alt Hacker NewsGreat 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.
Replies
> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air.
I agree! It feels off compared to the overall aesthetic of the game.
Awesome game though! Loved it.
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. 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.
The turn-based version sounds interesting, but I think it falls on its face in practice. The game then becomes:
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.
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.
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.
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.
And of course: Buy additional walls using in-game purchases!
(jk)
> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air.
I think it should go up, otherwise it doesn't look like a wall. It would look like something the horse can step on and run over. For the water it makes sense to be flat flat and that the horse doesn't want to touch it: it is water-shy.
> I hope the author is collecting juicy analytics.
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?