Game about squares

by golergka • 12 years ago

910 189 12 years ago

netcraft3• 12 years ago

I might be dense, but all I see is a square with a triangle in it and a circle, and can't seem to make it do anything. It is throwing a 408 timeout though, so maybe its just under load?

brkn• 12 years ago

You have to move the squares on the circle by clicking on the square.

netcraft3• 12 years ago

interesting - its working in firefox but not in chrome 36.

devilsbabe2• 12 years ago

Not working with the mouse on chrome 36. My laptop has a touch screen though and that's working

manojlds2• 12 years ago

I am on 36.0.1985.125 m (Windows 8.1) and it works for me.

devilsbabe2• 12 years ago

Same version and OS. 64 bit but I doubt that would change anything. Strange. Doesn't work with touchpad either

alternize• 12 years ago

not working chrome 38 dev-channel (win8.1) either... works fine on lastest chrome for android beta tho.

bob_george33• 12 years ago

This would probably be the issue I have on my desktop then. For some reason, chrome thinks I have a touchscreen...

laxatives• 12 years ago

I like the game and that it teaches you the rules as you play without needing any explicit instructions. I thought some of the comments between levels were annoying. Also the little flag in the corner indicating you're over the correct target could be a little easier to see at a glance.

Just curious, how do you design these levels? Work backwards from the solution?

edit: I'm a little further in, and I'm starting to think the annoying comment thing is on purpose...

remon2• 12 years ago

Ads are on purpose too but they're still rather annoying ;)

integricho• 12 years ago

I specifically liked the comments between levels, it was obvious what he did there after the second message :)

ppod2• 12 years ago

Are you from the US? I'm from the UK and I really liked the comments too. I really find that people from the US are more likely to dislike humour in this kind of game. Especially Californians.

resu_nimda• 12 years ago

The comments kinda ruined it for me (I did enjoy the "I'm starting to feel like putting jokes between levels was a bad idea" one).

They were alright at first but I started developing a sense of urgency, like I just had to complete a few training examples before some kind of main introduction to the "real game" (which I expected to develop into some form of a puzzle game world, with labeled levels and sections, maybe themes, etc). After more and more one liners (that don't add any substance and aren't particularly funny) I became increasingly annoyed and was trying to pass levels just to get past that phase of the game. After a while I realized that that was the whole game, and my expectations had set me off on the wrong foot, so to speak, and I lost the will to continue.

I do like the concept and the puzzles were enjoyable, but I guess my recommendation would be to leave out the comments that make it seem like they are leading up to some prize or event but never actually go anywhere. The complete lack of indication of the level I'm on and where that is in the puzzle world (Am I still in training, or...?) also contributed to me losing interest.

T-R• 12 years ago

This was the first thing that struck me as well - just fantastic level/game design. Immediately brought to mind the instructional level design from Super Mario Bros - http://www.theoryofgaming.com/gold-standard-for-game-design/

tjtang• 12 years ago

I really enjoyed this game. I went through every level and what amazed me most was the creativity it took to come up with the different levels of difficulty. It's not the repeated stuff you get in Candy Crush. Finding a solution is one thing but designing the levels is a different skill set altogether. We'll done.

remon2• 12 years ago

A very promising start and I'm very much in favor of the "randomly click to learn" approach to teaching the game rules. Can do without the comments between levels though.

GimbalLock• 12 years ago

I like the comments. I look forward to them after each level.

Thiz• 12 years ago

I love this kind of games. Reminds me of good ol' Sokoban.

Where are the mobile versions? I'd like to play it in my iPad.

Kudos.

thisjepisje• 12 years ago

Sokoban rules, you can get it for free here: http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/231/Sokoban.html You need DosBox to play that. But there's probably a multitude of online clones as well.

psawaya3• 12 years ago

I made a web based one a few years ago which I'll take the opportunity to shamelessly plug: http://sokobanjs.com

modeless• 12 years ago

Heroes of Sokoban is a great twist on the concept: http://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=6860122 and Heroes of Sokoban II: http://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=6891949 and III: http://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=7072276

sehr• 12 years ago

Save it to your homepage!

macu• 12 years ago

Cool concept, not a fan of the pointless commentary after the premise was clear (took two seconds to figure out).

ugdev2• 12 years ago

Level 15 drives me nuts

ugdev2• 12 years ago

got it <:)

forgotpasswd3x• 12 years ago

I can't seem to get past level 17. The black and red squares always end up on the wrong sides.

pbhjpbhj2• 12 years ago

You're going to love level 18 then!

bbayer• 12 years ago

I really like the idea and design. I also made a game [1] about squares some time ago.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/swap-boxes/id753811885?mt=8

PeterWhittaker• 12 years ago

With cookies disabled, it tells me I have an "old and rusty" browser. How odd.

