#just a game of sokoban

[just-a-game-of-sokoban]

Maybe we could use the goal to find the old player

...elaborate?

[patricia-taxxon]

stephen's sausage roll has been extremely influential on indie puzzle games, its the reason for patrick's parabox and can of wormholes. it's like a whole new type of puzzle game where the player is empowered to find interesting interactions and consequences, where every puzzle is a wide open space made to grant you 1 epiphany. but as much as i love those 2 understudies of stephen's, they didn't translate the awkwardness. stephen is himself an understudy of david w. skinner, who designed tiny basic sokoban levels that twisted in knots as you solved them, and sausage roll takes after that, with its horrible cumbersome controls, cramped geometry and fiddly multi-step solutions. make me contend with the space and not just the mechanics until it becomes a world my brain can inhabit and touch

[6ad6ro]

my review of each game in UFO 50: BARBUTA - intentionally "hard and obtuse to reflect the era", but imo it works. haven't gotten far but i really appreciate it. BUG HUNTER - kinda hated it at first, but wound up really liking it once i understood the basics. NINPEK - controls great. appreciate the mr goemon inspiration. but sadly way too hard. PAINT CHASE - a fine game. sorta like pacman. MAGIC GARDEN - a really cool take on snake. took a minute to warm up to it tho. give it a chance. MORTOL - what a cool idea! lemmings combined with a platformer. gets hard fast but fine. VELGRESS - inverted downwell? it's neat. super hard but i'm just bad at it lol. PLANET ZOLDATH - an awesome bitesized roguelike. this game is sick, don't skip it. ATTACTICS - i'm too stupid to play this. but also i don't really want to learn. just okay. DEVILITION - seems more interesting than attactics, but i want to play it even less. KICK CLUB - bubble bobble clone, seems amazing at first. but all too quickly turns into tedious bullethell drop puzzles. after world 2 you'll wanna stop playing. too bad. AVIANOS - hard but kickass strategy game. has game customization and difficulty settings! MOONCAT - a big reason to buy ufo 50. weird and great! BUSHIDO BALL - do you like windjammers? this game kicks ass. gets real hard tho. BLOCK KOALA - i've never liked sokoban and i never will. seems fine if you do. CAMOUFLAGE - didn't wanna give it a chance at first, but it seems alright. lil stealth game. CAMPANELLA - it's probably a fine game but i hate playing it. maybe if it had a healthbar? GOLFARIA - amazing idea executed poorly. i wish i liked this more, but it's annoying to play. THE BIG BELL RACE - campanella combined with super off road (or sprint). better than campanella, but that "touch the walls and die" shit makes it way worse than it's inspirations. WARPTANK - seems cool. i def need to spend more time with it. WALDORF'S JOURNEY - good, cute game. hard but small scale, making it very fun. PORGY - an even bigger reason to buy ufo 50. small scale metroidvania. cherried it. ONION DELIVERY - god, what were they thinking? has so much potential but wayyy too hard. CARAMEL CARAMEL - such a good game ruined by a two-hit gameover. booooooo. PARTY HOUSE - this game is just really really good. hard to explain, just try it. HOT FOOT - imagine if super dodgeball had shit controls. why does my player autoswitch? i may never give it another chance… DIVERS - weird swimming rpg. i need to give it more time, but seems ok so far. (skipped over next 5) FIST HELL - a final fight clone? hell yes! but then i realized it was more like playing final fight on hardest setting with a single credit. aka "not fun". another example of a good game mossmouth ruined by making it too hard. (skipped over next 10) PILOT QUEST - tied with porgy for being my fav so far. zelda 1 combined with crafting. but you gain resources even when playing other games. kicks ass, PLAY THIS FIRST. cherried. (skipped mini and max) COMBATANTS - tbh i heard it sucked so i jumped ahead to it. they were right… (yet to play final 4) ??? - awesome but can't talk about it.

i'll update with the rest of the games once i try em.

