I don’t mind them as long as they’re skippable without a penalty. They’re fun once or twice but IMO they get tedious when you have to resolve them every time you play the game through, especially if you’re just rushing through a solution you already know and misenter a command.
If you want them to be solved at least once you can use achievements as a persistent variable by having successful completion of the puzzle award an achievement and running a check for that achievement before the puzzle to activate the skip option. This kind of thing is fine with me, because I don’t mind solving the puzzles, I just don’t want to have to do them every single time I play.
Exciting, another minigame to try! I enjoyed getting to play.
Overall, I found this one felt less fun than the other because of having to go through two screens to make one move. I wondered about using the multiple choices per page function – although that would take either really a lot of code or some very shiny coding to hide irrelevant moves – or just showing all the options together, e.g.
#Jump the [b]god[/b] in the top square down by two.
#Move the [b]god[/b] in the second square from the top down by one.
#Jump the [b]spirit[/b] in the bottom square up by two.
#Move the [b]spirit[/b] in the second square from the bottom up by one.
I was a little surprised to find that I couldn’t move back but rather had to start over if I didn’t solve on the first go-round.
In a full game context, do you think you might include a ‘start over’ option for minigames to reset them to an initial layout, depending on whether it’d make sense in context?
Other thoughts generally would be keeping track of the number of screens the player has flicked through and eventually giving an option along the lines of ‘I give up! I mindlessly sit here and flick tiles until the &!*%$ thing opens up.’ or potentially allowing a companion to help, or providing some other shortcut or hint for players so inclined. (Or offering difficulty modes…)
Ah, that makes a lot of sense (and is basically what I did with the sliding puzzle, collapsing what was originally multiple menus into one…) but for some reason I hadn’t thought about doing it here. And yeah, I also found the “click twice to move” thing kind of obnoxious…
There really isn’t much of a reason not to show the god and spirit moves at once, so I’ve updated it now with that in mind.
With this embedded in a full game, I definitely would want to include a way for the player to say “I’m done with this now,” which would probably just be a menu option that always lets them return to the main game.
Hi @Stewart_Baker , thanks for sharing the great games. The 3x3 puzzle works particularly well in my opinion. It would be cool to have a graphic interface similar to the other game or a larger grid.
I have some code to make graphic elements clickable to trigger a choice. I’d be happy to share it if you are interested.
Thanks! They’re not much compared to your amazing creations.
I was thinking about graphics for the slider puzzle as well. Although it wouldn’t work in an actual Choice of Games title (which is where I want to put these eventually), for a standalone version I might add some CSS to float:left images and create a more traditional “graphical” puzzle.
This one was pretty buggy and kept giving me “no options available” errors when there should have been options still. I think I got rid of all the bugs now, but I also added a “Give up” option just in case choicescript doesn’t give you any valid moves.
Good info Stewart_Baker, thank you for sharing. Ha, probably beyond my abilities at this time barring a major increase in my free time, but good to know what it might take. To bad Delay break didn’t work on the choice points . . . if those could be delayed I could see a use for it more so than just setting the tone and pace of the prose.
Also, cool little mini game and a good example of what sort of things can be done.
Can you guess the six letter word? There are currently seven words to guess.
Sometimes the puzzle will start you with the correct letter in one or more spots… I’m going to update it to stop doing that, but it will take a while since it’s a lot of finnicky copy-pasting!
(This might be the last of these I make for now. I wanted to do a version of shiritori, but realized there was no native Choicescript method for checking the first and last letters of an *input_text so I don’t think it’s possible without using actual JavaScript in the game.)
This is guessing every letter A to Z for the first letter, and getting it wrong every time.
I suspect you’re probably only checking for lowercase letters here. IMO, that’s a bad way to do it because of the amount of devices which will automatically capitalize the first letter entered. Having to specify lowercase letters is unintuitive and makes the puzzle much more irritating. ( I tested again and got matches with lowercase letters, so I’m p sure this is the case.)
Probably I could add in a bit more nuance in the outcomes…
Currently unless you throw it straight down or straight up, I think everything will at least skip once. (It’s only really difficult to get things to skip more than four or five times, depending on your angle and how hard you throw.)
I added a betting minigame and a pub quiz minigame to my current project. Most of the game takes place in a hub that you go back to after each mission and I thought it might be important to have side activities you can do between main missions. If anyone has any ideas for other possible minigames that they’d like to see in a game like that I’m happy to take suggestions.
One thing I always enjoy in games like that is chances to interact with NPCs. Not quite a minigame, I guess, but when I think of other things I’ve played with a “between mission side stuff” location, it’s what comes to mind!
Hi @Stewart_Baker , I don’t understand the anagram solver. It showed something like BNBFIh, but the first letter is a. Don’t I have to anagram the given letters?
so I guess I’ll rename it.