ZENDEFRAG is a little early PC inspired puzzle game. Clear the map by ensuring that all the bit of the files are contiguous, and that the free space is contiguous too.
Release history
2024-10-06 - v0.3 - Fixes to menu
2024-10-02 - v0.2 - Added daily challenge
2024-09-29 - v0.1 - Initial Release
I get the idea of putting blocks that are alike together, but there seems to be some rules regarding the different colours that I don't follow. Can you elaborate on the rules?
Sure!
- To achieve 0% fragmentation, all segments of a file must be together (AKA - orthogonally adjacent). All the free space must be together too.
- You can move and rotate chunks, but you can only drop them where all of the occupied segments will fit in free space. This means that if there's white space under all of the non-white bits, you're good. A segment will conflict, even if it's the same type of segment that it's overlapping with.
- If you drop a chunk in the same place, with the same rotation, it recognises it as you not doing a turn, and won't increase the moves taken.
I'll see if I can summarize it any better.
@lachlan, I'm a bit perplexed with this game. The visuals are OK, reminiscent of Windows 3 era. Controls are a bis surprising, alternate mouse support and rotate selection with mouse wheel would make sense, given the visuals.
A few bugs : highest difficulty can take up to a minute shuffling tiles around before reaching the target fragmentation.
Also got a crash once when starting highest difficulty after finishing easiest.
But the real problem is the lack of incentive to do rotations and block moves. It's trivial and faster to move tiles one by one or by small segments. Hardest difficulty is same as easy, just with more moves.
Instead of an ever-growing move counter, we could have a tight move counter going down, and the possibility to undo moves, to make the game turn into a puzzle game. Finding the right starting counter is tricky though, and might require to write a solver outside pico-8.
In the game, you'd just need to store the random seed and the solved par found by the solver to have lots of levels available.
I'll have a bit more of a think around the motivation. I was hoping minimizing the amount of turns alone would be sufficient. I'm also keen on a different mode where continued fragmentation happens while you're going (files being added, moved, deleted, the fixed section moving etc).
I'm coming off COVID, and a long day at work - but I'll have a look at that second bug tomorrow hopefully: it looks like it's trying to do something with the menu with the new daily mode, given that hash.
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