lots of fun! the fact that the walls spill over the square boundaries is very annoying though, i would love to have an option to just make a wall a filled in square without the 3d effect.
I expected the horse to move one tile for each block you placed. I had an elaborate plan to lure it towards one exit and then close it at the last minute... Nope!
Cool game, but I don't like how you get only one chance. Even returning to the page, you can't try again to beat your previous score. No replayability value at all.
IMO they should have a (second) pop-up that warns you that you only get one submit. Not sure if it should let you know if you've made an optimal solution or not, but since it's not timed there's no cost in slowing people down. I've seen similar daily puzzles where you get to see the leaderboard and then can go back and optimize further. Yes, it says it at the beginning, but it's still easy to forget.
I am curious on how you would algorithmically find the optimal solution for this kind of problem for much bigger grids.
I wanted to do some seed finding in Factorio for the same exact problem using the generated map images, but never found a good solution that was fast enough.
Great game, I love it! I hope the author is collecting juicy analytics. They would be useful if they ever want to bundle 100 levels in order of difficulty and release this as a Steam game (which I would absolutely buy!)
I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. It’s subconsciously confusing to see a gate I place in one cell move to occupy pixels in the cell “above” it.
I look forward to future days introducing new mechanics as well. Can I suggest a few, based on dynamics?
- Food! The horse moves on every turn towards an attractor. Have a hay bale / giant sugar cube in one corner fall off the back of a truck / helicopter :) Horses start out dumb and move directly towards the goal before backtracking. Smarter horses path find the shortest route to the goal.
- Goals! Now that the horse is moving, get the horse into a static horse box / cattle pen cell by strategically placing fences so that the path it takes towards the food involves walking onto the goal square.
- Floods! Water encroaches from the edges on a turn by turn basis. Not only do you have to contain the horse, you also have to hold back the flood.
IMO, the game is great to keep simple, but I’d like to play more levels than just daily, so could see people paying for the ability to play more, like NYT games, and could be part of a suite of game if curated daily by expert vs social curation. The blocks are small though for a small phone with big fingers.
I also wonder if making it GPL and submitting to various *NIX distros would be best. Then it may need to be standalone with random maps created by ML or similar.
Another thing to try could be to rank people in realtime instead of the one-off submission approach. I do this in https://spaceword.org (create tight crosswords using 21 letters), and I think it's quite motivating to see how you compare to others as you improve your solution. On the other hand, its a bit more taxing on the server, and then you also could not show the optimal solution.
Sometimes simple things are best. I really like the game as-is.
This is a rather simple game to program. IMO, if you can program, take a few weekends to make your own game based on your ideas. If you can't program, your ideas will lead you to a wonderful learning project.
> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. It’s subconsciously confusing to see a gate I place in one cell move to occupy pixels in the cell “above” it.
I interpreted it as standard "top-down" RPG graphics, where the Y axis always doubles as the Z axis. As such, I didn't find it visually confusing - but it did made playing on mobile annoying, because you often end up targeting the wrong field.
There is definitely a turn-based minigame here - get the most "distance" travelled by the horse, every turn the horse moves one block towards it's closest escape and you can drop walls to cause it to find a new path - in this one you actually lose when the horse can't get out but the goal is to get the horse to move as many blocks as possible using your limited number of walls (or apples which can attract it).
> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit.
I also feel it would make more sense either for everything to be 2.5D or pure top down. Having appear / disappear animation is nice feedback to user though.
Other thing is that maybe the hitbox should change when the wall comes up. Now to remove it you need to press the grid, essentially the root of the wall. Unintuitive to me.
Thanks for the game, looking forward to when there is multiple horses or sheep to enclose.
I would have responded earlier, but I wanted to actually implement something you suggested: different walls. Alternative wall sprites, which don't occlude other tiles so much, are now live and can be adjusted in the settings.
Re: analytics, the only serious plans I had were to use the daily level histograms to adjust difficulty. The idea of taking some levels and releasing them as a standalone game is tempting, but I wonder if doing this type of puzzle over and over again might get tedious? That's one of the reasons I thought it would work better as a daily game. Let's see how it's doing in a few months.
I love the mechanic ideas. I think there are two big constraints on what kind of cool new features/gimmicks can be implemented though. First: if this is going to be a daily game, the new mechanics have to be intuitive enough to where somebody could figure them out their first time playing. I like the idea of cherries being misleading, and it's a fun troll-ish idea for a single player game, but it would be a mean trick if it were someone's first daily. (Then again, there's someone who's first Wordle game was probably MYRRH.) The other constraint is I have a solver that can guarantee the optimal solution is actually optimal. Some game mechanics might make this a lot harder, or even impossible.
Great game. I've been having fun with it every day, but today there is no puzzle! Be careful about this. I intuit that not having a puzzle on a day is enough to lose some players, with the number only increasing the more days you don't have puzzles. Not sure how you're doing it now, but you should easily be able to generate thousands of levels and have them all ready in the page like wordle.
Nice game! Out of curiosity, are the daily levels built by hand or algorithmically? Is there some way to measure their difficulty computationally, other than just trying to do it yourself or seeing how many people get a perfect score? I'm also working on a grid-based browser game and both those questions have come up for me, I'm keen to see how other people tackle it.
