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sudonim posted:I think it would be possible to do procedurally generated puzzles in a similar way that rougelikes have procedurally generated levels. Let's say a sliding tiles puzzle for example: with the right algorithm it should be possible to create randomized starting arrangements for the puzzle with enough rules to keep them from being made unsolvable. Sort of how level-generating algorithms for roguelikes make different level every time but have rules in place to keep the generated level from being untraversable. Microsoft Minesweeper.
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Mar 8, 2015 22:14
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NGDBSS posted:It would be interesting to see a puzzle game where the parameters to puzzles (and thus the solutions as well) were variable. I was working on something like that based off a Molydeux tweet, but Twitter made their APIs too restrictive and I had to scrap it.
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Mar 8, 2015 23:04
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frozentreasure posted:I was working on something like that based off a Molydeux tweet, but Twitter made their APIs too restrictive and I had to scrap it. It probably would have come to fruition if you'd picked another developer.
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Mar 9, 2015 04:04
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I'd love to hear how the background elements of the setting come across, I hope that's in one of the bonus videos coming later on. I blitzed through this all yesterday and today.
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Mar 12, 2015 05:15
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I was thinking about the monolith puzzle, and I decided that even for Phil Fish that seems absurd. There has to be something else to it. Then the simplest and most obvious answer I never thought of hit me in the face: the three heart puzzles represent the three things Phil had to do to create the game. The first puzzle had us translate a series of flashes into binary, and then into a sequence of button presses. Binary, obviously, is the language computers "speak" in, so we could say that puzzle represents the programming challenges Phil faced. The second puzzle had us decode the language system, and then use it to decode a meta riddle and spell out the answer. I think this represents the ingenious levels of creativity Phil had to have to design things like the basic mechanics, the art, the music, etc. The third is the monolith, which could only be solved by brute-forcing the solution. I think Phil never intended for there to be a real solution, and that brute force was what he was looking for, because it represents his own dedication to the game and the diligence required to make it what it finally was.
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Mar 12, 2015 15:00
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I forget where, but in an interview I saw with Phil Fish he got to talking about one of his goals with making this game. Basically that he wanted to bring back the idea of meeting up with people elsewhere outside the game and learning new things through the grapevine. His specific example was the flying mechanic. He wanted it to resemble the kind of thing that you'd hear about at school during the day and then you'd get home to try it out and holy poo poo it actually works. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the whole point of the monolith puzzle was just an extension of that thought. Where it's a giant mystery that promotes discussion of the game and the solution would be spread through that discussion. I like the idea of trying to bring a community experience to an otherwise single player game.
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Mar 12, 2015 15:39
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well it seems now is as good a time as any to give my feelings about this game, i think the idea of 2d platforming in a 3d cube based world is really cool and interesting leading to a intuitive system that requires you to think about how you are going to platform around the world which is awesome and the first half of the game where platforming is the focus seems to show the best parts of the game. Then as the game moves onto more of a puzzle focus at least to me the game seems to fall apart the clues are generally so abstract and often put in areas that require huge leaps in logic to connect what clue connects to what puzzle and that generally only make any kind of sense in reverse just makes it seem as if the only reason anyone found most of the anti cubes is by sheer blind luck i know that i would only be able to find maybe a couple without looking at a guide and then there are the heart piece puzzles (more specifically the metatron puzzle) which at least to me come off as incredibly pretentious but much more importantly seem to be designed completely ignoring the player, if you dont know the things Phil fish knows then gently caress you, you dirty casual you dont deserve to play Phil's masterpiece. I will admit that i may be reading too much into that but if nothing else i feel the game works best when it sticks to what the mechanics were designed for, platforming.
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Mar 16, 2015 06:10
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Honestly, I felt most of the anticubes weren't really that bad. The main things to figure out for most of them are the squiggle patterns that dictate inputs, and the number system. If you've got that, and otherwise just gently caress around in rooms which don't have a gold border yet, you're generally fine. Now, the heart cubes on the other hand are much more obnoxious and obtuse. But I think they're also intended to be.
