I had the same thought. Just made me wonder, are there browser extensions, or maybe even full OS overlays for people with epilepsy that will automatically filter out any potentially problematic flashing?
I made the same assumption and didn't even try putting the dog and rabbits together, but I completed the puzzle (at least I'm pretty sure I didn't overlap them, there was a lot of back and forth)
I find it amusing that this is driven by the particular visualisations of the characters. I.e. if it were a chicken and a rabbit would you have also made this assumption?
For me it's a variant of a classical "move a wolf, goat and cabbage across the river", where you can't have some of them on the boat together, because it would be eaten.
I had the same problem. I was trying to click on things but not drag. Maybe if one of the animals is clicked but not dragged, it could expand and immediately get small, as if it had been dragged 0 pixels?
Hmm, the style of the OP and that landing page reminded me of another web game I saw a few years ago with a philosophical theme, maybe a game jam entry? Kind of bothering me that I can't recall the name.
It was an abstract simulation of the course of a human life: units of "time" spawned regularly in the middle of a black screen. These gravitated towards the cursor and had to be guided to text spaced around the screen: play, grow, work, etc., which all needed to be regularly tended to, with more and more "responsibilities" appearing as time went on.
Some day there'll be an AI search engine for 'tip-of-my-tongue' media. But what will have grown faster? The ability to catalogue things in the world, or the depth of obscurity of things that can be catalogued?
Oh, how the subconscious did answer! The Ludum Dare entry I was thinking of is Notch's similarly minimalistic Drowning in Problems. There's also the classic, Alter Ego.
Coyote, turkey and corn?
Lion, cow and millet?
Redback spider (or any native fauna really), kangaroo, can of fosters?
I don't know how the Japanese would do it. I was going to go with fish, but the puzzle would need reformulating for that.
Norway has wolf, sheep and various things the sheep eat (I've seen variants cabbage and bales of grass). We also have a variation where everyone shifts down a step and there's a missionary "above" the wolf.
Great game, more levels and maybe a countdown for animals that will eat other animals (and end the game) if they are left on the same pad for too long.
A timer would only be fun for me in order to compete with friends. Not a distracting one that you can see while playing, but a time at the end with the number of the puzzle (assuming more get made) would be helpful for sharing.
Some neat concepts here. Aside from the mostly cosmetic qol issues other commenters mention, I also wonder if the game will get repetitive. It's hard to tell with only the one level but I imagine there might be some recurring patterns that the player will pick up on after playing for a bit
I have to say the fact that I was able to figure out how the puzzle worked - what I was meant to do - with no instructions in about 60 seconds is a good sign.
I'm also immediately kind of addicted to this....I really like it.
The one thing that annoys me is that I can't see what a symbol is if the dog/bunny is on it because it's covered up. It's hard to remember when there's so many. Some transparency or slight design adjustment would fix this easily.
Oh yeah, I had to reset once lol. It has to do with getting a couple of characters stuck in the arrow trap without being able to get someone on a tree to escape...I think
Not sure what I am missing. But all the possible moves lead to dead states.
That being said, not sure what the transition labels mean. "Somebody at bone", "Somebody at carrot" or "nobody at bone" means nothing to me. I suspect there's another game that I don't know about that would provide the context.
The path with that label is blocked unless the condition is fulfilled. I don't think it relies on any prior knowledge (at least nothing specific I can think of)
It's entirely self-contained. "Bone" is a node in the graph, put either a bunny or dog on the bone and that "somebody at bone" path will be enabled because its condition will be enabled.
I second the UX of clearer way of showing the icon the player pieces are on. I don't know if transparency is the way to go. Maybe the shape of the node can differ.
I didn't understand the conditions at first. I think it would be good to have visual feedback on what the issue is when trying to make a forbidden move, e.g. trying to move through "somebody at Carrot", the condition and the Carrot field should be highlighted together.
Having a knack for these, I found these "lack" of hints (understanding goal, covered tiles, no precondition failed) to be part of the game, and making deduction/memory work for it. There was just enough for me to understand it.
Had these hints been there I'd have been bored rather quickly.
That might be because most modern games are much more complicated than Doom. It’s also possible that modern game designers don’t want people to abandon the game before having a chance to really get what the core of it is about.
Don’t get me wrong, there is still a place for games with mystery and obscure mechanics etc, but it doesn’t make sense for most games to be like that. It’s just an unnecessary way to keep away players that would otherwise love the game.