(FF 31 on OSX, why do you ask?)

LukeShu• 12 years ago

I also got that with FF 31.

For me, it was because I had dom.storage.enabled=false. LocalStorage obeys cookie settings, so I guess disabling cookies would do that too.

hamai• 12 years ago

Simple and engaging. Nice graphics engine.

outrightfree• 12 years ago

Great game. Was it inspired by the telescope game that was on the Dyson (vacuum cleaner) website a few years ago? Seems to be gone from the dyson site now, but I've linked to a copy in a separate submission [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8092648

pseudometa• 12 years ago

And go! Tomorrow this game in full will appear on the Google Play store with the exact same colors. In 3 days this game will be rewritten in Swift, Erlang, and have a community based variation. In 4 days someone will find a way to merge this game with 2048 and Flappy Bird. In a week there will be 20 variations of this game including one called Dodge Squares on the iTunes App Store. I'm not psychic, I've just seen this script before.

khoury• 12 years ago

In a month, someone writes a QBASIC version with random map generation and a month later, someone writes a javascript AI that can play it.

Artemis2• 12 years ago

The next day, Twitch will play it.

zalzane• 12 years ago

and every single variation is going to hit the front page of hacker news

bellerocky• 12 years ago

These are all cool things that I would be happy to check out, play with and read about. It's either this or another Show HN filled with angry detractors (kinda like this one), something about the NSA reading my email, or the latest boycott because Facebook, Amazon, Dropbox, Google, Apple are doing something mean to someone.

canacrypto• 12 years ago

You forgot to mention the various AI solvers that will sprung up and compete to be smartest / fastest.

visakanv• 12 years ago

And then blogposts and news articles written about the phenomena on marketing journals, Buzzfeed, newssites...

xixixao• 12 years ago

I don't think so. 2048 and Flappy Bird are based on a mechanic including random gameplay. This game is full of content (design of levels and text between them). Sure, someone can clone it, but it will take them slightly longer and it will be much tougher to make variations (possibly coming up with new levels, but that's hard). It's not the same kind of game.

costicyn• 12 years ago

Check it out :)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chuger.squ...

psawaya3• 12 years ago

This is great. I'm especially impressed with how the game teaches its own mechanics without ever spelling anything out.

Monkeyget2• 12 years ago

There are game stats: http://gameaboutsquares.com/statistics.html

busterarm• 12 years ago

Made it to 23 before I started to have a hard time.

I am the 1%.

henpa• 12 years ago

Can someone tell me how those graphs were made? They look cool. I tried looking into the HTML code, but couldn't find the info "right away".

Edit: got it. http://www.flotcharts.org/

sanketdasgupta• 12 years ago

It's right at the footer of the page, "Using flot 0.8.3"

tobias2014• 12 years ago

It should be possible to write a solver for this with a "decision tree". There are decisions where the blocks run out of the screen - you ignore these. You only take into account "sensible" decisions (this has to be formalized). When there are multiple possible "sensible" decisions you branch. One decision consists of an action "click x times on block X and y times on block Y …"

thomasahle• 12 years ago

Any solution is on the form 12232322... where the number expresses what square to click. It's pretty easy to brute force the game from there. Sure, you can use tree search and prune the search a bit, but it's still brute force and may take exponential time for tough levels.

You can also look into some of the research that has been done on Sokoban AI's.

Strilanc• 12 years ago

There's no need to search all move sequences, because so many of them end up in the same game state (a game state is a combination of positions and orientations of arrows, with a cut off on positions because far away ones because don't affect whether there's a solution or not).

