On/Off - A game-y puzzle-y experiment

Game Ideas
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Hey Devs,

We’ve been working on some new game concepts in the office, and today we quickly coded and tested a little puzzle based on the old Lights Out game from Tiger. We installed it on a bunch of Blinks and had a real interesting time trying to solve it. Check out the repo here:

The aim of the game is to get all Blinks to turn off. Clicking any Blink will reverse the state of it and any neighboring Blinks. If you see some red and blue flashes, don’t worry, that’s on purpose. Also, if you’re using old-school dev-Blinks, you may want to set the dim on line 40 down to like 10.

We found that it was really easy to solve puzzles at 6, interesting at 10, really difficult at 12, and essentially impossible at 18.

If you get a chance to play around with this, let us know! We’re interested in hearing people’s opinions about this mechanic.

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@danking222 …hehehe, I have way too much fun with these simple little games. Thanks for the fun! I like it, but I’m also easily entertained! :star_struck:

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If you win, there should be a spectacular boogy-woogy that happens! OMG, they just sit there and don’t celebrate your success with you. So not Blink-like! :crazy_face:

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@WillowDreamer A good way to learn to code is to learn by doing a good example of this might be to take the game code above and add a winning LED’s blink routine, if you get stuck then you can always ask for help here.

I hope that helps @WillowDreamer

Lee

(P.S I hope this post comes over as welcoming and well meaning, I find it hard to do in text)

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Hi @lsallen,

Thank you for the suggestion! I think I will do exactly that. I was also thinking last night that it would be cool if the blinks gave you a ‘rating’ or a score. For example, if it took you less than X moves they would light up green meaning you got an Excellent Rating, etc. I wonder if there’s a way for the Blinks to know how many Blinks are connected? Because the score rating would change depending on that.

Anyway, to start, I’ll add fun lights when you win!

Thanks for the encouragement.

Dawn

P.S. It did come across as you intended. I really appreciate that you spoke up.

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You are most welcome @WillowDreamer and I would like to see how you progress with that too, I will try and provide help where I can as well and am sure others here will do too. The rated scoring sounds intresting yes and if it can be pulled off certainly encourage replaying for perfection, I am not sure but if anyone knows it be any of the Move38 people.

Excellent ideas, if you would tag me in future posts on your progress that would be great.

Thank you,
Lee

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@WillowDreamer move counting is doable, but can be a little tricky depending on the kind of game play. I know one of the early assignments during the 2018 Move38 summer game design internship was to make a move counter such that all Blinks are aware of the number of moves. The first step was to define the start and end of a move and then make sure that the highest count propagates across all Blinks. I have a feeling it is in one of our github repos, and if not, perhaps a version can make its way back :slight_smile: I know @danking222 laid much of the groundwork for this and does something similar to make sure WHAM! moves from level to level consistently.

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