I'm really sorry about this

[davidn]

Apparently not feeling like he had unleashed enough suffering on the world, Qrostar - the creator of Hanano Puzzle - has released another puzzle game. This one is called Jelly Puzzle, or something like it, and will be instantly familiar to anyone who played the previous one - it features more coloured blocks and infuriating PxTone music in prime-numbered time signatures, this time with a higher-resolution Worms 2-ish aesthetic.


HOW THE HELL ARE YOU MEANT TO DO THIS

Have fun with this one, because this time around, non-Japanese speakers don't even get the benefit of instructions! Left-click to move a block left, right-click to move it right. Blocks of the same colour (blue, not-blue and other) placed adjacent to each other merge together. That's all I've been able to work out so far. The solution to level 1 is not among these things.

I'm not 100% sure as to the goal of the game yet (though it's probably to eliminate all the 1-block pieces), but after the last one, I think the only thing this author would ask you to do with jelly is attempt to nail it to the ceiling.

Get it here or here - and say goodbye to your brain.

Comments

[xaq.livejournal.com]

As much as I'd love to dive into this, I'm afraid I have prior engagements: Submachine 8 has finally come out. (http://jayisgames.com/archives/2012/09/submachine_8_the_plan.php) Been waiting for this for almost 2 years.

[kjorteo]

Five levels down, and this is some sort of attempt to live up to your being the voice of Murderbeaks, isn't it?

[davidn]

Solve this puzzle in the next thirty seconds, or... hohoho.

[davidn]

I really wish I hadn't posted that.

[davidn]

You know, in hindsight it's almost embarrassing how insultingly easy the puzzle I posted above seems... and that was only yesterday. This is why writing puzzle games is so difficult - when you know the solution, there is absolutely no way to go back to knowing what it's like looking at a puzzle for the first time.

[premchaia_pre4]

(very approximate) “The rules are simply explained. Below, there are colorful jellies. Left clicking moves left, and right clicking moves right. When the same colors of jelly touch, they cling and become one. To clear the level, put all jelly of the same color together. You can restart any number of times. That's all. Good luck⁓ (It may be much harder than it appears…)”

I've finished level 1 now.

[premchaia_pre4]

Once you get to level 4 (again very approximate): “Here's what we know up to here. Once-clinging jellies cannot be cut. There is no way to lift jellies.
The motion of jellies pushes on neighboring jellies. The undo button restores only one state.”

[davidn]

Well, thank you so much :) Helps not a jot with my current situation, but it's nice to know that I'm not missing some amazing property that suddenly makes the game able to be completed by mortals.

[premchaia_pre4]

Level 7: “Stationary jellies do not move.”

(I suspect that's the last one.)

*peers at your current situation curiously*

[davidn]

Thanks, game - very helpful!

I'm on level 8 now, though I can't remember how I solved level 6. This one may take some time.

[premchaia_pre4]

You're awake! I just got to the beginning of 10. 9 says “Dark blocks also move.” 8's solution (at least the one I used) involves n gjb ba bar fgnpx naq n punve.

(appended) There's a level that combines the new mechanics from 9 and 7. o.o

(appended 2) 10 took a bit. 11 through 15 were pretty easy. 16 is amusing…

[davidn]

I felt very good when I finally worked out the solution to 8 :) It - like so many of the other levels - involves breaking the pattern to do something quite unexpected...

I was similarly flabbergasted when I saw the... affixed-mobile mutant! Thankfully, that level only had one configuration in which it was possible to join the yellows around the block, but... I fear what's to come. Once I got into the mindset, I was able to get through another run of levels fairly easily. I think I'm on level 15 now, which would have been a fairly benign bridge-building puzzle in any other game.

[(Anonymous)]

JD again, I knew you'd pass this along to your chums here. You sure must really hate them...

Also I made it up to puzzle 8 and had to stop as it made me want to start crying after a while. It took Hanano until puzzle 20 or so for that to happen and the person who got through all 20 stages said it is a harder game so... yeah.

