jan_Inkepa
Joined 6 years ago
Karma
1,258
Submissions
418
Member since
Mar 26
makes games. At https://www.increpare.com , twitter: @increpare , and bsky: @increpare.bsky.social
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Comment · 2 months ago
our of curiosity, can you say what your use of it was?
Comment · 2 months ago
> From a human perspective, it's not apparent why, as a large part of the solution is very repetitive. It feels as if there should be a more condensed representation for iterating over problems like that one.
I'm not sure how 'in' you are, you might know this already, but for sokoban IIRC the recommended way is to treat things is topologically - you always do a flood-fill empty space from the player so that the decision isn't whether to go up/down/left/right on this turn but which accessible side of which crate to push. It decomposes quite well, and maybe makes the complexity a bit more obvious? Hmm...
I haven't looked into mazebench, but yes this is very related stuff.
Comment · 2 months ago
There's computational complexity, then there's human complexity. I've thought a lot about this over the years (I've made a bunch of puzzle games, and puzzlescript, an engine/language for making grid-based puzzle games), and the only paper I've read that's made me think 'huh' was "Difficulty Rating of Sokoban Puzzle" by Jarušek and Pelánek ( https://www.fi.muni.cz/~xpelanek/publications/stairs2010-fin... ).
While I have a feeling that subject 'difficulty' is necessarily a slippery concept, they focus on 'context switching' as a key element of difficulty. In sokoban terms - how often you have to alternate between pushing one box and pushing another. This too can be gamed/trivialized, but, when I used it as a heuristic is was very good at generating the most horrifically difficult levels, much moreso than just going for 'solution length'.
On more general notions of complexity. In sokoban terms, the number of crates trumps everything else - for solvers I've written you quickly get exponential explosions with the number of crates. Nothing else really is significant.
I've also been working on solvers for more general classes of these games (puzzlescript games) and it's surprising how powerful generic solvers still are. PuzzleScript+MIS https://dekeyser.ch/puzzlescriptmis/ (not by me) is one powerful tool that uses PuzzleScript as a basis. I've worked on speeding up the solver a bunch (not currently integrated), figuring out good general heuristics for different kinds of games ( https://github.com/increpare/puzzlescript-labs has various experiments in this direction, including a modded version of PS+MIS). It's a nice optimizaiton problem for focusing on making numbers go down - there are lots of games to test on.
Comment · 3 months ago
i see pablodraw up top - you know your stuff and have good taste!
Comment · 5 months ago
I was on a forum that had one member who is very knowledable on the subject of the forum. But now he...only ever responds with "I asked gemini your question, here's the answer:", and it's a real shame. His online person has become totally hollowed out. (These aren't like newb question threads, these are conversational topic threads). I think he doesn't know or care how valuable his point of view was. -_- Some communities aren't affected by this AI stuff negatively at all, but I suspect some communities (and people) are getting gutted.
( When he starts his own threads, they're now of the form "I asked gemini question X and this several-page-long attached markdown file is how it answered" )
Comment · 5 months ago
a tricolon crescens ^^ https://latinaadvitam.blogspot.com/2007/02/poetry-device-of-...
Comment · 6 months ago
Here's an editorialized title in the other direction: On Roblox everyone can make games and play them with their friends.
Here's my suggestion for an amendement:
"Roblox devs will need plus membership to publish to young users"
Comment · 6 months ago
(Yes, I would recommend a change of title.)
The step is a significant one, and Roblox has taken one other measure recently, restricting chat a lot for minors (https://x.com/Roblox_RTC/status/2043723470899437623) . I think this is a move to satisfy people concerned with child safety, not a cash grab. I think RB hq probably know they're making tradeoffs of keeping parents happy, while devs will be annoyed/fewer. But everyone can still make games and play them with trusted friends. Likely damages the network effect (Roblox's multiplayer aspect being one of its best parts), but oh well.
Comment · 9 months ago
>Hence you gain nothing
You're saying you get nothing, but you perhaps underestimate how time-consuming and expensive even the easiest company shut down in the Germany is. (I had a very smooth process winding down my company in the UK - you have my very sincere sympathies that things are a bit rockier for you).
>if your main shareholders and directors are physically in Germany and you reseat the company to where-ever, Germany is going to see and act like this is a de-facto German company. Hence you gain nothing, you get more paper work.
Looking online, here's a german tax-advisor who talks about the strategy of liquidating your company by first merging it with a uk company, saying you can close a company in 4-6 weeks by this process (though they recommend against it after brexit for liability reasons, but mention Ireland and malta as options). In germany you have a year of waiting, and lots of additional notary/accounts work. (OTOH, I don't know how you get it down to 4-6 weeks and avoid the uk's company house gazette notification period - they must pick a different kind of company - if your fees for closing down a company in germany are going into the thousands (or tens of thousands) for notaries, liquidators fees, and the like).
https://www.stmatthew.de/brexit-gmbh-sitzverlegung
Once again, not my specialty area, I just...wanted you to know that it does happen, is a specialty area of work for some companies, and it's presumably not irrational behaviour.
Comment · 9 months ago
I've been told by a lawyer that a common sensible step in closing companies in Germany is to first...reseat the company in the UK ... (at least pre-brexit - not sure if things have changed). Think of how bad and expensive the process has to be for this extra step to be worthwhile.
Comment · 10 months ago
I'm actually a fan of his game/prototype Painter from 2006 - was just talking about it today.
http://number-none.com/blow/prototypes/index.html
It's very different from his more recent stuff, but charming.
Comment · 10 months ago
(I'm a fan of Kwirk. I had it as a kid on Gameboy, and thought it would have aged badly, but no it's still good!)
Comment · 10 months ago
interactions between the various mechanics in the games likely yield countless surprises, and let you build something considerably more elaborate than thesum of its parts..
Comment · 10 months ago
Puzzle design is his strong point (and the team has several v. good puzzle designers on it), so it's safe to assume there'll be some good ones there. The sheer quantity make me wonder about how the game will be structured - they can't presumably all be stumpers (aka hard puzzles that you'll have to step back from and think about) - maybe there'll be more of a gentle flow between puzzles, like in the Witness, or maybe there'll be lots of optional levels/branching in the game design. I guess we'll see! I'm curious :)
Comment · 10 months ago
>Trying to optimize to some kind of perfect pixel alignment shouldn't be a goal anymore.
If you're trying to display pixel art (or make games with pixel art), being able to have integral upsizing is very useful. Antialiasing doesn't cut it, and the eye notices when you do non-integral nearest-neighbour upscaling and some pixels are the wrong size.