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Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle

• kjkisielewicz 4y ago
  holy shit that was hard
• super256 4y ago
  Could you please change the cursor to pointer when hovering over a dog / bunny? I initially thought I would have to solve the puzzle on a piece of paper, until a peer told me that I can just drag and drop the characters.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bckr 4y ago
  Possible epilepsy warning on completion? Great little puzzle, thanks for making this and sharing it.
• sp332 4y ago
  I like the puzzle! Too much flashing at the end there, either tone it down or put an epilepsy warning on it.
  • tempestn 4y ago
    I had the same thought. Just made me wonder, are there browser extensions, or maybe even full OS overlays for people with epilepsy that will automatically filter out any potentially problematic flashing? Edit: Unsurprisingly it appears I'm not the first to have thought of this, at least: https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/making-screens-safe-those-photosensitivity https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/making-screens-safe-those-p...
• wodenokoto 4y ago
  That was fun. Where is the next level?
• sposeray 4y ago
  [dead]
• serf 4y ago
  I figured it was conrad barski the moment i saw the art. I like that style.
• socialismisok 4y ago
  I thought I had to keep the dog and rabbits separate, which really stumped me for a bit. It would be neat if the conditional statements emphasized and deemphasized based on whether their condition was currently met.
  • taberiand 4y ago
    I made the same assumption and didn't even try putting the dog and rabbits together, but I completed the puzzle (at least I'm pretty sure I didn't overlap them, there was a lot of back and forth)
    • kxjabzjej 4y ago
      I find it amusing that this is driven by the particular visualisations of the characters. I.e. if it were a chicken and a rabbit would you have also made this assumption?
      • krallja 4y ago
        I didn't even realize two animals could be on the same node at all until I needed to get both rabbits to the carrot.
      • justsomehnguy 4y ago
        For me it's a variant of a classical "move a wolf, goat and cabbage across the river", where you can't have some of them on the boat together, because it would be eaten.
        • PebblesRox 4y ago
          A fun Easter egg would be to have the dog eat the rabbit if both of them are on the boat node.
      • taberiand 4y ago
        If it was a chicken and rabbit I think I would have tried to overlap them
• zapt02 4y ago
  Cool puzzle and nice art. Too much flashing at the end. Concept reminds me of the indie game Baba is you: https://hempuli.com/baba/ https://hempuli.com/baba/
  • mgdlbp 4y ago
    Hmm, the style of the OP and that landing page reminded me of another web game I saw a few years ago with a philosophical theme, maybe a game jam entry? Kind of bothering me that I can't recall the name. It was an abstract simulation of the course of a human life: units of "time" spawned regularly in the middle of a black screen. These gravitated towards the cursor and had to be guided to text spaced around the screen: play, grow, work, etc., which all needed to be regularly tended to, with more and more "responsibilities" appearing as time went on. Some day there'll be an AI search engine for 'tip-of-my-tongue' media. But what will have grown faster? The ability to catalogue things in the world, or the depth of obscurity of things that can be catalogued? Edit: got it, remembered the dev's domain: https://faedine.com/games/spendyourtime/ https://faedine.com/games/spendyourtime/
    • rvanlaar 4y ago
      Thanks for sharing. That was a fun game.
    • mgdlbp 4y ago
      Oh, how the subconscious did answer! The Ludum Dare entry I was thinking of is Notch's similarly minimalistic Drowning in Problems. There's also the classic, Alter Ego.
• jonah 4y ago
  It took a while, but I got it! It's like the Wolf, goat and cabbage problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf,_goat_and_cabbage_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf,_goat_and_cabbage_problem
  • benj111 4y ago
    You mean the fox, chicken and grain problem? I wonder if this just gets localised to typical staple, typical predator and its prey? I guess cabbage and wolf is eastern Europe / Germany?
    • praptak 4y ago
      Wolf-goat-cabbage is definitely the version which is popular in Poland.
      • benj111 4y ago
        Coyote, turkey and corn? Lion, cow and millet? Redback spider (or any native fauna really), kangaroo, can of fosters? I don't know how the Japanese would do it. I was going to go with fish, but the puzzle would need reformulating for that.
    • gspr 4y ago
      Norway has wolf, sheep and various things the sheep eat (I've seen variants cabbage and bales of grass). We also have a variation where everyone shifts down a step and there's a missionary "above" the wolf.
    • jonah 4y ago
      Ah yes, "the river crossing problem"! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_crossing_puzzle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_crossing_puzzle
• ahaproudowl 4y ago
  Great game, more levels and maybe a countdown for animals that will eat other animals (and end the game) if they are left on the same pad for too long.