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Mar 16, 2015 19:47
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There's a few puzzles which are proper bullshit but nearly all of them have some internal consistency that plenty of people did work out. I probably found about half of them without any help and the rest I generally had the right idea but not the patience/mindset to get so I was happy to let the internet fill in the blanks. I couldn't solve a Rubix cube without watching a video but I wouldn't feel compelled to give it's inventor poo poo for not designing a puzzle that I can't solve. Some people have argued that the game wasn't sold as a clever clever puzzle game which is fair enough but on the other hand I saw it as pleasingly surprising (a fairly rare thing in games I think). I thought it pulled off the rabbit hole feeling really well, that there were things you had to work at to understood.
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Mar 16, 2015 22:41
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I'm going to clarify a few things, i feel the problem with the anti cubes is that the puzzles are not very well directed such as with the owl puzzle sure there is hints to the locations of the owls in the house but the game doesn't do anything to lead you there (at least as far as i can tell) the game would do much better by having small hints such as having something that looks like its from the area the hint is hidden in to give you a clue as to where to go. There is an issue with most puzzle games in general in that they are largely based on trial and error and if you happen to try the one thing that works then it seems easy and well thought out but when you happen to try out many different solutions before coming across the correct on then the exact same puzzle seems incredibly difficult and frustrating which is largely solved by having puzzles being properly directed which at least in my opinion in fez are not. And the rubix cube analogy doesn't really work, as you eventually could solve it it may take a lot of time but you could solve it using no outside force, its more like getting really close to finishing a rubix cube and then having someone take it away until you answer a question on a topic you may or may not have ever heard of, its completely unsatisfying and unfair it is not testing you on how well you can problem solve it is testing your outside knowledge which really has no bearing on the situation. I can see an argument about how people view success and failure including how they affect each other(seeing it on a micro scale of i cant complete this puzzle or a macro scale of i cant complete this game) being a large factor on how people react to this kind of puzzle.
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Mar 16, 2015 23:57
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Well the owl puzzle was one I did do. The game is very good at making you think every image is important and so it's not that unlikely that you'd recognise those trees from the paintings on your travels (there are not many trees of those style/colour combos) and from there that you'd happen to be hanging around one at the time of day an owl flies in and make the connection. Or maybe you'd find the tree with no owl, but remembered there was one in the painting and that the paintings had very distinct sky colours. It is vague but that vagueness was part of the appeal to me. Bear in mind that if you're enjoying exploring this game then you'll be passing through the same rooms again and again and each time is a chance for something to click. And yeah analogies are dumb, but personally I'd solve a rubix cube in the same way a 1000 monkeys might eventually mash out a line of Shakespeare; I simply don't have the brain/patience to work it out properly, but I do have the visual memory to legitimately find some owls talking gibberish in a video game. There's a pretty big scattergun approach to puzzle types in Fez and you're going to be better at some than others. None of this really refutes your problems with it but to me it didn't feel any different to banging my head against a puzzle in an Adventure game before relenting, checking a walkthrough and moving on.
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Mar 17, 2015 02:28
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God damnit, why did I discover this LP right when it's ending  Watched it all in the last couple of days, helped me survive a nasty case of flu.Fez is definitely one of my favorite games. I managed to solve most of the normal puzzles if I remember correctly. I think I ended up looking up the owls. As some people said before I also thought the number system is base2 (I'm a software engineer, what do you expect  ). I think I might have looked the real system up as well when it turned out that binary numbers don't work. As for letters... Well, English is not my native tongue so the fox/dog thing was alien to me. I ended up doing statistical analysis on all the text samples and with a bit of bruteforcing it wasn't too bad.The observatory heart piece... I remember recording the entire sequence and counting video frames in search of timing clues  . In the end I tried the "shortcut" solution because I thought it just repeats. Got the piece but didn't realize about the binary. Managed to summon the monolith but of course ended up looking it and the security question up. I had a big Excel sheet with all the stuff but can't find it anymore. I have this though: Also found a gigantic .txt file with something that looks like bruteforcing attempts. I have no idea what that could be, maybe something from the tome artifact? code:
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Mar 17, 2015 21:23
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I meant to get this done last week, but I was busy being kept waiting on another project. Speaking of which, I made a game in 48 hours. Feel free to try it; I'm gonna work on it some more once I finish off the last of these videos. I feel like I kind of spun things out at the end; I really wanted to express how much positivity, hope and inspiration the endings fill me with personally. To be clear, these are just my personal interpretations. Appendix A: The Endings of Fez Pidmon posted:I'd love to hear how the background elements of the setting come across, I hope that's in one of the bonus videos coming later on. I don't know if I have any thoughts that I didn't already share when I came across each new area. I never honestly gave much thought on what the aliens and the owls' roles in the universe are, and the rest I already mentioned; I'd rather let people interpret the world as they see fit, which is why I tried to just put my ideas out as suggestions, not necessarily hard facts. Crumps Brother posted:I forget where, but in an interview I saw with Phil Fish he got to talking about one of his goals with making this game. Basically that he wanted to bring back the idea of meeting up with people elsewhere outside the game and learning new things through the grapevine. He brings it up in Indie Game: The Movie, and I think it's a valid desire in the case of flight.