I liked having my life back too.

Also completely on the wrong post but I skimmed through some of your Hatoful vids and you all have the most wonderful of personal issues to even try this :)

[davidn]

Believe me, from a skim of the videos you don't even know the beginning of the personal issues involved ;) This game is hardly the worst thing I've done to most of them (the worst thing being cutting some of them to bits in the Hatoful videos).

I thought I was doing quite well for a while, as this time I completed the first level in under half an hour - but puzzle eight! Think of us stuck back here at puzzle 6, which is clearly not possible. Even though this is exactly what happened on every level of Hanano - the cycle of looking at an impossible puzzle, trying it anyway, learning what it expected you to do, knowing that was impossible and trying it anyway, and eventually clawing a way to a solution before it all started again in the next level.

It's certainly interesting playing it after Hanano, not being able to swap things around and having the puzzle come from ordering things left and right instead of lifting them up.

[(Anonymous)]

Oddly enough with puzzle 6 I didn't touch anything and just stared at it for like 5 minutes, then got it on my first attempt. I felt sooo smart... and then 7 comes along and adds a twist to the formula that seems like a terrible harbinger of brain pain. Hope you get to see it soon!

I think the experience with Hanano, while helping in terms of being familiar with some of the basic design, might be a bit of a detriment as I keep looking for ways to elevate blocks like in that game and it simply doesn't seem possible in this game.

...Much like puzzle 8 :(

[davidn]

Yes, I... would have thought that eliminating the possibility of lifting blocks would make the game much easier as it was one less thing that you might be expected to do! But taking away the ability to swap blocks over has more than made up for that... now, things that appeared simple in Hanano are the impossible-seeming tasks.

When I first started up the game, I would never have been able to solve them just by looking, mostly because the red and green colours are near-identical in my vision... but as the game's graphic assets are lying around out in the open in the data folder, I was able to shift the colour of green more towards cyan so that I could tell the difference. That's the kind of game customization I like :)

[premchaia_pre4]

Gurer'f n yriry gung pna or fvtavsvpnagyl uneqre vs lbh erzrzore Unanab Chmmyr jryy, and that's really tricky to express at all without giving it away; to be maximally safe, return to it after completing^Wtrying level 18 for a while.

[(Anonymous)]

...and I finished up puzzle 8 right after posting that. This means this journal is a good luck charm. I will make a note to abuse this fact in the future.

[davidn]

It does seem that declaring being stuck on a level helps greatly in getting past it! I'm now stuck on level 8 and experiencing the same symmetry block that you were - I know that one of these groups has to slide over the other, but unsure how...

Unless...! Hang on.

[davidn]

Yes! Breaking the symmetry was the way to go...

I can't marvel enough at how incredible Qrostar's puzzle design is, setting things up so that a solution appears to be apparent each time but then having you learn to completely go against your own expectations and find a hidden way that is nevertheless completely logical... and to do that on every single level.

I have to wonder if he has some sort of solver/algorithm for designing these (like I tend to use for my own puzzle games to check how unique my solution is) or whether he just has an astonishing raw puzzle-setting talent...

[premchaia_pre4]

You more or less always have to break the symmetry in cases like that; the question is how. My mathematical intuition suggests that there's a deeper reason but I don't have a full grasp of it.

[davidn]

I should mention that everyone who's commented on this post but me did complete all fifty levels of Hanano! Although it did take varying degrees of anguish to get there.

[kjorteo]

beat 11

12 is absurd

sleep

[premchaia_pre4]

A side note^*: this might be a test release—note the 「かり」, which I suspeeect is to be interpreted “temporary/transitional/provisional”. So there's that.

(^* I feel like I should be apologizing for posting so many comments in a row, but it's not clear what else I'm supposed to do except for batching the text up, which doesn't really work because invariably someone else will get to it first or I'll end up waiting for a week just in case new information appears or something else terrible will happen.)

