Fun stuff! I appreciate the work that went into the visual clarity of everything, it was all very intuitive at a glance what was going on at each layer.
I agree that the sokoban-ness can cross the line into tedium, especially with levels with a lot of moving parts or limited spaces. Halfway through development I had second thoughts about the direction the game had headed when I realised that more than half of the levels could technically just be drag-and-drop! Ultimately I think I wanted to keep the feeling of moving through the world, and maintain the foundational idea of a sokoban where the final placement is the puzzle instead of the path to get there.
Amusing side note, the first test version of Shard was horrifying with how tedious it was to move everything around (back before the yellow 'x' tiles were added to increase the play space), so I'm very glad my testers shook some sense into me, resulting in me reworking the entire area haha.
Happy to hear you enjoyed Totem, that one definitely went through the most iterations to make sure that the tutorialisation and difficulty curve felt right. And glad that the epitaphs felt worth reading, I almost left them out entirely a week before release because I wasn't sure if they quite worked!
That sounds about right! Might pass this bug report along to the PuzzleScript Plus dev as it seems to be an issue with PS+'s 'goto' command in particular, and how it interacts with user state history. Thanks for looking into that.
The itch.io desktop app allows you to download the game to play offline. Though as far as I know there's no way to do this directly from your browser (the downloadable option is removed when you set a game to be playable in-browser for some reason).
Currently no, I assumed the player wouldn't need to go there a second time haha. If it helps, all the Credits info is replicated in the Thanks To section of this itch.io page anyway!
Reworked the level one last time haha. The issue was narrowed down to an odd interaction that the '8' Totems have when a loop is introduced. While I couldn't find a nice solution for the bug itself, I've changed the level so that that particular loop shouldn't be able to arise anymore. Thanks for the bug report!
Thanks! Yeah Totem can feel quite daunting and open-ended at times. The solve method of that area is mainly focused around search heuristics (particularly in trying to narrow the search space as much as possible by identifying and placing highly-constrained or highly-constraining pieces first) rather than a step-by-step logical method, which is definitely not everyone's cup of tea. Glad you enjoyed your time regardless!
All done through PuzzleScript Plus's 'goto' commands! Very useful feature of the fork that vanilla PS cannot do, which enables for non-linear structures such as this one.
Hmm this one might come down to perspective. If you think of the input and output rays and how the input is transformed to the output, then the two terms make sense as-is. But then if you think about the ray itself turning then they are mixed up. I might have to rethink the wording to disambiguate it completely, thanks for letting me know!
While not quite the intended solution, I don't mind this staying in the game because it's an interesting consequence of the ruleset. In fact, there was a potential Pylon-X5 level that made use of that mechanic, but didn't make the cut for the final release!
The main menu itself is actually just a regular level, and the logo is made up of many smaller individually-made tiles. I wanted a main menu that didn't look like a PuzzleScript game, so I'm happy to hear the sega genesis/mega drive comparison!
As for the in-game menu, it's pretty much just a whole bunch of individual tiles that are populated on the screen, and some semi-transparent tiles everywhere to give it that 'darkened' effect. The player movement is disabled, and is instead transferred to the menu dots until the action key is pressed again.
Both are pretty hacky solutions, but gives the cool illusion of actual menus!
Looks like a slightly incorrect assumption about the SPIRE rules. As a gentle hint, I recommend going back through some of the earlier levels while keeping an eye on the gate lights, and make sure you know what causes them to change!
It should just play from your browser. Perhaps click on the game to focus it and then see if the keyboard controls work for you then. If not, trying a different internet browser is another potential option.
Sorry to hear this happened, the engine's implementation of level transitions and win states has a bug, and can sometimes 'wrong warp' you to the incorrect level. Not sure what exactly causes this, but I have a fix on the way that should at least intercept when this happens so that it doesn't take you to the outro.
This game uses PuzzleScript Plus which includes the feature of 'goto' commands. This allows you to define levels with a name, and the ability to add 'goto [level_name]' on the right side of a rule. In my case, the game just has a rule for every valid combination of 5 sigils, and a goto command to send you to the relevant level.
Huh that's strange. There's a bug in the PuzzleScript+ engine where sometimes level transitions behave unexpectedly, so it might be a case of that sadly. Usually the 'wrong warp' tends to happen if you undo through a level change.
Hello! I think you have written down the 2nd sigil wrong in this case. You will instead want the "9"-looking sigil there, hopefully that will work for you.
Progress is tracked only by Garden passwords and Monolith Fragment passwords, so no need to worry about losing progress! You can also get back to the hub at any time (outside of the Intro section) via the X Menu.
Legitimately the most fun I've had with an enigmatic/hunt-style puzzle in a long time! Really loved that every part of it felt approachable, whilst also staying cohesive in theme. Just awesome work all around.
Also I'm delighted to hear that Ultraviolet Puzzle Challenge was an inspiration for this, it's a style that I'm really fond of so it's exciting to be on the receiving end of it for a change!
Cool stuff! I appreciated the puzzle design gradually guiding the player to not take the most obvious route first, and instead imagine other uses for what is given. The final victory lap of sorts was also a satisfying conclusion.
I adored this game when I was younger, playing free Flash games on Newgrounds in my spare time. I was (and still am) completely enamoured by the atmosphere and fragments of story. I love the aesthetic of monolithic architecture dwarfing the size of the player, and of stories that leave just enough to the imagination to continue to spark wonder even after completion. Even though it's quite a short experience, I think it manages to get across everything it needs to and nothing more.
More than a decade later, it still lives on in my mind; It seems that I never truly left Looming.