Of the levels I saw (up to 31), the relevant board area was never more than 20x20 and there were never more than 4 arrows. So the state space had size 16(2020 choose 4) ~= 17 billion. Of course most of those states won't be reachable from the starting state... so the actual number of states you need to explore is probably more like a million or even a thousand.

I think a program could solve all of the game's puzzles in under a second.

TimPC• 12 years ago

Should be far easier to create a heuristic search solution. Very naively you could probably get good results by exploring nodes in order by sum of distances from blocks to colour points if blocks could move in any direction. You'll eliminate most of the move away and out of screen behaviours naturally and by preventing the exploration of a previously explored state. You could explore better heuristics but given that the branching factor is only n where n is the number of blocks, most puzzles are solved in under 50 moves and most solutions get pruned quickly both position duplication or bad solutions quickly mangling the heuristic. The hard problems for this program are ones where you have to make a whole sequences of moves away from the objective in order to get a key directional move that accomplishes it.

coder232• 12 years ago

I gave up on level 28. Solving it would require pen and paper or some serious thought. The difficulty curve is excellent.

wubbfindel2• 12 years ago

I've gotten to 31 without the need for pen & paper - but yes, your right, the difficulty balancing is great. It's had me scratching my head a couple of times, but not so much to cause me to quit.

Sign of a good game.

coder232• 12 years ago

No idea why you got downvoted.

Such silliness really drives me away from hn.

fernandotakai• 12 years ago

I'm quite impressed that this works really well on firefox for android. really smooth and the interface is great.

prezjordan• 12 years ago

Awesome! Add sound, throw this in a PhoneGap container, and take my $2.99.

harpal• 12 years ago

Excellent game. So much fun and very addictive.

manicmonad• 12 years ago

Very enjoyable! Loved the interstitial comments' specialty-barista-like attitude.

geuis• 12 years ago

Cool game. The browser interface keeps appearing in ios7 Safari. Add this meta tag.

agumonkey2• 12 years ago

Suggestion : add keybindings. I'm spoiled by 2048 I want direct repeated manipulation at my finger tips. :)

S4M• 12 years ago

Maybe tab to change the selected square and enter to make it move, since there's only one direction?

sinaa• 12 years ago

Or numbers/numkeys + enter.

agumonkey2• 12 years ago

For up to four squares (npi) I thought a simple mapping A S D F would do. Pressing A pushes Square A in its current direction. Squares would have the letter tagged on them subtly.

Sami_Lehtinen• 12 years ago

Nice simple game. Yet annoyingly unresponsive after level restart.

MWil• 12 years ago

I liked the game until I came here and felt like an idiiot for being stuck at 10

rkayg• 12 years ago

I'm stuck here too :(. EDIT: GOT IT! woot.

yaddayadda• 12 years ago

12's kicking me

Sephr• 12 years ago

The author is intentionally limiting this app to touch-only for touch-capable users. This breaks the game for anyone wanting to use a touchpad or mouse on their touchscreen laptop.

The offending code (from http://gameaboutsquares.com/game.c.js, beautified):

    (function($) {
        try {
            document.createEvent("TouchEvent");
            return;
        } catch (f) {}
        var eventMap = {
            mousedown : "touchstart",
            mouseup : "touchend",
            mousemove : "touchmove"
        };
        // mouse handling code follows

Never do this! Remove the entire try-catch block. There is absolutely no reason for you to be limiting touch-capable users to touch-only.

gegenschall• 12 years ago

Further more it is completely unusable on some touch devices, I tried iPad 4 and iPhone 5. They both scroll the page (better: bump to the top, as if you wanted to scroll past the end of a page) instead of moving the blocks. :-/

izietto• 12 years ago

No problem on Android Browser 4.4

gk12• 12 years ago

I use a touch-enabled laptop and come across this far too often. Even nytimes.com is guilty of this, as is Stripe Checkout.

agmetcalf• 12 years ago

We actually changed this recently in Stripe Checkout. Touch detection worked great for 99% of cases, but serving a touch-only experience to devices like yours was pretty clearly unacceptable.

We're now treating the touch-only versions as optimized for specific platforms. For example, we have a mobile version that is optimized for, and only displays on, Android and iOS. Going forward, we may explore a pointer event polyfill to improve support for less common touch devices.