[falciesystemessays]

so there's this indie game developer who's been a quiet favorite of mine for the past year. Artless Games. they're a chinese developer who specializes in puzzle games. they have a programming game called A=B about working with an esolang, pretty solid takes on The Witness and Sokoban formulas, and the absolutely ridiculous 14 Minesweeper Variants, which is my comfort game and also getting a sequel soon. this developer is really good at making rock-solid puzzle games with good ideas and great execution. if you are interested in puzzle game design at all, and especially if any of these concepts interest you, i highly recommend you check out their work.

The hitch is, of course, the lack of an artstyle. You could call it minimalist, but the name "Artless Games" shows a full awareness that there's a presentational lack in these games. I kind of admire it, honestly, because these games do stand up without the need for visual flair. And as an indie designer who tends to be pretty limited on assets, I deeply respect a game that shows how you don't need those to make an amazing game.

...But it's not that simple, is it?

A few months ago I went to the yearly Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I learned a lot there, met a good few people, and started to really rethink how I approach gamedev. The thing to understand about GDC talks is that they are incidentally about making good games. The real focus is on how to be successful in the game industry. This often does mean making better games, but it's just as much about confronting how making a good game isn't always enough.

Enter Lenophie, an aggressively French game designer who gave my most anticipated talk, 'Bunburrows': How to Break Out of the Puzzle Niche. She speaks to the fact that, despite puzzle games being very popular among indie developers, it's a pretty small niche in terms of players. To make a profitable indie puzzle game, you have to appeal outside of that niche to players looking for other things. In Lenophie's words, "We treated being a puzzle game like something we had to compensate for." It means not relying on mechanics alone as a selling point. It means giving your game a unique style, or even a story. And it means swallowing your pride as a puzzle game designer and giving players hints, or even letting them skip puzzles. It's not enough to make a good puzzle game, she says. You have to make a good game with puzzles in it.

I came out of that talk feeling like the future of puzzle games was just laid out before me. And I was excited. I'm still excited! The idea of puzzle games extending past their current niche status is a really cool one, to me. But it puts me in a weird spot thinking about Artless again. On some level, I have a deep respect for a game like 14 Minesweeper Variants, a game with even less interesting visuals than normal Minesweeper, for standing on its own as a puzzle game. It was a game built just for me. I think it's really important that games like this exist, that game developers can make a game with a sharp focus that knows its audience and appeals to it fully. But the reality of gamedev as a business complicates matters. I hope every developer working in the puzzle space finds their answer. I hope I find mine. And I hope you, whatever rising star developer is reading this, find your balance.

[bubblingbeebles]

something small but incredible about void stranger is how like. a lot of the late game puzzles make you put the controller down and just stare at the screen for ten minutes.

like. if you told me a year ago there's gonna be a sokoban where you have to solve each whole floor in your head before making a single move, i'd say that sounds unplayable. and yet VS somehow boiling-frogs you into loving it. i would never wish for an undo button in VS.

and yeah, the same effect is writ large in how you have to take notes across multiple runs to find the deeper secrets and everyone here knows that's what makes the game truly great but like. the moment to moment gameplay has to feel good too. the large scale and the small scale have to be in harmony. and VS pulls it off with freaking. sokoban.

[snugglesquiggle]

right, pinned posts

the main thing i've been working on lately is Hostile Takeover, a longform murder drones fanfic about a lesbian killer robot torn between her directives and her own needs. i've been taking a break from that to write Of Commodified Contradiction, a series of shorts focused on the same pairing

my most extensive work, though, is the many writing about Black Nerve, a dark fantasy setting with giant insects wield magic that dissolves life and matter, mutant bat-blood and of course esoteric fungi. there's a couple of novels and LOT of lore posts

i have a website which is probably the best place to see all of my stuff:

but to get a taste of what you can find on that site, keep reading

most people are probably following me for my murder drones stuff.

as mentioned, i write the critically acclaimed J/Uzi fic, Hostile Takeover:

it's a beyond-novel-length enemies to lovers slowburn, and distinguishes itself by pulling it all off without heavy alteration to canon characterization.

most people are probably put off by the tagged ship, but i've received numerous comments to the effect of "i never liked this ship" or "i didn't think it could be done" followed by "but you somehow pulled it off".

give it a shot!

