Puzzle-y thing 2

I found this dev-log sitting in my drafts and realized I never published it! Here is a slightly edited version, with insights presented next to hindsights.

Hi Friends,

This is my second game in puzzlescript, and I wanted to try adding only one line of code again, so I could focus on the design aspect instead of programming. Since I added another movement-rule last time, this time I tried messing with the win condition. Specifically, I changed the goal from "put all the crates on the targets" to "line up three crates in a row."

This was a bad idea. It reduced the space of interesting levels in a couple ways:

1.  I have to have at least 3 crates in every level
2.  Outside of very specific situations (which I tried to explore), having more than 3 crates is difficult without adding more solutions and therefore making the level easier.
3. It's difficult to specify where the player should form the row, and open spaces in general are not conducive to an interesting levels

These factors make the "size" of this game's set of interesting levels a subset of sokoban's. This wasn't all bad, as it pushed me into other design space to fill out the 10 levels I arbitrarily chose. In puzzlescript, it's really easy to add more than one controllable player, so I made the second half of the game about that.

Ezra from the future here, this is something I wrote when I right after I made the game: 

Separate from all that other stuff, in terms of my growth as a designer, I'm trying to embrace negative space a little more, and vary the look of the levels. I think this game is a little more spacious than the other, in a pleasant way, although it's hard for me to tell having made both. 

Making and thinking about that is making me minorly obsessed with creating a puzzle game with the minimal number of interactable objects. Expect more on that in the future I guess

I find this quote interesting here in the future, because I know how my next game, sokodig, turned out. I think past-me was right about varying the look of levels and caring more about those aesthetics. Good job past me. 

The idea of a "minimal number of interactable objects" was flawed, though. At the time I wanted to prove myself as a designer, and I thought I could do that by coding a game sparsely and spending all my time *designing* my way out of the problems the sparse code created. These days I think it's more fruitful to think about the game as it exists in the player's head. Most players don't see the programming, so having a "minimal number of objects" is a silly goal to have. In sokodig I went in the opposite direction. I added a couple more objects like the shovel and the golden shovel. The rules are still easily understood by players because there is a strong metaphor to a real-world concept. 

Thanks for reading, 

-Ezra (past and future)