  • Jverse 4y ago
    I disagree about the countdown. It wouldn't change the actual puzzle and arguably wouldn't make the game more fun to play for most people.
  • 7thaccount 4y ago
    A timer would only be fun for me in order to compete with friends. Not a distracting one that you can see while playing, but a time at the end with the number of the puzzle (assuming more get made) would be helpful for sharing.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• b4je7d7wb 4y ago
  That was fun to figure out
• zeckalpha 4y ago
  Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_Königsberg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_Königsberg
• ugh123 4y ago
  I wish I could see the icons that the rabbit and dog are standing on
• 63 4y ago
  Some neat concepts here. Aside from the mostly cosmetic qol issues other commenters mention, I also wonder if the game will get repetitive. It's hard to tell with only the one level but I imagine there might be some recurring patterns that the player will pick up on after playing for a bit
• windowshopping 4y ago
  I have to say the fact that I was able to figure out how the puzzle worked - what I was meant to do - with no instructions in about 60 seconds is a good sign. I'm also immediately kind of addicted to this....I really like it. The one thing that annoys me is that I can't see what a symbol is if the dog/bunny is on it because it's covered up. It's hard to remember when there's so many. Some transparency or slight design adjustment would fix this easily.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    I also like that you can make a few mistakes and still solve it.
    • perihelions 4y ago
      Are there even any dead states?
      • quickthrower2 4y ago
        Yes. From beginning: Dog right, dog right, dog up.
        • runxel 4y ago
          And you have to reload the page then... Should have been a "back" button or smth!
      • 7thaccount 4y ago
        Oh yeah, I had to reset once lol. It has to do with getting a couple of characters stuck in the arrow trap without being able to get someone on a tree to escape...I think
      • starkd 4y ago
        Not sure what I am missing. But all the possible moves lead to dead states. That being said, not sure what the transition labels mean. "Somebody at bone", "Somebody at carrot" or "nobody at bone" means nothing to me. I suspect there's another game that I don't know about that would provide the context.
• simultsop 4y ago
  Since he could use lights, giving accessible paths green highlight and red to the opposite, would save players some time and become intuitive, or destinations bg become red/green, had fun
• mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
  I'm convinced there is only one way to solve this: Write a program to unroll the constrained state transition diagram into an unconditional state transition diagram and find the shortest path. The unrolled version would still be pretty small so you can just iterate over it.
  • tgv 4y ago
    You'd have to do that for VxVxV, because there are three different objects (although there's some symmetry). Solving a puzzle is often described as path finding.
    • mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
      The vast majority of states is not reachable, so you can roll out the full tree from the starting state and it's going to be very small. Even the super-naive approach of unrolling the full state space is only 6^7 which is a big waste because connections are very sparse but even that's not big, it just wouldn't scale to larger problems.
  • sooyoo 4y ago
    That's an interesting statement. Because I actually don't think it's true. (Well obviously it's not and you were joking, but let's say you were not, for the sake of argument.) Humans do this differently from machines. We look for strategies and have smarts to on-the-fly develop and refine heuristics that rapidly allow us to intuitively do branch-and-bound like algorithms and in the end solve this even though we brute force very litte, if at all. That's why it took so long for machines to surpass us at chess or similar. It's a different approach. That's what makes machines better at certain things and humans at others. And there is a lot to be gained by trying to have machines also try human-like approaches to problems (strategy-developing rather than brute force).
  • sterlind 4y ago
    In other words, BFS over the state space of the puzzle, skipping previously-visited states? You don't actually gain anything by unrolling everything ahead of time; it'd actually be worse because you'd store all the memory and wouldn't stop when you get to the solution. And you can't really factor the state space into subproblems. Anyway, for this puzzle BFS would work, but classical planning in general gets astronomically exponential fast. It's a neglected field, not yet thawed from the last AI winter.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  2. Make a daily one with a countdown to tomorrows one. 3. Profit.
  • benj111 4y ago
    I've never come across 2 indexing. Is it meant to avoid off by one errors? Pointer arithmetic might be interesting though.
    • rmetzler 4y ago
      1 is already done, isn’t it?
      • benj111 4y ago
        I don't know, it hasn't being listed, neither has 0.
        • peterkelly 4y ago
          0. Be Conrad Barski 1. Create http://www.dogbunnypuzzle.com/ http://www.dogbunnypuzzle.com/ and post to HN
          • drcode 4y ago
            Lol
          • benj111 4y ago
            Surely it should properly be: -1. be Conrad Barski 0. Create http://www.dogbunnypuzzle.com/ http://www.dogbunnypuzzle.com/ 1. post to HN
• j-pb 4y ago
  Petri nets: the game Nice one!
