RoboZZle blog

I wrote about the first month of RoboZZle on my personal blog:

It’s now been a month since I launched RoboZZle, so it is a good time to reflect on how things went so far. It has been a great experience, and the project took up all of my free time and then some.

For fun, I’ll discuss different aspects of RoboZZle and assign each a letter grade.

 Continue reading here.

I’ve been gradually rolling out new features, most of them based on the feedback that I received via this blog and my personal blog.

The features that are live include:

• Forums
  Now you can discuss puzzles with other RoboZZlers, so long as you don’t directly spell out the solutions. The forums are now functional, but there certainly is a lot of room for improvement. Most of all, I would like to integrate the game itself with the forums in some interesting way. Perhaps when you solve a puzzle, you will automatically be offered to leave a comment, the same way as now you are asked to vote. And the main page could show the last few comments, to push things further in the “social” direction.

• Solution length
  The page for each puzzle now shows the length of each player’s shortest solution. For example, here you can see that apparently drus solved Space Invader in just 13 moves… It took me pretty long to figure out how to solve that puzzle in 15 moves.

  Now you can compare with other players to see who has the most concise solution. I think that potentially, this could add another interesting angle to the game, and I’m planning to add a scoreboard that lists how many puzzles did each player solve with the shortest known solution.

• Hide solved puzzles
  This one was a no-brainer: it’s nice to have a checkbox in the in-game puzzle menu to hide solved puzzles.

• Stepping “debugger”
  I proudly announced this feature earlier, but then found out that I introduced several bugs, and had to quickly rollback. This time, the “Step” button is available, and the game should also be working right.

• Reorganized in-game puzzle menu
  The old in-game puzzle menu was rather messy, with most puzzles appearing in all categories, but some puzzles (the new and the somewhat-duplicate ones) only appearing in some. I discussed this with czvxbc, and we came up with a new organization that should be much cleaner. The puzzles are categorized into four disjoint categories: Easy, Moderate, Hard, and Unrated. Within each category, puzzles are ordered based on how much people liked them, with the exception of the Unrated category which contains puzzles with fewer than 3 difficulty votes, and is ordered based on the time of posting.

  The one downside is that it isn’t quite as easy to see whether there are any new puzzles, but the Puzzles page is ideal for that.

• Minor improvements and fixes
  The in-game scoreboard now refreshes itself, the statistic pages have been cleaned up, and I fixed one or two small UI glitches.

Now, I’m hoping to look into better forum integration, OpenID support, and perhaps a minimal AJAX client.

I no longer have to wonder whether a brute-force solver for RoboZZle is practical… A Google Alert notified me that hr0nix just wrote a solver that is fast enough even for some Moderate and Hard puzzles. Oh, and hr0nix’s friend Ilya implemented a screenshot convertor to simplify entering of puzzles into the solver.

Pretty awesome, isn’t it? And it invariably leads to a question: “Can a computer beat a human in RoboZZle?” (And the answer to that is probably that it really depends on the type of the puzzle. )

Barry Dahlberg aka stingray took a break from solving RoboZZle puzzles to write up an insightful blog post, Can Games Teach You To Program?

With 48 puzzles solved, Barry is currently ranked #1 out of 409 registered RoboZZle players, so he knows what he is talking about!

You guys asked for it, and here it is: some mechanism to step through a puzzle.

Let me know whether you like it. Also, of course, please let me know if you encounter any bugs.

Just as the headline says: subscribe to the RoboZZle puzzle feed, and you will get fresh RoboZZle puzzles in your RSS reader as soon as they are posted to the site!

Please use the comments below this post to discuss RoboZZle and provide feedback. Do you like the game? Do you have ideas how to make it more fun?

Thanks!

RoboZZle is an online puzzle game that challenges players to program a robot to pick up all stars on a game board. The game mechanics are simple, yet allow for a wide variety of challenges that call for very different solution approaches.

Here is an example of a RoboZZle puzzle, with the arrow added to show the path of the robot:

Since designing RoboZZle puzzles is as much fun as solving them, the game includes an easy-to-use tool to make puzzles yourself. After you create a puzzle, you submit it, and other players will get an opportunity to try to solve it.

In this screenshot, I am just about done designing a challenging puzzle:

Players rate the difficulty of each puzzle, as well as vote whether they liked it or not. When looking for the next puzzle to solve, players can use the ratings to find cool puzzles with the difficulty that suits their current mood.

This screenshot shows the main RoboZZle page at http://robozzle.com:

Players can lookup their ranking, as well as statistics on all players and puzzles on the statistics pages.

In a Web 2.0 fashion, RoboZZle is designed to be a user-driven, social experience. So go to http://robozzle.com, install Silverlight if you don’t have it (it is safe to install), and check it out.