been, what it actually was...), and another for when your robot passes all tests, letting you see how long you took (in adjusted time - so running at 8x speed wouldn't give you an advantage) and how many components you used. That'd have the advantage of encouraging competition and replay of levels already beaten - see if you can get the most elegant design!
I approve of this idea. One step further would be to have an online highscore table for each level (like in Fantastic Contraption you can see other player's solutions to the same level). That's loads of work though, so it's probably not a good idea to start going down that road.
I'm not really fond of global high-score tables. They tend to be dominated by people who've put immense amounts of time into the game, leaving me, at least, rather intimidated and turned-off. A more interesting idea, for me, is a global
level repository; somewhere that your successful levels can be (automatically?) uploaded, and browsed by others. Upvoted for elegance, commented on... that sort of thing.
Either way, though, it's a big project. (The level-repository idea even moreso!) If it's ever coming, it's a long ways out.
At first I instinctively build my machines so that all the inputs for the branches would always go in the side with no arrow, I would suggest making it noted that that isn't needed.
There's a ton of things that confuse people about the branch-tool when they first encounter it. The 'grey arrow' ("There are grey symbols?"), the way they erase symbols they've read... and the problem you mentioned. Most people seem to be confused by one or more of these things... confused enough to comment, even!
I've been thinking about adding another introductory slide-thing like the one for binary numbers for The Humble Branch, but I'm not sure where I'd put it. Perhaps I could just tack it on to the end of the intro-slideshow, if that doesn't make it too long; or I could have a 'link' to it in the help-screen...
A further increased speed would be really nice, say like a tile or more per frame if possible.
Haha! When I first introduced the speeds, they were 1x, 2x, and 3x. For launch, they were 1x, 2x, 4x, and 8x. And now - just for you - I've changed them to 1x, 8x, and 60x.
Speed demons, all of you!
(Well. Maybe.)
On the androids level a solution of mine would fail because I would write something before removing something, so I have to go with a slightly less elegant solution. Removing one pair on the second really long one would fix that.
Done!
Some of the early ones I could more or less brute force solutions that would still solve it, but only with shorter strings, and would horribly fail with longer ones (I would basically need more room the longer the string is.) Going back I was able to redo them with much more elegant solutions that solve it faster and could solve strings of any size. I don't know if you want to allow the more hackish solutions or not, but I thought I'd mention it.
It's something I've been torn about. I'm inclined, for the moment, to be pretty lenient on the earlier levels; I don't want to attack new players with 50-symbol long test-strings. But they're going to have to learn the techniques in the early levels if they want to beat the later ones...
Ehh. You figured it out. It's not too big a deal.
Speaking of long strings to make sure people aren't using non-scalable solutions, please please please make the long strings very last. It's very annoying to wait for it to simulate a long string (which is made even worse that the first working copy is probably inefficient) only for it to fail at an empty test or something silly like that that takes 5 seconds to fix and 3 minuets to wait for it to simulate the long strings again.
Sorry, that's my sadistic side coming out. I've gone through and re-ordered everything. Sorry!
Also make the fast forward button apparent, I didn't notice it until I read someone mention it in this thread.
What would you suggest?
I would suggest making it so linked ones don't over-ride your previous ones at all, nor grant you anything on running them. Sure people could still just copy the design over, but I would use linking more to show of my solutions to people who have beat it in a different way, and less to give other people solutions to advance.
My first inclination was to respond, "there are technical obstacles."
But then I did it!
Nope! It's very close, though. (I've added a new test that breaks your machine; see if you can fix it!)
I have no clue what I'm supposed to do for school teachers, can you explain in further what I'm trying to accomplish.
Added a bit of a clunky clarification to the new version.
I have four levels left. I have to figure out Admirals and School teachers, Children just popped up but it doesn't look hard, and I'm looking forward to finding out what the challenge is for the final locked one.
Nice! Thanks for all the feedback, Laremere (and Draknek, and of course TobiasW...) - it's been really valuable!
Developer
