Live data from Hacker News

enclose.horse

enclose.horse

211–220 of 242 posts

Re: enclose.horse

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'analytics' and 'surveillance' are not the same thing trying to understand player behavior in the context of a board or video game (though there is some overlap!) is not the same as trying to understand user behavior in the context of social media or purchasing behavior - the data of both of which derive their value from being sold to THIRD PARTIES as a commodity. being able to tune a fun little video game is not the…

Does your opinion change if they use it to train a commercial program to do a similar task?

For me at least, no. Making money by training a model from user data on such a game seems like a perfectly fine thing to do.

Re: enclose.horse

#213
post #64

This is a very cool and enjoyable game. I'd be really interested in knowing what framework/library was used to make it. I inspected the source and can see the game is done on canvas, but can't work out more than that.

Just vanilla canvas + Typescript.

Re: enclose.horse

#214
post #56

Nice game! Out of curiosity, are the daily levels built by hand or algorithmically? Is there some way to measure their difficulty computationally, other than just trying to do it yourself or seeing how many people get a perfect score? I'm also working on a grid-based browser game and both those questions have come up for me, I'm keen to see how other people tackle it.

All the daily levels are built by hand. I struggled to come up with a good random level generator. You can see my feeble attempts in the Edit page (via the hamburger menu) by giving the dice button a few sad clicks.

I did originally try to measure the difficulty computationally by running the solver and timing it, but it didn't really line up with what humans would find difficult. Now I'm just eyeballing it.

Re: enclose.horse

#215

Does each day's challenge come out at a certain time in your local timezone? I have a friend who is seeing day 9 when I can only see day 8. I'd request having new daily maps come out at a consistent global time for the purpose of competing with friends who live in different timezones.

I tried to match what Wordle does, so it should come out midnight in your local timezone.

Re: enclose.horse

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. I don't think the puzzles do this and if they would, I would run a pre-solve pass over the puzzle first to flood fill such horseless pockets up with water, no?

It's not quite that easy. For the simplest example, look at https://enclose.horse/play/dlctud , where the naive solution will waste two walls to fence in the large area. Obviously, you can construct puzzles that have lots of these "bait" areas. Like the other comment suggested, running a loop where you keep adding constraints that eliminate invalid solutions will probably work for any puzzle that a human would want t…

Oh I see what you mean now, indeed:

    Score: 7
    ~~~~~~
    ~····~
    ~·~~·~
    .#..#.
    ......
    ..#...
    .#H#..
    ..#...
However, I think that you do not need 'time' based variables in the form of

    reachable(x,y,t) = reachable(nx,ny,t-1)
Enforcing connectivity through single-commodity flows is IMO better to enforce flood fill (also introduces additional variables but is typically easier to solve with CP heuristics):

    Score: 2
    ~~~~~~
    ~....~
    ~.~~.~
    ......
    ......
    ..##..
    .#H·#.
    ..##..
Cool puzzle!

Re: enclose.horse

#218
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 to this. It's also visually confusing, the gate looks like it's covering two cells. Great game! Feature request: add a button that shows my submitted solution. I'd like to be able to compare it with the optimal solution (so it'd be nice if a single tap could toggle between my submission and the optimal).

It would be nice if the “optimal” view visualized both my solution and the optimal one at the same time, like a Venn diagram.

Just added this, check out "Optimal as overlay" in the settings.

Re: enclose.horse

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have no idea what the optimal solution is, are you 1,10,50 away from it. Would be nice to have some indicator of how close you are before you submit, though I guess that's intentional.

If it told you how close you were then you could just brute force your way to a perfect score every board by trying each square.

But if you remember the best score isn't that approach still possible?

Re: enclose.horse

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collecting analytics like this is effectively the same as play-testing physical board games in-development. People play a game, information is gathered, and the game is tuned in response to that. If zero information were ever gathered, games could not be balanced or tuned for other things like unforeseen problems. Please, show me a piece of software, or game, that is perfect the first time it is made.

It's effectively the same, except people volunteer or are paid to play test. This whole industry really needs a lesson on consent.

Indie games don’t have a budget for playtesting, but they can probably swing a GA account.
Post reply on HN