besides that, i've read a lot of murder drones fanfic, and maintain a page on my website dedicated to indexing and reviewing fics that i'd recommend

several of the people following me are writers, who may be interested in know that i've written several essays on the craft of writing. people tend to find them pretty insightful!

i've written many stories other than Hostile Takeover. you can find them on my site; there's too many to list, but in general, i write nonhuman character near-exclusively. (my friends were only so surprised when i became obsessed with murder drones)

still, HT is my most successful work for a reason, and i'm not certain fans of that will enjoy my earlier writing; i have reservations about recommending most of them. A Chimerical Hope is still cool, i think, though its issues are undeniable

the majority of my site is dedicated its overarching setting: Black Nerve, a dark fantasy world of giant sapient insect ninjas and corrupting fungus and gruesome mutagenic blood magic. there's so much going on there that i just cant get into all of it here. not even sure where you should begin reading

lore posts like "In Dialogue With Plagues", or "Lardsuckers and (What Were) Grubsuckers" give you a taste of just how freaky the setting is, and i think "The Duality of Mantis" is a great look at the weird psychology of the dominant species. but there's so many articles i can't list them all

writing is probably what i've done the most of, but i have other skills :3

i've released four albums of electronic music on bandcamp:

and there's more!

i'm sometimes an artist, and there's gallery on my site with over three hundred pieces i've drawn over the years. i mostly draw these weird alien dudes i invented, plus a lot of praying mantises and dragons and pokemon. quality varies a lot and i'm bad about staying in practice, but here are some pieces i think turned out rather well

ok, now is that it?

well, mostly. i have some poetry that's neat, and i recently produced a game demo that's shaping up into something interesting:

but now, that's probably everything of serious note.

if you read through all of that, i love you. thank you for your time and i hope there's something here you appreciated

[burnoutgxrl]

My gf bought me Void Stranger after I got invested on watching her playing the game and yapping about it and after we spend a night watching Connor's video about this marvelous experience of a game. Don't mind my hour count, I probably have 3/4 of it because the rest is me spending the time off screen and forgetting the game was open because I needed some time on a puzzle. After all of these hours, most of the puzzles become solvable, although hard mode (the second or third playthrough you'll experience) have some pretty nerve-racking puzzles.

I never played a sokoban game before, and I must say that Void Stranger not only does its job perfectly, but it also mixes the puzzles with another instances of games when it comes to boss fights (those exists, and the game basically asks you to look deeper on it to find them, and the rewards are everything). Not only that, but Void Stranger also mixes a charismatic set of characters and an amazing soundtrack that accompanies every moment this game gives you.

I insist, please, give Void Stranger a chance if you're unsure if you should play it or not. Also, after the playthrough in hard mode (when you're playing with another character (I'm trying to keep this spoiler-free)), you enter another playthrough with another character and it's not the puzzles the trickier part, but the story is the thing that pulls you to it.

Also, I happened to get to an specific point where the game basically tells you the only thing you can do is start over again and I kid you not, I thought it was figurative, but nope. It was literal and I was struck by many feelings and then I had to start over again, losing the progress (the game, even if you reset the game, saves the little milestones you get), but what else could I do? Forfeit it all to the void and stop playing? Nah, I'll keep playing, I now entered post-game territory and, this game's lore keep expanding, I definitely love it.

Definitely one of my favourite games. Please, give Void Stranger a chance. Play it blindly or don't, although, when you start connecting dots from here and there, you just get wow in your head time and time and time again. Best game I've experienced this year.

[ohandcounting]

Void Stranger Turbo Spoilers Lore Google Doc

This has all information in it from what I can tell, except sprite sheets. With info on hidden mechanics and stuff to get them to appear in the game for yourself. The only thing missing really would be what scores you need for each rank image in [REDACTED] I had nothing to do with this I just haven't seen it shared anywhere on Tumblr yet.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mSXK3tSuVPKn7yVYmy0wwuEgNDnjB8ZN?usp=drive_link

Addendum: Here is a link to a video with (almost) Literally Everything In Void Stranger it has excessive timestamps in the pinned comment, and is not being embedded because the video thumbnail is spoilers in of itself. It's unlisted to prevent spoiling people, don't click it unless you truly have seen everything and you're just looking for the small things you've missed. Or I guess if you hate sokoban with a passion and still want to see what System Erasure did?