• neximo64 4y ago
  It's got too many rules for a puzzle imo. It does take an overly long time to figure out how it works.
  • bastijn 4y ago
    Took me less than 60 seconds. I'd say it's a perfect little puzzle. Next one you encounter you know the rules. I'd argue 2048 is harder to learn and that was a popular game.
    • neximo64 4y ago
      I actually thought 60 seconds was a bit too long. An easy to understand puzzle is probably more intuitive and < 15-20 secs from start/enough not to notice it took time.
      • tgv 4y ago
        It's a puzzle for people with a CS degree. You need to recognize state transitions and conditions. Other people will take much longer.
• chocolatemario 4y ago
  The light show at the end gave me a chuckle. Pretty fun little puzzle.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• eyelidlessness 4y ago
  It took me a moment to understand what the constraints meant, which says more about how tired I am than it says about the design, which is great! I don’t want to minimize the cleverness of the puzzle design, but I think it’s a visualization of a finite state machine. Not a novel challenge but a clever way to display it for sure.
  • csande17 4y ago
    The one aspect that took me a bit to figure out was whether, to move between the house and the tree, you needed someone on BOTH the bone and the flower or just one of them. (It turned out to be both.)
• nvln 4y ago
  Took me a while to figure it out as I assumed the labels on the lines to be dynamic. But once I got it, it was super fun to play. I wonder if you can algorithmically generate these puzzles and have human's curate them based on factors (joy, difficulty, visual appeal etc). Thanks for sharing. :)
  • drcode 4y ago
    Yes I have a puzzle generator program, will post more soon
• krlx 4y ago
  Great work, it is very easy to understand but challenging enough to be rewarding. A puzzle once a day with a timer or an action counter to compare with your friend could be quite successful!
• jimbob45 4y ago
  Word of warning: iPhone Firefox dark mode renders the game unplayable. Turn off dark mode to fix the issue.
• JaceLightning 4y ago
  It doesn't work. Especially on mobile.
  • sharken 4y ago
    Must be a very rare browser, it works very well on Brave (mobile). Also, it is always more helpful to state the actual issue.
    • plank 4y ago
      Solved it on mobile, but no signal that game was finished. On Firefox (android) here.
      • OJFord 4y ago
        Worked fine for me on FF on Android. With third-party disabled uBO even.
    • eCa 4y ago
      Safari on ios. I see no dogs or rabbits. I only realized that it was supposed to be interactive by reading the comments here. Edit: Same in Chrome on ios for me.
      • sharken 4y ago
        Not sure what is going on, works fine on Safari (ios) here.
  • niemenmaa 4y ago
    Worked well on my Android`s Vanadium browser (chromium based).
  • shever73 4y ago
    Worked fine in Ecosia on mobile
  • Smaug123 4y ago
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  I love it. Fantastic. Can you think of a way to re formulate the puzzle so that you can express the rules without words? Also, the dog / rabbit dynamic (as used in the classic dog/duck/grain river crossing puzzle) made me think that I had to chase the rabbits with dog, or that dogs and rabbits couldn’t share a node. Different animals might be better — rabbit and mouse, perhaps? Or even different coloured rabbits and different coloured carrots? The words thing though — that’s what you should work on next, I think. Good puzzles like this are word-free in the puzzle itself (Stephen’s sausage roll, English country tune). It would take this puzzle from great to excellent. Good luck. More please!
  • schoen 4y ago
    > Also, the dog / rabbit dynamic (as used in the classic dog/duck/grain river crossing puzzle) made me think that I had to chase the rabbits with dog, or that dogs and rabbits couldn’t share a node. Yes, I assumed first that no two animals could share a node at all until I was near the end (and saw that it would be necessary), and I still assumed that rabbits and the dog couldn't share a node ("the dog will eat the rabbit!") because of the river crossing thing, until someone in this very comment thread mentioned an unsolvable state that involved getting the dog a rabbit on the same node.
    • 01100011 4y ago
      > saw that it would be necessary FYI It's not necessary to solve the puzzle. Also it seems to have issues on FF/Linux because when I did stack a dog and a rabbit I could only then select the dog.
      • marcushill 4y ago
        It is necessary to stack the rabbits on each other at the carrot, no?
        • 01100011 4y ago
          Oh haha, yeah I guess so then. Sorry, I missed that.
• spicybright 4y ago
  That was very well made! Are there any more levels?
