Sokoban with a twist! The box pusher is always in a bubble. Which boxes it can see and push depends on the bubble it is in.
Features:
- 24 levels
- Music and sound effects
- Hard and easy mode
- Undo (only in easy mode)
- Progress storage
- Level selection
- Stats view (once you solved all levels)
Can you solve all levels? And if you do, how many moves did you need?
Background
This is a polished version of the game I developed during this year's Global Game Jam, with theme 'bubble'.
Change Log
This was interesting! I got frustrated on the “order” level because my tractor ended up accidentally bumping the blocks as I was walking the tractor around and the blocks became unmovable. This happened so many times that I gave up. Perhaps adding some kind of subtle lag to the magnetism of the tractor to the pushing of the block could help solve this issue — if others are dealing with it at least. The accidental movement became frustrating enough that I gave up.
Currently on mobile and played the first 10 levels.
It is very easy to make a wrong move by mistake on mobile, and even if controls were on keyboard, the game really needs an undo button.
Puzzles are nice so far, but the board is hard to read.
1st , a box that is neither red nor blue shouldn’t be a box at all, use an unambiguous grey wall instead.
Having the same visual for unpushable blue and unpushable red is also not great. You could keep the main colour and add a grey checkerboard to convey the locked status of the box, for example.
Having the targets change colours seems pointless and distracting : their blue/red colour is always relevant, and the block colours ne player colour already clearly convey the durent active state.
Blocks over switches are hard to see. Combined with no undo, this is what made me give up L10, even though I’ve visualised the solve path . I’ll retry later on PC, to see how playable it becomes with propper keyboard or game pad.
Thanks for both your feedback. As you may have guessed, this game has been fully developed on PC, with a big screen and keyboard. Accidental key presses very rarely happen there. You may still make a move that you'll soon regret, but that is more a thinking mistake, and I don't mind punishing the player for that.
Hiding the colours of boxes and targets when they do not match the current bubble matches the original bubble idea. You only see a subset of reality, based on the bubble you're in. It also adds a memory aspect to the puzzle experience, which is, I think, a nice extra dimension. However, I can see why some players may not like it, as it hinders the core box moving puzzle solving aspect.
My idea therefore is to support both. You can choose a difficulty level. The hard difficulty is the current game. The easy mode:
- adds undo last push,
- does not hide target colours, and
- allows distinguishing colours of non-bubble matching boxes (by only darkening them)
Thank you for easy mode. Even with it, I still had problems reading the board, especially on level 10 coffee. For better readability, since the boards are small anyway, maybe change the tiles sizes from 8 x 8 to 10 x 10 for example ? (using sspr instead of spr).
I liked the levels with more than two colors the most, especially L15 center.
Single undo is nice and OK on PC, but not enough on mobile. While I understand you don't want the levels to be brute forced, the main problem on mobile is that you can double push or even triple push by mistake. Having undo go back all the steps in the last pushed direction instead of a single push would permit the same "single push" undo spirit without penalizing players on mobile touchscreen.
Lastly, do you mind if I remake your game in puzzlescript ? If you're OK with it, what credits/link would you like ?
If you're curious, I've done it with a few other pico-8 games :
go figure!
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=153205#p
quantum maze
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=156948#p
Trichromat
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=158533#p
Vampire vs pope army
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=161609#p
They all play much nicer on touchscreen mobile for the simple reason that puzzlescript only handles single press orthogonal movement by swipe, when pico-8 has to be able to handle multi-touch for support of games that need it, so it's very easy to press a diagonal by mistake, for example.
@RealShadowCaster, I was ahead of you with the bigger sprites. Here's a preview of the latest version (not yet released).
It's using 16x16 sprites even, which means that levels are limited to 8x8 tiles, but I think that's okay. I think it's possible to make 24 interesting levels at that size, especially given that I plan to add wrapping at the screen boundaries. This enables puzzles without surrounding walls to have an 8x8 area where the player can move (instead of being limited by 6x6).
Based on your feedback, I will extend undo but still limit it to a single push direction. That should be easy.
Feel free to remake this puzzle idea in puzzlescript. You have the rights as I released the code under a CC4-BY-NC-SA license here, and on GitHub under an MIT license. For crediting you can use my name, Erwin Bonsma. Should you come up with some interesting levels yourself, and don't mind me adding them here, let me know.
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