First, the news: I've put out a major update! The placeholder failure-message has been replaced with a great big Failure Screen, and there's a new Success Screen that gives some stats on your solution! They're both works in progress - I'm planning on adding a lot more to the Success Screen (saved stats! A copy of the level code, to make it easier to share!), and I'm informed that the Failure Screen is obnoxious enough that it ought to be moved. But enough of that - try it out for yourself! Tell me what you think! (And there's those three new levels from 3:40 AM this morning, too, if you've not seen those. Go forth!)
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I really like this game so far. Like constructing
DFAs, except having to deal with spatial constraints.
...
Edit2: Well, not quite DFAs, since you can write bits. Know for sure that the "equal number of reds and blues" one isn't a regular language (at least for unbounded input strings).
Yeah, the game's based on a more advanced variant of DFAs. I talked about it
a few posts back.Yellow and green are mixed up in the hovercar, zeppelin, and lasershark levels. (Haven't had time to beat it, so there are probably more.) Really confusing since the TEXT (level description AND failure text) matches, but the succeed/fail LOGIC is inverted.
This is a combination of me trying to debug at 3:40 AM, and TobiasW blaming the game for his machine being broken. (Though, admittedly, if he did that consistently, he'd have about a 90% success rate.) Regardless: I'm blaming TobiasW!
Edit: Might be helpful if there were some way to change the speed when not playing a level. If the speed gets stuck on 64x and you fail immediately, it's tricky to return to normal speed.
I've set it to reset speed whenever you fail a level. You can (and could) also return to the main menu to reset your speed, though that's kinda unintuitive. Let me know if I should do anything more.
Edit3: It would also be helpful in some of the later puzzles to know upfront whether the input is just red/blue or if it could contain green/yellow.
It'll always be red/blue! That is part of my
contract with the player. (I might break it some-day, but I'd be very careful to warn the player beforehand.) I've had an Informational Slideshow planned for a while, to explain that, but there've always been more pressing things to do! (Plus, the art involved is a bit of a bottleneck for me.) Sorry about the confusion; I promise I'll clarify it in-game
some day!
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Two new broken levels (refreshed swf to make sure it was the newest version)
Robotic laser sharks breaks on the first test, doesn't accept green blue yellow even though the error message says that's what it expected (
example)
TobiasW!
Robotic marshalls gives blue red blue blue in one of the tests and expects blue blue blue red, which doesn't sound right.. my solution (
link) gets blue red blue red which should be right, but that's rejected.
Typo! I'd double-check your machine, though. It's giving me red-blue-red-blue, which doesn't seem quite right!
About the selection interface, you could add two new tools .. one to select areas, and one to move selections (copy to buffer, clear area, paste from buffer on release), or individual objects if there's no selection. Then you can hotkey one to shift and the other to ctrl or something. (If you hotkey select to ctrl-drag, hitting ctrl+c or ctrl+x for copy/cut would come pretty naturally.)
Interesting idea! The problem with that approach is that you'd naturally expect shift or ctrl (and the associated 'tools') to work as modifiers. That is, once you stop holding down the relevant key, it goes back to a 'neutral' mode. If you selected them as tools from the UI-bar, on the other hand, you'd expect them to keep working until you deselected them!
I think the basic idea - select and drag as basic tools - is a really good one, though. I'll see about putting it in!
Also, about the robots outside grid not getting deleted bug, can't reproduce it now. Maybe you fixed it?
Someone got a screenshot of it in the
other thread, which showed me enough for me to be able to fix it. Thanks anyway!
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I assume the ordering of the levels is intended to be easy on the left to hard on the right. Seems like a couple of them are out of place, eg the generals level is trivial but it's way over on the right (and has a really big work area)!
I thought it'd be harder!
(The placement of the levels on the main menu is actually algorithmically determined. I'm super proud of it! But you're still right.)
Simple examples of accepted/rejected input or transformations (depending on the level type) would be really useful. Not sure that there's room in the UI, so maybe they could go in the ? menu (which admittedly is also full atm
)
Very reasonable request. It's on the List now!
(The help screen (? menu) probably wants to be expanded to multiple pages, and to absorb / merge with the cutscene-selector while it's at it. Not totally sure about the details there... I'll probably let the idea gestate for a little while.)
The level names have no real meaning (or at least not to me :D), so it's difficult to find one you remember doing earlier (I can only remember the content of the levels, not the names)
The names aren't really connected to the content of the levels at present, yeah. (With a very few exceptions.) Do the robo-pictures (the dog, the fly, etc) help?
The way you delete things wasn't obvious, maybe you should add that to the help screen, or add a garbage can icon to the UI (which would have the same effect as clicking on the background)?
Yeah, you aren't the first one to find it confusing. There's not much space in the UI for a garbage-can (especially if the select/drag tools end up finding their home in the UI-bar).... perhaps I could add a (cosmetic) one to the background, somewhere...? I'll think about it!
The ability to "single-step" the machine might be useful (although I guess you can sort-of do that with the pause button)
Interesting idea! For figuring out how components work early-on, and for analyzing complex, dense constructions later... you could probably bind it to 'space', make that enter the mode / move one step... the play button could change to a dot (?), and you could click it to go back to 1x speed...
The trick would be teaching players that it existed (probably add a hint when you first enter 'run' mode, and slap it down somewhere on the help screen as well), and it is, as features go, a little bit bloat-y... but I like it!
Also, the robotic polar bears level won't accept my machine
.
TobiasW! 
(it is very hard to phonetically render the sound of a drawn-out, despairing, TobiasW-ward yell)
(because of the W)
(but I am doing my best)
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And that's all!
Developer
