Games requiring lots of Blinks

Hi.

This is my first post here so take that into account in case I ask something stupid. :slight_smile: I am just starting with Blinks development (even before having any Blinks with me) and I have a couple of questions that I am sure someone will have the answer to.

1 - I assume every game designed so far do not use a lot of Blinks as the minimum configuration, right? What would be the usual number? 8 at most? 10? The reason I ask is because I decided to work on game (not designed by me, but that I always loved) that in its usual configuration would need around 60 blinks. I do understand there are probably not that many people with all those blinks (I ordered 60 in total, but I am probably the exception). Is this just too crazy? This is the game, BTW (https://www.yucata.de/en/Rules/Hexxagon). Note it can be played with less than 60 Blinks, but not much less than that).
2 - I would probably need to use some network flood fill algorithm because at various states I will want to validate the board. Is there a common strategy for that generally used with Blinks?

Thanks in advance.

Ps: I am also working on getting TinyGo (https://tinygo.org) to support Blinks so one can use Go instead of C for development if one so chooses. The advantage is mostly, in my option, a nicer syntax for writing programs as the amount of memory in a blink is so small that most of the nice features Go provide are not very useful in this context.

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Welcome @BGA!

I’ll take a swing at answering these :slight_smile:

Our core set games are designed to enjoy with 6 Blinks since we wanted there to be an easy point of entry. That said, the average user of Blinks has 12 Blinks in hand and soon the average user will approach 18 Blinks. A helpful statistic, more than 75% of our new backers purchased 18 Blinks or more. So while we encourage game play to be lots of fun with 12 Blinks, the direction is clear that there will be space for games that explore more Blinks.

You are in a special club but not alone, and when people are gathering again, you can remember that putting Blinks together allow groups of Blinks owners to play bigger and more complex games, so not too crazy.

There are some good techniques shared here in the forum such as this one.

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@jbobrow thanks!

I guess as I am developing this mostly because I think it has some interesting properties to be used with Blinks and also because I like the game, I guess even if there are not lost of people with enough Blinks to play, it is still worth it. :slight_smile:

Concerning the network flood algorithm, thanks for the code pointer. I ended up implementing my own version but as I do not have any Blinks to try it yet, I have no idea if it actually works. See my other post in case you are interested in checking it out.

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Hi Bruno! We met at the Robomaster S1 meetup at Nvidia a while back.

I see Jonathan has already sent you the link to the distributed task example:

I have also been trying to figure out how to implement detection of a victory condition. The challenge I am finding is that communication is a little slow, so I can’t really check constantly. In “Raid” checking for victory is triggered manually.

Excited to see what you come up with, I’ll test out your code on my Blinks.

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Hey! Yes, I remember you. I guess we will end up stumbling on each other on all forums for these technology-related things, eight? :slight_smile:

Yep. As I do not have any Blinks yet, I can not see for myself but as it uses an IR link for data transmission, I can see it being slow. Right now, I think what I came up with is possibly the faster possible implementation (assuming that the cost of sending the data is way greater than the cost of processing messages, which I assume is true even for something as simple as a Blink).

That is great! Let me know how it goes. I do not expect it to work on the first try. :slight_smile:

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