Kiro3• 12 years ago

Why are people doing this? There must be a reason.

skeletonjelly2• 12 years ago

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12566306/how-to-test-for-...

JoshTriplett2• 12 years ago

I have a touchscreen laptop, and both touch and mouse work perfectly for me. Firefox 31 here.

Aardwolf• 12 years ago

Is it multitouch? Could it be that there is no TouchEvent and the touch screen acts as mouse?

Ardeof• 12 years ago

Decided to stop/stuck too long (around 5 minutes) at Level 21, which is pretty disappointing for me.

RevRal• 12 years ago

Since I'm rather arrogant it would be nice to be able to easily compare my clicks against the statistics.

ashishbharthi• 12 years ago

Advice to author. Create iOS and Android versions of games ASAP. You are just hours away from getting cloned on app stores.

poopsintub4• 12 years ago

I'm curious what would stop someone from directly copying his code and sticking it in an webview of an android app.?

abuddy3• 12 years ago

Google would probably ban the developer for life. Not sure about iTunes AppStore.

bthornbury• 12 years ago

Somebody will definitely do it, on a throwaway dev account, but the original developer will only need to file a complaint and that account will almost certainly get banned for such blatant copyright infringement.

dpcan• 12 years ago

I'm hoping the author is way ahead of us. If he were smart, the game should be approved in iTunes and uploaded to Google Play, just ready for him to click "Publish" the moment this web version picks up some traffic.

Otherwise, Google Play will have a clone by the weekend if not sooner, and iTunes, maybe a week or two.

VMG• 12 years ago

This requires an order of magnitude more effort

campugnatus• 12 years ago

I'm the author. I'm not very smart...

chanux• 12 years ago

It's already on Play Store. It's called push the squares (I did not download).

poopsintub4• 12 years ago

Nice job. I will love seeing this type of game over-run the play store compared to something like 100 falling balls.

amenghra• 12 years ago

Cool. Reminds me of Boxxle / Sokoban, but adapted for touch screens.

It's PSPACE to solve, right?

Zimmux3• 12 years ago

The levels with arrows seem PSPACE complete even. I wonder if the levels without arrows are in P.

zwegner2• 12 years ago

Tiny bug report: after clicking on the levels and going back to level 0, all of the buttons on the sides disappear.

malvim• 12 years ago

Beautiful, polished, fun! Contrary to most people here, I actually like the comments between levels, and the "no instructions" policy just made it better. I wish more games were like this.

Nicely done, I have no negative comments to make. I'd totally pay for this.

panzi• 12 years ago

One can argue it isn't "no instructions". The symbols have colors and arrows. How much more do you want? Someone that can't figure out how it works from that won't get very far anyway.

ndds• 12 years ago

I win: window.GAMEABOUTSQUARES.Interface.completeLvl()

ryanknapp• 12 years ago

Amazing game, loved the stack on level 21. Made it to level 26, will have to come back and play more later. Go sell it on an app store and make some money for your time.

jaachan• 12 years ago

How's the stack work? I can't make it do anything else but move the blocks counterclockwise :/

Edit: Got it with stinos' comment

klackerz• 12 years ago

Finished the game after some two-three hours. The last level and the 31st level were the most difficult for me. I know that the statistics page that no identifying information is showed but it would have been interesting to see some individual stats.

http://i.imgur.com/BP5dBde.png

Kiro3• 12 years ago

I don't think this is the next Flappy Birds or 2048. It's just not casual enough.

lifeformed• 12 years ago

My strategy with the harder levels was to divide it into 2 parts:

1) Ignore the colors and just figure out how to get the pieces on the goal squares (working backwards helps a lot).

2) Find a cyclical part of the puzzle that lets you swap the order of tiles.

Then you just look for any color-agnostic states in Part 2 that overlap with Part 1.

k_os2• 12 years ago

From level 25 forward ( minus 26, spirals seem to be easy to simulate for my brain ) it's a fascinating example of how your subconscious bruteforces.. I managed to finish 25 and 27 but I honestly have no idea how I did it and if I had to do it again it'd take a while.