[xenosagaepisodeone]

more seriously I do think the character designs and/or visual style of helltaker are really cute and cool, I just think the gameplay is maybe a bit silly. like it's just worse sokoban and then you answer a yes/no question iirc.

the draw of the game has always been the girls so I don't think that's a contrarian opinion or anything. at the very least there is challenge to the gameplay and progression is decently incentivized.

[kawaoneechan]

Some "achievements" a'ight...

So here's me looking at the achievements for NetHack Legacy, a Steam version of NetHack that apparently does not have the original developers' blessing and costs like five dollars unless you're willing to try and find the source code and then build it yourself. And the only reason the source code is there for free to begin with is to pay lip service to the original's license.

What do you get for your efforts? An in-game soundtrack, a CRT filter, some QoL from other NetHack forks, and of course achievements. So I'm looking at the list and...

Hmmm. It seems they couldn't think of any achievements for a roguelike either. That's the whole reason I started looking into the topic in the first place — Noxico used to have 'em for a short while, on my own self-hosted imitation system. There were like... two or three, mostly for testing purposes.

In NetHack Legacy, you get achievements for starting the game, one for each class, and another for having started at least once for each class. How is that worth anything? You expended literally no effort to earn this! You get one achievement for beating the game (good luck) and another for beating it as specific classes, and with various conducts. That's so much effort, statistically almost no NHL player even has any of these.

First of all, beating NetHack is not an easy feat and you're very liable to die trying. Two, beating the game while adhering to various conducts is among the most "proper achievements" stuff I've listed yet, but it's still super hard to beat the game in the first place.

And then there's the "NetHack Master" achievement. Description is hidden but the internal name is `ACH_ASCEND_ALLACH`, so that's the "beat the game all these other ways" achievement, if I had to guess.

According to Steam, "YES!" (the "beat the game at all" chive) has a 0.7% achievement rate. See? Statistically nothing. Specific classes? 0.1%, same as the conduct-specific ones. In case you doubted my words about NetHack being hard.

And then there's the quest and location achievements, which can be gained simply by playing long enough. Be a specific class, you're almost guaranteed to drop into your class' specific quest map.

The only standout I could find was "NetHacker", description hidden, but the ID tells me you get it for cheating in the Sokoban minigame.

Compare all that to Team Fortress 2. The "Crime and Punishment" achievement is earned by playing as a Heavy and killing ten enemies carrying your team's intel. This is achievement worthy because Heavy is slow and whoever carries the intel is likely to hotfoot it the hell outta there. You may even jump the gun and accidentally kill them before they grab the intel, and that doesn't count.

I don't think I need to tell you how different that is from, let's say, finding the Oracle in NetHack, which you are almost guaranteed to just stumble upon. I know this from personal experience with the original.

[just-a-game-of-sokoban]

shitposts? on the daily poll gimmick blog?

[patricia-taxxon]

I've been thoroughly enjoying I Wanna Lockpick on from your mention of it a bit ago, and I was wondering if you've played/heard of Arranger? Relatively recent, but it's an interesting little puzzle adventure game that's got a fun gimmick. Not the longest or the toughest, but the visual style is stand-out. I would personally consider it a "sokoban" but ymmv

Oh dear, I was not the target audience for this game! The structure of introducing a new mechanic, tutorializing it, then giving exactly ONE non-trivial puzzle before abandoning the mechanic entirely, it started to feel like the whole game was a huge tease. I went into it knowing it wouldn't be super difficult but my perspective is so skewed that it felt like i went hours before discovering any amount of friction whatsoever. Also, the whole "no undo but none of the puzzles can be softlocked anyways" deal made the game feel like the puzzles just kinda passively yielded rather than being solved.

I tried to meet it where its at, like at some point in the twitter allegory village I realized "wait, this is mario odyssey" and i kinda got into the rhythm of doing little tasks and exploring and talking to people, but unfortunately i also kinda hate the story and characters. i dont care about the special ray of sunshine Y/A protagonist with a maligned supernatural gift finding out she's actually super special and needs to save the world from apathy, I was grinding my teeth by the end. I don't know if this game was actually for kids or if it was just really fucking wholesome, hard to tell these days.

