Lucky Luc
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Just stumbled across this game today: https://www.patricksparabox.com/. The concept feels like it would've been done before, but I can't recall actually playing a game quite like it (I guess Recursed comes kind of close?). It only has a relatively short demo so far, but I really enjoyed what is there so far and I feel like a lot of DRODfolk will do so, too.

mrimer
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Oooh! Neat!

This looks like the "tiny rooms" idea I had for DROD or a spinoff some years back. (Wow...in 2008) I haven't seen this concept implemented anywhere else either but it's stayed in the back of my mind.

I appreciate you sharing.

I'm interested to see what they make of it here.

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[Last edited by mrimer at 01-16-2021 12:46 AM]

ErikH2000
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That's such a clever idea. I love it!

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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mrimer
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I enjoyed playing through the demo puzzles. Looking forward to picking up this game when it's released. From Patrick's twitter feed, sounds like that may not be too far in the future.

I'm guessing ThemsAllTook now has his eye on this.

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[Last edited by mrimer at 01-18-2021 07:50 PM]

ThemsAllTook
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mrimer wrote:
I'm guessing ThemsAllTook now has his eye on this.

Yup. I actually got to meet Patrick a while back and played a very early version of his game, and I've been patiently waiting for it to be done ever since. Should be a really good time once it's ready.

Jordthro
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Hey, FYI everyone--the full game just dropped and based on the Steam reviews (100% positive so far), the dev seems to have it out of the ball park. Really looking forward to playing through this one.

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Meta
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File: FractalMaze.gif (34.6 KB)
Downloaded 83 times.
License: Other
From: Not specified

The concept of fractal maze was first introduced by Mark J. P Wolf in 1995. I am attaching (possibly) the first fractal maze Mark made. By the way, Mark recently published a puzzle book called "101 Enigmatic Puzzles: Fractal Mazes, Quantum Chess, Anagram Sudoku, and More".

It seems that Patrick pushed the idea one step further, and created a fractal Sokoban game. This increases the complexity of the problem significantly. Fractal maze can be solved in polynomial time, while fractal Sokoban is at least PSPACE-hard (a lot harder than NP-complete).

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[Last edited by Meta at 03-30-2022 12:48 PM]

mrimer
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Jordthro wrote:
Hey, FYI everyone--the full game just dropped and based on the Steam reviews (100% positive so far), the dev seems to have it out of the ball park. Really looking forward to playing through this one.

My kids played this a bit last night. Definitely recommended for maze/puzzle solvers, especially for those who like exploring the recursive/fractal problem space. The difficulty curve seemed pretty smooth from what I saw and there were some fun surprises along the way. I like that puzzles typically only require a relatively few steps to solve, i.e., there isn't a lot of superfluous movement involved just to get things in the right place once you know what you're supposed to do. Really nice level design so far. Love the music.

ErikH2000
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Really impressed with this game. The puzzle design is excellent and builds up general principles as you go through.

General principles, E.g. I can push a block through a twisty 1-wide passage as long as I have a matching recursive block for each corner.

As the mechanics are almost completely new to me, I'm enjoying all the rule-making my brain is doing.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
Decent Apps - open source tools for writing and deploying privacy-focused LLM-based web apps.

Gordius
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I just finished the main game yesterday (still some work to do on the final hub of miscellaneous challenges and oddities to get to 100%) and can confirm that this stays good and interesting throughout. Every new region adds a new mechanic to play with. Though mostly they're not new, just newly substantive; in some cases you will have seen them before if you did something that wasn't helpful (usually ruinous) in an earlier puzzle because you didn't have the associated format or type of piece.