[davidn]

Yes, I think that Hanano was in a temporary state as well when we played it, though perhaps slightly further on - he seems to release things declaring them not-quite-finished and then never quite get around to declaring them complete. But they're still brilliant :)

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I entertained myself with puzzle 3. Now no more of this.

No.

No.

[davidn]

I keep telling myself that - then starting it up again five minutes later.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Well. . . .I mean I won't uninstall it just yet. . . . .

[premchaia_pre4]

Wait a minute. Jelly isn't all that dissimilar to pudding.

(“Jealous Puzzle” would be the obvious title mutation, given… well, you know.)

[davidn]

And the point of the game is to roll it all together like some sort of... pudding god.

[premchaia_pre4]

I decided for tradition's sake to mechanical-search level 19, in C instead of Lua this time—and as before, it found that I had gotten the inferred constraints of the solution exactly right but had missed one sequence that actually made them possible. Level 20 was easy. There.

Whrf!

[davidn]

Oh, so by brute-forced you didn't mean you just manually tried every available move...! What kind of thing are you writing to solve them?

[premchaia_pre4]

The kind of opaque C that I would avoid knowingly putting into any kind of real production application!

Er, which is to say something like this. Or there's the Lua for Hanano Puzzle ^#29. I'm told that academic scientific programmers tend to write like this even when they're not half-asleep and doing complete one-offs, which is a bit scary…

(I did both of these, as I recall, without having had any coffee yet that day, respectively, which tends to leave my thoughts kind of meandering.)

[davidn]

Do you... realize that you re-wrote the entire mechanics of these games (minus interaction and display) in one morning each, pre-coffee? That's... not a normal thing!

I'm impressed with the jelly19 engine... I think I would only have been able to do it in a much more verbose way. Your C code is actually much more understandable than most I've seen, though, mostly due to the presence of vowels.

[premchaia_pre4]

Well, they're not particularly complicated games in terms of actual physics!

hana29 is actually a strict subset, since I didn't need more than one wide block, more than one flower, or more complicated shapes for just the one part of the one level. I think jelly19 implements the whole thing though, because level 19 of that game is complicated enough to need all the physics. (Well, it doesn't need multiple colors, but it felt better to put that in anyway.) I remember I ran it on level 20 afterwards (just altering LEVEL_DESC) out of curiosity, and it found a solution similar to the one that I'd used, but better-optimized in moves, as one would expect from a mechanical search.

Some of the opaque and/or sharp edges about the C are: my affinity for bit-twiddling showing through in the use of bitmasks for sets of small integers (the use of which is not described nearby and the limits of which are not enforced); the State type packing a block ID and a color into an 8-bit value resulting in some fragile shuffling of unsigned integers with unobvious interpretations; some crufty subexpressions that aren't factored out (like '1' + (foo - MIN_BLOCK_ID)); the weird superfluous union of a 2D and a 1D array in Board; and just a general lack of semantic documentation. But it's sort of to be expected in context, I suppose.

[davidn]

If you understand it and you don't expect anyone else to want to ;)

My own solver application (which I can now just use on arbitrary classes that extend State, which describe a game situation, the available moves, how to transition from one to another and whether this state is solved) started off in a rather similar way... it was written for a very specific puzzle (the Knight's Tour, actually, which I didn't look up the algorithm for). The class for sliding puzzles has now expanded to being able to handle puzzles with any shape and number of pieces, with any number of goal pieces.

[davidn]

(Which still counts as having solved it with your own ingenuity! So I tell myself every time I do the same for a sliding block puzzle in Professor Layton.)

[(Anonymous)]

*still JD*

If I have to suffer through the sliding puzzles in Professor Layton games then everyone else should as well!

Also I'm posting to say that I'm hopelessly stuck on puzzle 20 and then I'll just wait for the magic to happen...