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Mar 18, 2015 02:42
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omeg posted:God damnit, why did I discover this LP right when it's ending I just played the game as a platformer and solved a few puzzles, then turned to a walkthrough because I'm a giant baby man who absolutely must get every trophy in every game he plays.
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Mar 26, 2015 07:41
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I know I'm not really saying a whole lot, and that most of what I'm saying here is pretty obvious, but I still felt like I hadn't given the music in the game its due; it's so brilliantly composed to match the areas you're in. Appendix B: The Music of Fez Thanks to anyone still sticking around; I've been taking a lot longer with these than I should have, but there's just the one video left. Unless it turns into two. We're almost done. frozentreasure fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Mar 28, 2015 |
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Mar 28, 2015 01:07
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I feel like I could have done better on this and the other appendix videos. I definitely didn't spend as much time as I could have working on it, but I'm pretty much out of free time to work on it, and I want to make sure this gets done so you're not all left hanging for weeks on end. Appendix C: The Puzzles of Fez Side plug: the first track in this video is on Side Z, and is by Aivi and Surasshu, who do the music for Steven Universe. They're pretty good. On another note, congratulations to bobbertoriley, the winner of a free copy of this game you've all now seen in its entirety! Thanks everyone for joining me for this LP; especially thanks for following the main thread rule and finding plenty to talk about regarding the game. It's been fun and somewhat exhausting. I'll take a couple of weeks to shake-shake it off and then I'll be back with something new. Until next time! frozentreasure fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 03:40
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frozentreasure posted:Thanks everyone for joining me for this LP; especially thanks for following the main thread rule and finding plenty to talk about regarding the game. It's been fun and somewhat exhausting. I'll take a couple of weeks to shake-shake it off and then I'll be back with something new. Until next time! Will there, then, not be a video showing what you get for breaking the heart?
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Apr 7, 2015 04:11
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Unless... nothing happens from that? I admit I'm curious as to why there are flecks of gold in the construct. Edit: Oh yeah; what do the villagers say to you? Now that there's a translation of the cube-people's alphabet. Samovar fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 06:40
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Just caught up on the last two parts. Thanks for the LP, frozentreasure  Fair point about the puzzles there, and how they're meant to be extensions on the general ideas of exploration and anthropology. After all, if they're representing relics of bygone civilizations, things of either practical or ritual significance, then it makes sense that they'd be repetitive. Even the number system, one of my personal bugbears, makes sense when you think about it as something that developed organically - after all, we have several ways of writing down certain figures (I can think of three different methods for writing Arabic numeral 4 alone), so why shouldn't they? Something for the thread to talk about a bit (since it's not come up in a video) is translations of some of the game's incidental text. The hub of the Industrial Zone, for instance, has giant number 5s plastered over it and a message also confirming that it is hub number five, so presumably it was the final warp gate to be built. Interestingly, it's never going to be the fifth hub that you find, as you can only reach the Sewers by passing through the Industrial Zone. Paul.Power fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 08:29
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Samovar posted:Unless... nothing happens from that? I admit I'm curious as to why there are flecks of gold in the construct. Nothing else happens, and it's presumably not an issue of people not having found what happens because they had to hack the game to get that far.
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Apr 8, 2015 22:38
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You have amazing skill at both chillness and game commentary. I was completely riveted start to finish and I look forward to your next production.
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May 2, 2015 00:21
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