New puzzles, keyboard shortcuts, and more


Now that someone has actually completed all the original puzzles, I took some time to add a few more (difficult) puzzles. I'm still working up the courage to attempt them myself. See if you can beat me to it!

Additionally, this update brings keyboard shortcuts:

  • Step: Ctrl+.
  • Run/pause: Ctrl+Enter
  • Stop/menu: Esc

Other improvements:

  • More thorough testing of solutions (with random input)
  • "Load" button merged into "Step" and "Run" (i.e. fewer button clicks required)
  • Highlighting of next input and output

For the future, I'm hoping to add public leaderboards. I'm also considering adding character/string support to the language or maybe some sort of graphical output to add more variety to the puzzles (instead of just continuing to crank up the difficulty), although that might compromise one of my guiding principles for this game: prioritize difficulty over everything else, including fun ;)

Enjoy!

Comments

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Oh yes oh yes oh yes! Yay for the changes! And regarding your future plans, it's all up to you to decide of course, but I personally think that while a graphical output would be a little out of place, string support would greatly improve the gameplay and done right would increase difficulty instead of compromising it; for example a level which requires the player to create a terminal would be very challenging and fun at the same time :). And I gotta say, I love this game.

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Yeah, good point. I do think having it be simple and text-based feels more believable, for lack of a better word.

It's not quite ready for general consumption, but I have been playing around with text-based puzzles locally and they feel pretty natural. Coincidentally, my long-term plan has always been to ask the player to implement a SIC-1 Assembly compiler on the SIC-1 -- very similar to your terminal suggestion! (Although that particular puzzle probably won't make the next batch -- more likely, it will be in the batch after that.)

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Update: the latest update has text-based puzzles, including one (which I haven't solved yet) where you implement a program that takes assembly language input, and then assembles and executes it.