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Sudoku & Puzzle Lovers - seeking feedback on abstract puzzle prototype (Browser)

A topic by NaturalNick created 26 days ago Views: 122 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 3

https://naturalnick.itch.io/pipface

Pipface is an abstract 2d puzzle game about identifying patterns on a grid.

The concept is simple, but I'm worried about how hard it is to explain. Essentially 6-sided dice are unfolded into varios 2d shapes alongside others and you need to identify and color in the dice faces. It follows the rule of 7, meaning that neighboring faces neighboring faces on the same die won't add up to 7. I won't explain too much here - there's detailed instructions in the How To Play menu. The tutorial is not quite a tutorial yet, it's just a smaller puzzle to ease you into it - eventually I will add a more guided tutorial.

I'd love to get feedback on whether this concept is just too confusing. Or if it was confusing at first but got the hang of it quickly. I'd appreciate any feedback. Thank you!

The concept made sense enough to me.  The easy levels seemed to usually take me between 2 and 3 minutes; I did one medium level that took a little more than 15.

I like the simplicity and cleanliness of the interface.  A couple times I thought I wanted a sort of "negative" marker, to mark that I knew a block couldn't be a particular color, but that would probably over-complicate the interface too much.  

It was easy enough to see in the normal browser area:

When I tried "fullscreen" mode anyway, it didn't expand to fit the screen (in Firefox 140.13.0esr,  1600x900 display).  


When leaving fullscreen mode, it wound up clipped by the available space in the browser.


Going back to fullscreen gave the same result as the first fullscreen attempt; refreshing the page was enough to fix the sizing outside of fullscreen mode.

Wow derekniederhut. Thanks so much for playing my game and for the detailed feedback. So, so much appreciated. Cheers!

(1 edit)

Hi, I played your game and its pretty impressive! I like the concept behind it! I tried some easy levels which I completed in about 2 minutes. However I was not able to complete a Medium or Hard level. 

I might just be figuring out the puzzle still, but I feel like I have not quite figured out the 'rules' on how I can complete the puzzles without guessing, especially when the invisible faces appear in Medium or Hard levels, I felt like I had to guess a little to get things right? For me the best puzzles are the ones where you do not need to guess, and everything can be found based on the rules that are inherent to the puzzle. It might be a skill issue thou.

A small potential improvement could be ways to annotate! In most online puzzles, you can annotate things you know which can then help you figure out the puzzle. In your game I felt like I was kind of missing this. Two examples:

- When two faces next to each other add up to 7, I wanted to kind of place a line "|" in between them so it was clear that these two numbers should never be in the same color group.

- For two faces with the same number I also wanted to annotate something. For example, you know that two faces with the same number (for example 6) will never belong to the same color group. It would be nice to also be able to annotate something so this can be clear. I currently did this by just marking them with different colors.

Anyway, a very good concept for a puzzle game!

Thanks for playing my game!

The Medium and Hard difficulty levels are challenging and a leap from Easy, but they are solvable without guessing. That's the cool thing about it. Once you get the hang of placement rules, you can piece together which faces go with which group. Sometimes you might have two options for a 3-pip that both work. You could make an educated guess, but if you move onto other groups and come back to it, the answer is usually revealed.

I will admit, hard is diabolical haha. Doable, but it hurts the brain.

I like your ideas for annotations. That sounds like a clean way to do it especially since hints sort of operate in a similar way.

Cheers!