I haven't been able to get as much work done as I wanted to on this month's design challenge due to having to go back to POLYPAINT to prepare it for a trade show, but I have been able to make a decent amount of progress. Thus far, I've gotten things to a point where there are a few playable puzzles. I'll break down one of them here in this week's article, and I still have about a week of work left on this project before May is over. I've really enjoyed working on this project and, although it's nowhere near my standards for a playable demo, I think it has a lot of potential and promise. I'd love to come back to this project at a later date and continue developing it.
Here's an animation of me solving the puzzle:
The goal is to start with the node "A&B" (shown at the bottom) and transform it into "B&A" (shown at the top). The first thing I do is try to feed the node directly into the output machine at the top of the screen, which fails (when a machine turns red, it means the input is invalid).
So, I first use the "&OUT" machine, which breaks down any node containing "&" into two nodes. In this case, the "&OUT" machine will break "A&B" into the nodes "A" and "B" respectively.
Next, I take the outputs of the "&OUT" (which are "A" and "B", respectively), and I feed them as inputs into the "&IN" machine, which joins the two inputs by an "&". However, we don't just want to feed them in blindly, otherwise we'll just get the same node we started with. Thus, I flip the inputs. I feed "A" into the right side and "B" into the left side, and the result is "B&A", which is exactly the result we want.
Obviously, there's a huge gap between this and the finished demo. There are so many features I haven't developed yet that I wanted to be there. I wanted there to be animations showing the nodes moving from machine to machine rather than just having the machines change colors when they receive the correct inputs. The mechanics aren't complete, either. In an actual level, all you would see is the node at the bottom ("A&B") and the output machine at the top ("B&A"). It would be up to the player to decide which other machines they want to use to achieve the goal.
So, there's still quite a lot of work to do, and I doubt I'll have a finished demo I'm happy with by the end of the month. Having said that, I'm very happy with what I have so far in general, and I'm excited about this game. I'm going to continue developing as much as I can. See you in a week!
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