[s-lycopersicum]

☕️ something you love that you dont talk often get to talk about

Let's see... I really like certain kinds of combination puzzles and sliding puzzles, like Sokoban.

You can do a certain thing in that kind of game where you introduce a new mechanic, then you spend a few easy levels so that the player can "get" how to solve that, then you ramp up the difficulty. Then, you add more mechanics and mix them together in complex ways that can still be solved if the player managed to learn it correctly. The best example of that I can think of right now is Baba Is You.

It's a very engaging way of making the sort of puzzle game that often just gets thrown in as a half-baked minigame in other places.

[sumikatt]

Kind of obsessed with how the Baba is You dev keeps making small sokoban games that are on itchio for free. he could combine a lot of the gimmicky mechanics he explores into a new big puzzle game (perhaps a Baba is Two) but i guess he’s just chilling

[dandelionsprout42]

Captain Laserhawk episodes 1 through 3 review (Minor spoilers)

Just to have said it: People who are checking out the show, me included, while only expecting "Rayman doing silly and funny antics", are in for the Shock of the Year™™©®. This show is pretty dark, and very, very deep social commentary.

References I detected in the first 3 episodes alone: • Crayon Shin-chan. • Black Mirror (twice). • PRC's social credit system. • Rabbids. • Rodney King. • Gestapo(!). • Hypercapitalism. • Job quotas. • Final Fantasy X. • Game Boy Color sokoban games and/or Metal Gear Solid. • Fist of the North Star. • Deepfakes.

Episode 1 was the best in any mature cartoon since Black Dynamite 11 years earlier.

Episode 2 was a huge mess, because at this point it's impossible to tell who are the heroes, who are the villains, and most importantly: what the hell is the boss's motivation.

Episode 3 starts as messy as E02, but then it becomes like, holy freaking cow. Rayman is starting a major character development arc while being alcoholic and the victim of species-ism, and situation immediately prior had major similarities to early Black Mirror and even to the Rodney King riots.

This is not a show for weak souls, and the 16+ rating is fully warranted, yet this may be the most important and revolutionary thing Ubisoft have made since the Wii version of Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 in 2007.

Also worth noting: This is not just some "Far Cry spin-off". In fact it has nothing whatsoever to do with Far Cry beyond the title of the show.

[legy]

random game roundup

Jabberwocky - Free!

sorry everyone. i fucking hate this poem lol

this is a pretty charming zelda-like that likely doesnt have more than an hour runtime. you wander around and kill shit and completely flounder at a sokoban puzzle for 6 minutes. i think the combat is really unresponsive and the weakest part of the whole thing (and having to kill 10 of anything to proceed is weird and not exceptionally well communicated) but the music is great and it felt very nostalgic to play

Camphor - Free!

description of the game straight up says it plays for 30 seconds to a minute and they are not kidding. this is a visual poem about a worm looking to see fireflies. the lack of screen direction consistency drove me insane. just play this to see what i mean

NeuraQaurium - $4.95

Included in Indie Bundle for Abortion Funds

this shit gets me right in the creatures

neuraquarium isnt really a "game" its a neural network simulation where a bunch of fish powered by machine learning react to stimulation in the environment, evolve and generally survive. you have some minor interactions (can place food and change the environment a bit) but its mostly a virtual fishtank. every time i found a favorite they died instantly. but shooting things with laser beams and spinning in a circle was pretty big in my aquarium

Cat Ace - $4.99

Included in Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, Indie bundle for Palestinian Aid

competent arcade-style dogfighting game. there's a bit of depth here but i did really feel like i saw everything there was to see about this game after like... 5 minutes. the visuals are great (i love the 3d effect when starting/ending a run), music and sound effects are godawful, wish i could hold onto the missile powerup for longer because its the funniest weapon

Septiny - Free!

they r not kidding this is a rage platformer

short game where you jump through 3 levels 7 times which each level getting more difficult as you loop around. the jumping was unfortunately not really responsive enough to make this fun to play + i definitely had some unearned level clears where i died and it just moved on anyway