There are games where figuring out what to do is the goal, but this game has an good enough design that it really doesn’t have to be one of those. Many older games use that kind of obscure design as a crutch to appear more interesting and difficult than they really were.
Only thing I didn't know at first was that I assumed multiple conditions were or instead of and. Also, people are talking about flashing lights? I get to the completion criteria with the dog on the bone and the rabbits on the carrot and the game doesn't end. I can keep playing, no lights. Is there more?
It was not obvious to me until the very end that you can have overlapping animals, my gut instinct is to treat this similar to a "wolf/lamb/cabbage" kind of puzzle and keep the dog and rabbits separate.
> I assumed multiple conditions were or instead of and
Same, so I tried, and it was very obvious that it didn't work, so, and. Discovering that was, to me, part of the whole experience that makes it rewarding.
Yes. I didn't get it. Hated it. Then got it. Completed it. Now I love it. Sign of a good puzzle... though the frustration/challenge balance is on a knife's edge with this game.
Overall, yeah. It has the feel of a clever, loveable game... how it comes together.
Honest question: What kind of design change would you make? I am struggling to think of a good solution that doesn't involve making pieces smaller, which I don't want to do.
One option is that a subtle version of the location image pops up next to the location space if it is occupied
It would be fun to have the characters integrate with the node images, as if you are dropping them into little worlds. E.g. when you move a rabbit to the boat node, the boat now has a little rabbit poking out of it. It would be similar to those combined emojis [0]
I recognize that this is a really bad idea from a usability/discoverability perspective, but wouldn't it be charming!
Since he could use lights, giving accessible paths green highlight and red to the opposite, would save players some time and become intuitive, or destinations bg become red/green, had fun
I'm convinced there is only one way to solve this: Write a program to unroll the constrained state transition diagram into an unconditional state transition diagram and find the shortest path. The unrolled version would still be pretty small so you can just iterate over it.
You'd have to do that for VxVxV, because there are three different objects (although there's some symmetry). Solving a puzzle is often described as path finding.
The vast majority of states is not reachable, so you can roll out the full tree from the starting state and it's going to be very small. Even the super-naive approach of unrolling the full state space is only 6^7 which is a big waste because connections are very sparse but even that's not big, it just wouldn't scale to larger problems.
That's an interesting statement. Because I actually don't think it's true.
(Well obviously it's not and you were joking, but let's say you were not, for the sake of argument.)
Humans do this differently from machines. We look for strategies and have smarts to on-the-fly develop and refine heuristics that rapidly allow us to intuitively do branch-and-bound like algorithms and in the end solve this even though we brute force very litte, if at all.
That's why it took so long for machines to surpass us at chess or similar. It's a different approach. That's what makes machines better at certain things and humans at others. And there is a lot to be gained by trying to have machines also try human-like approaches to problems (strategy-developing rather than brute force).
In other words, BFS over the state space of the puzzle, skipping previously-visited states?
You don't actually gain anything by unrolling everything ahead of time; it'd actually be worse because you'd store all the memory and wouldn't stop when you get to the solution. And you can't really factor the state space into subproblems.
Anyway, for this puzzle BFS would work, but classical planning in general gets astronomically exponential fast. It's a neglected field, not yet thawed from the last AI winter.
This can be easily solved by a class of algorithms called "search algorithms". Most famous ones are "Breadth-first search" and "Depth-first search". They have many variations like "Depth limited depth-first search" and "Iterative deepening depth-first search". If you include heuristics, then you have other variations like "A" and "Iterative deepening A". These are pretty well known and relatively easy to implement.
Hacker news change the star into italics. The variations are called 'A*' and 'iterative deepening A*' (Need a backslach prior to the star to show it properly)
I actually thought 60 seconds was a bit too long. An easy to understand puzzle is probably more intuitive and < 15-20 secs from start/enough not to notice it took time.
It took me a moment to understand what the constraints meant, which says more about how tired I am than it says about the design, which is great! I don’t want to minimize the cleverness of the puzzle design, but I think it’s a visualization of a finite state machine. Not a novel challenge but a clever way to display it for sure.
The one aspect that took me a bit to figure out was whether, to move between the house and the tree, you needed someone on BOTH the bone and the flower or just one of them. (It turned out to be both.)
