Write programs to solve levels for some well-known games
Welcome to your trial period at Video Games Inc., employee #24601. As you may have heard, our games are getting some bad press, because they are supposedly not entirely bug-free.
We recently fired our entire QA department because they were far too expensive. Instead, we want to invest in automated tests for our games.
Our engineers built a simple device that can simulate button presses in the game. Your job is to program that device. Because of its limited memory, the engineers decided to make it repeat all its instructions in an endless loop.
Controls: mouse. It somewhat works on touch screens too, but you'll be missing out on the tooltips which explain some of the trickier features.
The game has 10 levels, all open from the start. Your progress and programs are automatically saved in your browser, so don't worry about coming back later.
Made with Godot 4.3. Graphics done in Inkscape. Sound effects from jfxr.
For Zipper I see you got it in 14 steps though which seems impossible - even just trying to think of an optimal path I can't think of anything close to that. Was this perhaps on a previous version of the puzzle with only 3 boxes?
I think you might be right. Or I used the "win now" debug key and forgot to erase my score afterwards. Thanks for pointing that out! I'll retract my highscore.
In level 6 (Move Zig-Zag) there is a small UI-issue that toggling the condition (cross/check/?) makes the container resize due to there being so many instruction slots.
Ugh, that's what I get for adding line breaks at the last moment.
I love the text-explanation of what an instruction does btw, it makes the game a lot more accessible.
Thanks! Yeah, that one was tweaked in response to early feedback, because it's kind of critical that the player understands what they're doing.
Did you come up with all the puzzles just by thinking about them?
I just drew something and then tried to solve it. It was tricky, because my brain had to be in two modes at once. On the one hand, I'm trying to think of solutions within the current set of rules. On the other hand, I'm thinking of how to adjust the rules to make solutions more fun and interesting.
For example, this is how the second-to-last column was born: initially, the light was always only adjusted when the movement succeeded. But it turned out that I couldn't make "do until failed" loops with that, which you need in task 4 and generally make sense to have, so I added that column.
@DiningPhilosopher Uploaded my new best scores. I'm SO HAPPY to see that there are apparently many better solutions that I didn't think of! :D
Very good entry, not much to say. As DiningPhilosopher said, some quality of life improvements would be nice such as clearing line (with right click or something).
One feature that would have been nice is a single step button.
The boolean system wasn't clear at first, but the text that describes the lines when you hover made it clear after a few tests.
I'm curently stuck at task 8. I feel like I don't grasp something in how I should write the programs, it was allready the case in the previous levels in which I could only find very sub-optimal solutions (as far as I know). But I'll come back at it, and try to finish it.
Would you consider having solutions somewhere, so I could compare and see what I'am doing wrong ?
Good job.
@mixer Task 8 is probably not the most well designed puzzle in the game :) I lucked into a solution early on, so I knew it was solvable in some way, and assumed there would be other ways. Here's my solution: https://imgur.com/a/vbE7bUM
I might add some QoL features next week in a post-jam version, but not sure if I'll have time.
This game made me realized that I'm a terrible engineer as I was pretty bad at these puzzles. I need a language that allows to express my intents and agonies. I need a proper IDE! I can be happy even with Emacs but this game failed me!
…that said, I loved that Shenzhen I/O feel. Managed to solve it except the 8th one. Good job.
I had a lot to say about this game, but level 6 took me so long to beat that I can't even remember any of it anymore. It's not even a hard level, it's so simple, why did it take me so long? I genuinely feel significantly worse about myself now. All I wanted to do was relax and yet I'm out here shouting at a grade-school level logic puzzle. I'd like to apologise to everyone who ever believed in me. 8/10.
# | User | Score | |
---|---|---|---|
1 | @DiningPhilosopher | 280 | |
2 | @mixer | 280 | |
3 | @thomastc | 314 | View all 3 scores |
WOW, incredible game and super polished! I'm trying to beat your high scores (very helpful to have numbers to beat, just to know what should be possible). For Zipper I see you got it in 14 steps though which seems impossible - even just trying to think of an optimal path I can't think of anything close to that. Was this perhaps on a previous version of the puzzle with only 3 boxes?
Some quality of life improvements if you want to develop this further could be to clear all instructions, letting one drag/drop rows, and loading previous, optimal solutions. In level 6 (Move Zig-Zag) there is a small UI-issue that toggling the condition (cross/check/?) makes the container resize due to there being so many instruction slots.
I love the text-explanation of what an instruction does btw, it makes the game a lot more accessible.
Did you come up with all the puzzles just by thinking about them?