📯 Apologies if your RSS reader got a huge dump of duplicate entries. Stuff is happening on the backend. Unfortunately out of my control.

🕹 Play SRD 0.17

I've still been working on SRD whenever I get a spare moment.

I fixed a bug where a charged-up Slime (blue critter) was able to walk across lava when it shouldn't've been. This was an autocomplete mishap: The rule is that nothing in the AnySlime class can move into a lava tile, and if it tries, the move is cancelled. AnySlime was supposed to include SlimeCharged, the powered-up version of Slime who can skip across water when it kisses Goo (orange critter). But I didn't notice that it autocompleted to SlimePad, a new entity I added for a new fusion mechanic.

Fusing makes slime and goo powerful, but unstable. They can eat any normal obstacle, but encountering a solid wall causes them to explode back into their constituent parts. (the mechanism by which the slimes re-appear in the fusion device is currently unknown.)

This image is hosted on catbox.moe, since imgur doesn't allow webp uploads, and I don't know a good place to host an Mp4 for hotlinking. I think some ISPs block the host, so let me know if you can't see it and I'll figure out something else. (Puzzlescript generates animated GIFs, but the difference in filesize between a GIF and an Mp4 or WebP is more than an order of magnitude, so I gotta crunch it down.)

I keep adding more new mechanics, even though I said the rules I had would be enough for 100 puzzles. That was before I decided that every level would have a bonus coin you can pick up that has to be slightly trickier than finishing the level. It's a lot easier and more fun to introduce new rules than to figure out how to use the existing rules in a new clever way, and doubly so when I have to do it twice per level.

Obviously this isn't sustainable (I don't want it to get too complicated, and I'm running out of ASCII characters I can use to represent new objects) so I'm going to have to buckle down and do the hard work. The upshot is that adding a couple more rules means I now have more headroom to combine rules in interesting ways, so I'm not sorry I added them. I don't know if these 17 puzzles will represent the order they appear in the finished game; I may space them out with some more smaller-scale puzzles, to give the player some breathing room before they have to learn something new.

With ADHD it's really easy to give up on a project like this when I don't have enough time to satisfactorily work on it, and I'm glad I keep remembering it's there. I think I'm going to shoot for 50 levels before I call it done. All I need to do is make 1.5 new puzzles a week and I'll get there by the end of the year, and that's definitely doable. Hang in there, m;. Eyes on the prize 😤 🦝