Had a lot of fun with this, great job on the concept and presentation!
Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Show HN: Unflip – a puzzle game about XOR patterns of squares
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: Show HN: Unflip – a puzzle game about XOR patterns of squares
#22I really love how the first few levels teach you about various solving elements and patterns. very well done.
Yeah, that was the idea.
Re: Show HN: Unflip – a puzzle game about XOR patterns of squares
#23Wow... 120 levels... that was hard. I kept getting down to 1 square, and that always stumps me.
Re: Show HN: Unflip – a puzzle game about XOR patterns of squares
#24If anyone wants an extra challenge: think, how would you write a solver for this?
Re: Show HN: Unflip – a puzzle game about XOR patterns of squares
#25Wow... 120 levels... that was hard. I kept getting down to 1 square, and that always stumps me.
wait, did you actually do the whole 120 levels in one sitting? Wow. How long did it take you?
Re: Show HN: Unflip – a puzzle game about XOR patterns of squares
#26Level 60 is a fun one
Ah, yes, the single-pixel level.
Re: Show HN: Unflip – a puzzle game about XOR patterns of squares
#27Very nice and satisfying, but I would suggest ramping up the difficulty a little faster. I got until lvl 15 by just flipping the obvious areas, taking no more than 2 seconds. It's otherwise very cool and minimalist. Edit: limiting it to square flips was a great idea. There are just enough moves to make the answer non-obvious (after lvl 15), but not so many possible moves that you get overwhelmed. --- Edit 2: I just r…
Thanks! And yeah, I've gotten the suggestion to ramp up difficulty faster from a few people. Although interestingly some other people in the comments here say they liked how the progression goes. And that's an interesting little game you made. And I spent quite some time creating an algorithm and solver to find the par for Unflip. I'm planning to release a blog post about it soon
I think if you make the par visible in the "result screen" and add a "try again" option to "next" this could make it more interesting without the need to ramp up difficulty. I think I solved a few cases with a bunch of random shifts, for example, and may have switched to thinking mode if I was faced with that.
Re: Show HN: Unflip – a puzzle game about XOR patterns of squares
#28If anyone wants an extra challenge: think, how would you write a solver for this?
Tangentially related, have you heard of Bombe? It's a hexagonal minesweeper where you write rules to solve every possible scenario. It even checks your rules' satisfiability via SMT.
Re: Show HN: Unflip – a puzzle game about XOR patterns of squares
#29If anyone wants an extra challenge: think, how would you write a solver for this?
(If I'm trying not to spoil anything, do I even post? Maybe I can encourage someone else to have fun giving it more thought.) At least one elegant and efficient answer is within reach for many. The person who first pointed it out to me didn't need to know the relevant branch of mathematics to do so; he intuited the shape of it without the formal terminology.
I'll be particularly curious to hear the pattern(s) in how many solutions there are, and/or the probability of a random board being solvable.
The haptic feedback on mobile is really on point in this implementation.
Re: Show HN: Unflip – a puzzle game about XOR patterns of squares
#30i have a strong quibble about calling this XOR. XOR takes two arguments and one of the arguments here is implicit. The game inverts the square colors, which XORing with "1" will do, but it's not defined whether white or black is 1, it just inverts white and black.