I was wondering, for you guys out there that went past 25, were you able to visualise how the puzzle worked and plan out the moves or did you try different stuff until you got in a situation that seemed solvable and then baffled at the realization that you actually did it?

JoshTriplett2• 12 years ago

I found myself following a constraint-satisfaction approach to prune the search. I'd quickly work out the unrecoverable conditions to put constraints on the overall possible moves, then start thinking about possible states both forward from the start and backward from the solution, and consider the requirements to reach those states. That tends to produce new unrecoverable conditions and prune the search further.

Still, even with all of that, there was usually one particularly hard state to achieve that required some unusual step, and everything else mostly fell into place afterward.

k_os2• 12 years ago

You perfectly described my process so now there's 2 data points. If anyone else had some different way please share.

chestervonwinch• 12 years ago

I never finished the book, but I'm reminded of Malcom Gladwell's Blink whenever I have moments of subconscious problem solving. It's a strange feeling: insight followed by a confused determination as a my conscious mind pieces together what the sub figured out.

mrobataille• 12 years ago

Got all 35 - I did brute forcing with a few rules:

1) Don't worry about the colors at all, because you can usually shuffle them around to get the right order.

2) If there's a particularly cute combo, it's probably part of the solution.

3) Work out the most likely last few moves, going backwards from a winning position.

aerovistae• 12 years ago

I'm stuck on level 3, help please? I seem to be missing something re: controls.

gridspy• 12 years ago

Squares can push other squares sideways.

prawn2• 12 years ago

I think there are those people who persist and work it out, those who politely ask for help (OP) and those who say "Impossible. Game is broken!" and leave you a 1* review on the App Store.

We just released our first iOS game and sadly that latter group can be enough to hurt your ratings!

maccard• 12 years ago

This is a glorious example of how to design a tutorial in a game without bombarding the user with piles of text! Love it!

ardemue2• 12 years ago

Really liked the game, but I'm colorblind and it blocked me on level 20: I can't tell which square should go on which circle ( http://imgur.com/CX7XWJ4 ). I genuinely played that level as if the two bottom squares were the same. Maybe you could add another differentiator, like a different shape.

pdpi2• 12 years ago

It's always a bit of a shame when software provides no affordances for the colourblind. It's not nearly as uncommon as some people think it to be. Games and visualisation software tend to be particularly bad culprits in this.

(Also, you want the one on the left)

MattHeard• 12 years ago

While software should be designed with accessibility in mind, ideally this could be managed by the display, allowing applications to be agnostic to the needs of colour blind users. Would it be possible for displays to insert a colour-transformation layer to shift all colours to different palettes which are more distinct for each type of colour blindness? This might only work for partial colour blindness, but does anybody have an idea of accessibility software like this?

ardemue2• 12 years ago

Thanks for the tip! But after trying for a while (remembering the positions of these 2 squares), I lost patience and closed the tab. But it lost my progress, even though the game told me that it was saving my progress at each level.

That's really too bad, because the game is very fun.

pavanky• 12 years ago

I am colorblind too, but I solved level 20. I just assumed there were two of the same color. It sounds like I lucked out..

Level 21 however is being a pain.

chx• 12 years ago

Level 21 is impossible indeed :)

myfonj• 12 years ago

I've hacked quick userstyle [1] that adds text labels into blocks, it seems like [2] then. [1] https://userstyles.org/styles/103877/game-about-squares-colo... [2] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1571982/shots/game-about...

VBprogrammer• 12 years ago

I think the most annoying thing about this is that there are still 4 blocks, so why after 20 fun filled levels am I not able to differentiate the colours? I was able to, with some more care, figure out level 20 but level 21 I didn't even move a block before I knew it wasn't going to work.

b2themax• 12 years ago

I enjoy the game. I just wish it wouldn't talk to me so much.

uxwtf• 12 years ago

Don Quichot spinning effect (level 29) is too much for my eyes...

thomie2• 12 years ago

Make one move and it will stop spinning.

Archangelix• 12 years ago

Just touch any square and then undo. It will stop the rotation and you're back at the initial state.

egong82• 12 years ago

Fun!