All the daily levels are built by hand. I struggled to come up with a good random level generator. You can see my feeble attempts in the Edit page (via the hamburger menu) by giving the dice button a few sad clicks.
I did originally try to measure the difficulty computationally by running the solver and timing it, but it didn't really line up with what humans would find difficult. Now I'm just eyeballing it.
This is surprisingly similar to a subset of the ARC II puzzles.
The collected answered could probably be used to teach an AI to approach this type of problem thereby gaining some of the cognitive biases that humans have, which is exactly what you want in some cases: An AI that generates human like solutions to hard problems .
This is a very cool and enjoyable game. I'd be really interested in knowing what framework/library was used to make it. I inspected the source and can see the game is done on canvas, but can't work out more than that.
I imagine you went searching for domain names and came up with this? I resisted clicking on this top story all day because I thought "how good could that be? "enclose horse" what is that?" Yet, the experience was genuine-slow-forming-smile-of-understanding. This is really good.
99 comments
[ 0.14 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadRemoving a block was a bit fiddly on FireFox (Floorp) due to the right click menu appearing when I tried to click on a tile.
Looking forward to tomorrows!
I took a screenshot of my solution and the optimal one - and then I could compare like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_problem
https://enclose.horse Day 8 PERFECT! 100%
https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/176005/how-to-remove-...
I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. It’s subconsciously confusing to see a gate I place in one cell move to occupy pixels in the cell “above” it.
I look forward to future days introducing new mechanics as well. Can I suggest a few, based on dynamics?
- Food! The horse moves on every turn towards an attractor. Have a hay bale / giant sugar cube in one corner fall off the back of a truck / helicopter :) Horses start out dumb and move directly towards the goal before backtracking. Smarter horses path find the shortest route to the goal.
- Goals! Now that the horse is moving, get the horse into a static horse box / cattle pen cell by strategically placing fences so that the path it takes towards the food involves walking onto the goal square.
- Floods! Water encroaches from the edges on a turn by turn basis. Not only do you have to contain the horse, you also have to hold back the flood.
I agree! It feels off compared to the overall aesthetic of the game.
Awesome game though! Loved it.
I also wonder if making it GPL and submitting to various *NIX distros would be best. Then it may need to be standalone with random maps created by ML or similar.
I hope they're not. Can't we have a few things in this world that are just fun without going and sticking surveillance on them?
This is a rather simple game to program. IMO, if you can program, take a few weekends to make your own game based on your ideas. If you can't program, your ideas will lead you to a wonderful learning project.
I interpreted it as standard "top-down" RPG graphics, where the Y axis always doubles as the Z axis. As such, I didn't find it visually confusing - but it did made playing on mobile annoying, because you often end up targeting the wrong field.
(jk)
1. lure the horse to an optimal point on the map.
2. trap it in a small circle of fences.
3. build part of your final wall with the remaining fences.
4. one by one, move the fences trapping the horse in place into position.
> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit.
I also feel it would make more sense either for everything to be 2.5D or pure top down. Having appear / disappear animation is nice feedback to user though.
Other thing is that maybe the hitbox should change when the wall comes up. Now to remove it you need to press the grid, essentially the root of the wall. Unintuitive to me.
Thanks for the game, looking forward to when there is multiple horses or sheep to enclose.
I would have responded earlier, but I wanted to actually implement something you suggested: different walls. Alternative wall sprites, which don't occlude other tiles so much, are now live and can be adjusted in the settings.
Re: analytics, the only serious plans I had were to use the daily level histograms to adjust difficulty. The idea of taking some levels and releasing them as a standalone game is tempting, but I wonder if doing this type of puzzle over and over again might get tedious? That's one of the reasons I thought it would work better as a daily game. Let's see how it's doing in a few months.
I love the mechanic ideas. I think there are two big constraints on what kind of cool new features/gimmicks can be implemented though. First: if this is going to be a daily game, the new mechanics have to be intuitive enough to where somebody could figure them out their first time playing. I like the idea of cherries being misleading, and it's a fun troll-ish idea for a single player game, but it would be a mean trick if it were someone's first daily. (Then again, there's someone who's first Wordle game was probably MYRRH.) The other constraint is I have a solver that can guarantee the optimal solution is actually optimal. Some game mechanics might make this a lot harder, or even impossible.
I did originally try to measure the difficulty computationally by running the solver and timing it, but it didn't really line up with what humans would find difficult. Now I'm just eyeballing it.
Ah the famous spherical horse in vacuum
The collected answered could probably be used to teach an AI to approach this type of problem thereby gaining some of the cognitive biases that humans have, which is exactly what you want in some cases: An AI that generates human like solutions to hard problems .
1. Do a screenshot of the grid (try to include walls as well)
2. Open https://enclosure-horse-solution.onrender.com/
3. Make sure the number of walls are correct in the input (bottom left)
4. Press "Solve"
PS: It might crash as it's on the free version of render. I've added a caching layer.
Here's the github so you can run it locally:
https://github.com/langarus/enclosure.horse-solution
clone it and run
make init // make web