Sokoban is at the spritual center of a relatively new (or newly invigorated) and pretty hardcore subgenre of puzzle games. Who knew there could be so many interesting ways to push blocks around in a grid? Some good ones are Heroes of Sokoban I, II and III[1][2][3], A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build[4], Stephen's Sausage Roll[5], Ferdy the Cat[6], Kine[7], Snakebird[8] and Baba is You[9].
Each and every one of these games have undo. That's critical for this type of game. Forcing the player to restart because of a single mistake is about the least interesting way to make a puzzle game more difficult.
Half of the pleasure of "baba is you" is to discover it. The game assumes this perfectly, and is actually structured to make that discovery part of the gameplay: it's incremental, pleasant, and it surprises you in good ways.
I sometime even laugh at the way the game designer played with me. With one specific block present or missing. With one rule you didn't know about, or didn't think about that way. It's communicating playfulness without a having to say a word.
I first encountered this back on the original GameBoy as Boxxle [0,1]. I recall finding it just as much of a challenge to create levels which worked! The music is just as good as I remember [2].
Cool, I wasn't even aware that "A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build" is a Sokoban-style game when I bought the Humble Conquer Covid-19 Bundle (https://www.humblebundle.com/conquer-covid19-bundle) a few hours ago (thanks for the opportunity to plug this, normally I don't do this kind of thing, but hey, it's for charity!) - guess this is one of the games I'll install first...
For a kind of similar game but with a bit of a twist (not pushing blocks, but rolling them) I highly recommend Bloxorz [0] although I should warn everybody that it's highly addictive.
This is pretty much the only good game on long haul flights, nowadays. It's the caveman version. You definitely don't get an undo, but you can cheat to get to higher levels as the passwords are only five characters long (and are dictionary words). Lots of carriers have it [1]
Sometimes you can play Zuma, but that's hit/miss with latency and I can never get past Khufu's Revenge.
Back in the long long ago, some airlines made a deal with Nintendo to put a SNES emulator in their entertainment system [2]. You could play Super Mario World, Zelda: A Link to the Past and other games. I only had the experience once, on a flight to Cape Town around 2002(?) and frankly I was a bit too young to appreciate what it was, but it somewhat spoiled me for inflight entertainment ever after.
Yes! I had this on a Virgin flight in 1999 as a kid. Was 10 years before I started travelling as an adult, and was sorely disappointed at how much _worse_ things had gotten
yes, I added the "sokoban" tag to my game page. As I said on other comment, the difference between QUBES and a classic sokoban game is that on QUBES the amount of moves you make counts.
It's not enough to solve the puzzle, you have to solve it the best way possible.
It's not the first sokoban game to score based on number of moves.
But heck, writing an original clone of an already-extant game is an interesting exercise especially for beginner game devs. So cherish the victory of having finished and released it!
thank you. but I swear I had never seen a sokoban game that counts your moves. Well, I haven't search it either, so it doesn't count, but I remember playing sokoban on DOS when I was a kid and it didn't count the moves.
I had that game as a child. Even though it counted moves, I never paid attention to it. I only cared about finishing the level. Your game puts more emphasis on the number of moves especially with showing the minimum number of moves to solve a level. That gives it more replay value.
I remember thinking the Microsoft "Extended" Basic for the CoCo was pretty cool. Although it was pretty painful manually typing in source code from magazines to try new programs (I think the main magazine back then was "Rainbow").
The tweens today who have only used Github for getting code don't know how good they have it.
Hi, I'm Victor Ribeiro, author of the game. Yesterday I was let go of my job due to COVID-19. After I got the news, I sat down on my notebook and made a quick port of QUBES to release on itch.io
I understand that the game is a not a 5 stars game and there's room for improvement, some requests I may implement on the next update, but, I'm now working on a new game that I plan to release soon.
I think this new game is more fun. I suggest following me on twitter, itch.io, youtube or github to check it out.
As I told, I'm not working right now so if you liked QUBES and want to support me and the developing of other games, I suggest you make a donation you itch.io, paypal or consider becoming a patreon.
Here I go by atum47, but on all other platforms I'm usually victorqribeiro. On youtube I'm always putting videos of my projects, my english is far from good, but I'm working on my pronunciation.
On GitHub I'm always publishing open source projects that might help others or even serve as a starting point for a project. IsoCity is a good example of that. There are people working on some cool new things using IsoCity as a foundation. So, make sure you take a look at my projects at GitHub also.