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

This is a really elegant game. Kudos to the designer. It's quite admirable. It has a life/death property like Go: the game seems to be about recognizing which configurations are dead and avoiding them.

thret• 12 years ago

This game is fun, and cute, I like it.

One problem with puzzles of this type though, the structure of the problem leads to the solution. If you simply play with the mechanism for re-ordering boxes, you can 'brute force' the solution fairly easily.

redgetan• 12 years ago

this reminds me of Vagrant Story puzzles where you have to move box crates into the right places.

sowhatquestion• 12 years ago

Is anyone else stuck on level 24? Halp!

Edit: I know this is a terrible comment that contributes nothing, please don't downvote it just for that... :3

joallard• 12 years ago

Can't click or interact with anything on Firefox 33a. Just an unresponsive start screen.

marxshrugged• 12 years ago

Level 20 now. I'm a little bit color blind and 2 of the squares look exactly the same. Higher contrast between colors would be apreciated.

akbarnama• 12 years ago

What an idea! Simple but challenging and so much fun!!

CyberShadow• 12 years ago

Solver and solutions:

https://gist.github.com/CyberShadow/39f43cf25dac0534f8a9

The solver uses BFS with delayed duplicate detection for pruning visited states (instead of, say, hash tables).

The DDD part can be summed up in two lines of code:

    prevStates = (prevStates ~ states).sort.uniq.array();
    states = nextStates.sort.uniq.setDifference(prevStates).array();
    // ... expand states into nextStates ...

These were part of the solver's code at one point, although now I've expanded them a bit to improve memory efficiency.

I love D.

teawithcarl• 12 years ago

Nice work.

andor• 12 years ago

DDD was new to me, and I was wondering how sorting all previously visited states could be faster than checking a hash table. The answer appears to be:

1. Duplicate detection is done delayed and in bulk, not after expanding each node

2. The linear memory access of the bulk check is more cache friendly than random-like hash table access

Allow me to quote from the first Google result:

Surprisingly, delayed duplicate detection is useful even when all nodes fit in memory, resulting in reduced running time due to improved cache performance. In the standard implementation of breadth-first search in memory, the Open list is stored in a hash table. As each new node is generated, it is looked up in the hash table, which often results in a cache miss, since the hash function is designed to randomly scatter the nodes.

http://www.ijcai.org/Past%20Proceedings/IJCAI-2003/PDF/267.p...

Monkeyget2• 12 years ago

I wrote a solver as a chrome extension : https://github.com/tburette/gameaboutsquaressolver

Javascript is not the best language to write AI.

pawelkomarnicki• 12 years ago

Nice game :-)

luigisayshello• 12 years ago

I'm stuck on the freaking 35, I just want to finish this and go eat something, any tip for the level?

nathell• 12 years ago

Just go eat something.

thomie2• 12 years ago

Follow lifeformed's advice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8093977

hamidr• 12 years ago

I would definitely pay for its android app :P

dbg31415• 12 years ago

The game sucks on a laptop.

lpeancovschi• 12 years ago

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/super-game-about-squares/id9...

joshdance• 12 years ago

Cool game. When I saw so many points I immediately thought of 2048 but it is not that kind of game. But I like the clean look, the fun premise and the slightly snarky comments. :)

drydot2• 12 years ago

excelent addictive game, btw, what is the trick in level 15 ? i can't go beyond

drydot2• 12 years ago

ok, idid it!, no on lvl 16

wcy• 12 years ago

Nice game! I keep wanting to call it "Game Of Squares" :)

JeremyMartinez_• 12 years ago

Please add a window where it shows you number of clicks. And if you are revisiting a level, add your previous record

maxtheman• 12 years ago

If anyone is looking for puzzlers of similar difficulty to levels 30-35, I HIGHLY recommend "English Country Tune" (http://www.englishcountrytune.com/). It will turn your brain inside-out.

edymax• 12 years ago

I like that game and enjoying finally it on my mobile https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.funlab.squ...

wubbfindel2• 12 years ago

And now it's cloned on Google Play!

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=%22Game%20about%20Squ...

l33tfr4gg3r• 12 years ago

Has anyone managed to crack level 31? Seems darned impossible, but I'm also sure I'm missing something obvious :)

Game about squares

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