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Show HN: Slices – puzzle game

slices.ovh

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Re: Show HN: Slices – puzzle game

#31
post #12

I feel like I've played this before back when it was a flash game, is that true or is it just the awesome retro flash feel it has to it? :) Great though! Now I must waste some time on this.

Reminds me of mobile games ('Fruit Ninja' comes to mind) ... Having said that, there used to be a cottage industry of remaking old Flash games for mobile (and making a ton of money from that). Lots of great ideas in those Flash games.

Re: Show HN: Slices – puzzle game

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's one of the most fun puzzle games ever. But it's not a mobile-style quick play game like this where you solve a series of puzzles. It's more of a world you walk around where you find the puzzles sitting around in the world waiting to be solved. But without spoiling anything, there's a lot more to The Witness than just the obvious puzzles in the world.

And how long is this game? I mean for weeks, maybe months?

I personally completed the main game in about 20 hours, but there’s lots of optional stuff if you want to keep going.

Re: Show HN: Slices – puzzle game

#34

Fun at first, but between level 7 or something and at least level 15, it's the same problem over and over (sure, positions change a little bit, but the method is exactly same). I wonder if it changes a bit later, but even if it does, it would be cool if some of these redundant levels were removed so people don't get bored. Edit: level 17 is a little bit more interesting (albeit being the same thing) but level 18 and…

Level 21 gets interesting :)

Re: Show HN: Slices – puzzle game

#36

Fun at first, but between level 7 or something and at least level 15, it's the same problem over and over (sure, positions change a little bit, but the method is exactly same). I wonder if it changes a bit later, but even if it does, it would be cool if some of these redundant levels were removed so people don't get bored. Edit: level 17 is a little bit more interesting (albeit being the same thing) but level 18 and…

It's hard to make one-size-fits-all. If you figured it out, then I think it's fairly quick to get through the ~10 problems. If you hadn't figured it out yet, then it's good practice, and then the game doesn't get too hard too quickly.

Re: Show HN: Slices – puzzle game

#37
Since some people are complaining about the difficulty curve, you could randomly generate puzzles and rate them, and players, with Bayeselo (or similar; like chesstempo does). Then you have to use this ratings data to somehow discover how quickly to increase the difficulty of puzzles presented to the player (for example, perhaps select one with a 0.8 prob of success every time).

Actually, thinking about it some more, a player's rating should increase over time as they learn, while a puzzle's (true, latent) rating should be fixed, so you should allow for that.

Edit: love the game though, nice one!

Re: Show HN: Slices – puzzle game

#38

I got to level 20 or so and had figured out a working algorithm for two cuts whereby you would cut off 1 in the first cut and then find a good angled second cut to split off all the remaining pairs. This got a little more complicated when it went up to 3 cuts though... There has got to be some math theorem to generalize a solution to n swipes.

https://mathworld.wolfram.com/PlaneDivisionbyLines.html might be related.

I think it got really complicated when the initial shape was not convex. If its convex initially,then at best you can split all the groups in two, and in most of the puzzles you had to split all the groups in half (possibly not evenly if the group is odd) because you the number of lines you were allowed to make was roughly ceil(log_2) the number of dots.

But when its not convex you can potentially do better than just splitting all groups in half, and i found those the most challenging levels (i think it was either 20 or 21 that was like that)

Re: Show HN: Slices – puzzle game

#39
post #37

Since some people are complaining about the difficulty curve, you could randomly generate puzzles and rate them, and players, with Bayeselo (or similar; like chesstempo does). Then you have to use this ratings data to somehow discover how quickly to increase the difficulty of puzzles presented to the player (for example, perhaps select one with a 0.8 prob of success every time). Actually, thinking about it some more,…

Though it looks like these puzzles are far from randomly generated - they're quite artfully put together.
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