Thank you so much for playing the game and for the inputs/feedback.
My 4 year old is enjoying it. Interesting to watch him work through the process. Kept his attention for 15 minutes or so (which is pretty damn good). Thanks for sharing.
If the goal of the game is to complete a level in the fewest possible number of moves, you have to show that number and show a counter of how many moves I've made so far.
Think about UX, though. I know I want to go all the way to the wall because I'm thinking ahead. I might press it four times when it just needs three moves. It adds nothing to the game for me that I'm penalized for this, it just makes the UX arbitrarily worse.
You can stick to your guns here, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that it improves the game.
What's also annoying is that I don't know if I have suboptimal moves because I accidentally hit some walls or because there's a better solution.
no that's ok. that's something I can consider on the next update. a lot of friends are asking me to add a swipe to move on mobile devices, we argued about that a lot, and I'll may do it also.
it's kind my point, if you want 3 stars you need to play carefully. if just want to pass the time, you can too. that's another decision I had to make, I did not lock any level. you free to choose different from other games were if you get stuck on a level you can't progress to the next one.
Sure, but you can restart levels as many times as you want, so what's the difference? You're notified at the end on how many moves you made, and how many is optimal. So why bother with the non moves?
I'm holding the source code on this one for now, cause I'm trying to make a bucket out of it. But I'll release it soon enough. Check out my github for some other fun projects as well
by the way, the app version is a hybrid. I'm using java and javascript. I use a javascript interface to talk between the two. Java handles the ads and the data storage, the rest is javascript.
I remember playing the first time I used Linux also, when I was a teenager. later I got hooked in computer graphics (3D and vfx) and went back to windows.
In QUBES your goal is to move the boxes to their happy places making the least amount of moves possible. After the end of each level you get stars based on your efficiency. Hope you have fun playing it.
yeah, I needed a way to classify the levels by the difficulty. I should have done a double sort, one for the number of goals (boxes) and then the number of minimum moves necessary to finish the level.
This is a pretty standard way of creating solvers for puzzles that have discrete states. When you are searching for a shortest solution you can also hash states to track losing paths and abandon them early.
hi, thanks much. very fun.
any chance you could add keyboard shortcuts to the menu items after completing a level? (try again, next, menu) so that a user doesn't need to switch from keyboard to mouse.
yeah, I remember seeing one game where you had like 3 undos and 3 solutions, and you can buy more. I have decided no to that. but I'm really glad you liked it
This comment brought back some lovely memories of my grandfather, who got into computers late in his life and had all sorts of games on his Windows 95 (I think it was originally Windows 3.1) machine. One of them was Chip's Challenge, and it was the only game my brother and I could play together (at about 5 and 7 in the late 90s) and take turns without squabbling because half the fun was puzzling out the solution to each level.
hey, you're the second one. I have met only one other person who I know was addicted to the game. I know that cause she wrote me an email asking for the 3 stars solution for the 12 level. really funny
I started having trouble around there too, at 10 and 11. I had to settle for 2 star solutions. I knew I could spend all night trying to do all this (3 stars or nothing) so I called it quits.
Thank you. This project was born literally from me writing a level generator for sokoban. I added some free open source 2d art, some sound fx, some music, gave the game a story (the boxes are sad away from their happy place, help them) and BAM. Got myself a game.
because I'm a garbage person, right after I upload this one I was already working on something new.
I'll trying my luck as a indie game dev for now, and this is not a game that people would buy or spent a lot of time playing. so, after I thought I had enough for a "game" and released.
Tomorrow I'll start working on a new game. This next one I'll put more thought into it.
Please, be a garbage person and release stuff. Don't be a tidy person who bikesheds and procrastrinates forever, like most of us. Garbage persons make the world go round.
Each and every one of these games have undo. That's critical for this type of game. Forcing the player to restart because of a single mistake is about the least interesting way to make a puzzle game more difficult.
1: https://sites.math.washington.edu/~ostroff/puzzles/Heroes_of...
2: https://sites.math.washington.edu/~ostroff/puzzles/Heroes_of...
3: https://sites.math.washington.edu/~ostroff/puzzles/Heroes_of...
4: https://agoodsnowman.com
5: https://www.stephenssausageroll.com
6: https://ferdythecat.com
7: https://www.kinegame.com
8: https://noumenongames.itch.io/snakebird
9: https://www.hempuli.com/baba/