Took me a while to figure it out as I assumed the labels on the lines to be dynamic.
But once I got it, it was super fun to play. I wonder if you can algorithmically generate these puzzles and have human's curate them based on factors (joy, difficulty, visual appeal etc).
Great work, it is very easy to understand but challenging enough to be rewarding. A puzzle once a day with a timer or an action counter to compare with your friend could be quite successful!
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 459 ms ] threadEdit: Unsurprisingly it appears I'm not the first to have thought of this, at least: https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/making-screens-safe-those-p...
It would be neat if the conditional statements emphasized and deemphasized based on whether their condition was currently met.
It was an abstract simulation of the course of a human life: units of "time" spawned regularly in the middle of a black screen. These gravitated towards the cursor and had to be guided to text spaced around the screen: play, grow, work, etc., which all needed to be regularly tended to, with more and more "responsibilities" appearing as time went on.
Some day there'll be an AI search engine for 'tip-of-my-tongue' media. But what will have grown faster? The ability to catalogue things in the world, or the depth of obscurity of things that can be catalogued?
Edit: got it, remembered the dev's domain: https://faedine.com/games/spendyourtime/
It's like the Wolf, goat and cabbage problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf,_goat_and_cabbage_problem
I wonder if this just gets localised to typical staple, typical predator and its prey?
I guess cabbage and wolf is eastern Europe / Germany?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_crossing_puzzle
I'm also immediately kind of addicted to this....I really like it.
The one thing that annoys me is that I can't see what a symbol is if the dog/bunny is on it because it's covered up. It's hard to remember when there's so many. Some transparency or slight design adjustment would fix this easily.
Should have been a "back" button or smth!
That being said, not sure what the transition labels mean. "Somebody at bone", "Somebody at carrot" or "nobody at bone" means nothing to me. I suspect there's another game that I don't know about that would provide the context.
Had these hints been there I'd have been bored rather quickly.
Don’t get me wrong, there is still a place for games with mystery and obscure mechanics etc, but it doesn’t make sense for most games to be like that. It’s just an unnecessary way to keep away players that would otherwise love the game.
Play through portal with developer commentary, that's a masterpiece on how to use hints well without players even realizing.
Things like how hallways are structured, where light is shining, etc.
Reinforcing the rules of the puzzle when you try to violate one is a good idea.
Same, so I tried, and it was very obvious that it didn't work, so, and. Discovering that was, to me, part of the whole experience that makes it rewarding.
In a similar vein, when both dog and bunny are on one field, I can't choose which one to pick up.
Overall, yeah. It has the feel of a clever, loveable game... how it comes together.
Great work. I love these postings. Very artistic.
One option is that a subtle version of the location image pops up next to the location space if it is occupied
Right now you could only move the upper one.
I recognize that this is a really bad idea from a usability/discoverability perspective, but wouldn't it be charming!
[0] https://emojikitchen.dev/
(Well obviously it's not and you were joking, but let's say you were not, for the sake of argument.)
Humans do this differently from machines. We look for strategies and have smarts to on-the-fly develop and refine heuristics that rapidly allow us to intuitively do branch-and-bound like algorithms and in the end solve this even though we brute force very litte, if at all.
That's why it took so long for machines to surpass us at chess or similar. It's a different approach. That's what makes machines better at certain things and humans at others. And there is a lot to be gained by trying to have machines also try human-like approaches to problems (strategy-developing rather than brute force).
You don't actually gain anything by unrolling everything ahead of time; it'd actually be worse because you'd store all the memory and wouldn't stop when you get to the solution. And you can't really factor the state space into subproblems.
Anyway, for this puzzle BFS would work, but classical planning in general gets astronomically exponential fast. It's a neglected field, not yet thawed from the last AI winter.
3. Profit.
1. Create http://www.dogbunnypuzzle.com/ and post to HN
-1. be Conrad Barski 0. Create http://www.dogbunnypuzzle.com/ 1. post to HN
Nice one!
I'd argue 2048 is harder to learn and that was a popular game.
But once I got it, it was super fun to play. I wonder if you can algorithmically generate these puzzles and have human's curate them based on factors (joy, difficulty, visual appeal etc).
Thanks for sharing. :)
Great little puzzle, thanks for making this and sharing it.
Also, it is always more helpful to state the actual issue.
Edit: Same in Chrome on ios for me.