  • drcode 4y ago
    more levels will be coming
• richardw 4y ago
  Looks excellent! Not sure if it’s an issue on iPhone or my IQ, but I can’t figure out what the rules are. I highlight an animal but can’t move it on what seems a bidirectional edge (no nodes light up). But sometimes can. I assume that should work always but it’s not for me. Also initially assumed I had to keep them separate, but comments here said no.
  • pajko 4y ago
    Seems like it's a bit buggy. Got a bunny stuck on a flower, unable to move it. Moved the second bunny to the same place and that made it unstuck.
    • 7thaccount 4y ago
      I'd guess that's just how the puzzle works.
• nmg 4y ago
  Yes you did. One of these a day, please. I really like the hand-drawn / doodled style.. it disarmed me, which was good because solving this required me to be patient and to unwire my brain a little
  • drcode 4y ago
    working on it
• seba_dos1 4y ago
  Please make that blinking after winning less... epileptic.
• beoberha 4y ago
  Very nice! Really enjoyed figuring it out :)
• chirau 4y ago
  I am completely lost. How do you play this?
  • schoen 4y ago
    Drag animals from one node onto another. Some edges are one-way (marked with an arrow). Some edges are only open when an animal is (or is not) on a certain space, as indicated by the text on that edge. More than one animal may share a node at the same time.
    • eps 4y ago
      I am on an iPad and there are no animals anywhere on the screen.
    • Kaibeezy 4y ago
      Surely figuring out the rules for oneself is an essential part of the puzzle?
• Buttons840 4y ago
  Feedback: 1. It was good enough that I finished. This is success! Good job! 2. It took me too long to realize characters could occupy the same space, and the game doesn't draw characters occupying the same space very well. 3. The flashing lights at the end are too fast, slow them way down and it will still look good. You'll probably only have to change a number in your code.
  • rexf 4y ago
    Yeah, this was fun to solve. Re: 2, it seems intentional when two occupy the same space, 1 of them gets priority and has to be moved first? Ideally, you could pick which 1 of the 2 you could move, but removing this choice makes the puzzle harder. Re: 3, I don't like the flashing lights/colors at all. Putting a "You win" or "Congrats" <div> somewhere prominent on the page is probably enough. Flashing colors is very painful on the eyes.
    • txtsd 4y ago
      If you try pulling from different directions, you can pull the one that you feel is lower.
    • arketyp 4y ago
      I like the flashing colors. It reflects the cathartic pain in reaching a goal and it encourages the impulse to move on.
    • redanddead 4y ago
      maybe OP could hire an animator to make a 3 second loop of a happy rabbit eating a carrot and a dog chewing on a bone, anything other than the flashing lights
    • 83457 4y ago
      The return to location animation helps here. Drag one animal and the one underneath is available to drag. Probably not very accessible but actually a fun, possibly unintentional, mechanic. Can also drag to see location icon underneath.
  • 4y ago
• akrauss 4y ago
  When dog and rabbit are on the same node, it was somewhat hard for me to pick the right one to move (on mobile Safari), but I eventually managed. Very nice game.
  • eequah9L 4y ago
    Did you manage to? I couldn't choose the other one. (I forgot which one it was.) Even now on desktop it keeps picking up the dog and can't choose the rabbit.
  • WesleyJohnson 4y ago
    If the author is looking for ideas here, with minimal impact on the existing design, I'd recommend putting the most-recently dropped animal in the back to allow for cycling through which one you pick up. Another possibility is a "hover" state when when you mouseover a node with 2 animals, they animate quickly into a side-by-side orientation so you can easily pick which one you want to interact with.
• unsafecast 4y ago
  I loved it. Could figure out the way it works with no instructions fairly quickly. There was never a moment where I got annoyed and wanted to put it down. It got me trying things all the time and I was never stuck in one place thinking for long. Yet, the solution wasn't something I just randomly found. Congrats! This is really good.
• tibbar 4y ago
  It's beautiful! Looks like the optimal solution is 26 steps: https://github.com/polkerty/dog-bunny-puzzle-solver https://github.com/polkerty/dog-bunny-puzzle-solver
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • wrbs 4y ago
    Got the same. There are 200 ways of doing this (if you don't distinguish between the 2 bunnies when they're on the same tile, 420 if you do). If you merge together moves involving the same animal there are only 4 (with length 15). https://gist.github.com/wrbs/5824e9b17c55b5ad3d8467f93e12ed8b https://gist.github.com/wrbs/5824e9b17c55b5ad3d8467f93e12ed8... (svg graph of the 4)
  • aaron695 4y ago
    Nice. I tried to fuzz this rather than use an exhaustive search. So random animals walk randomly. It gets stuck. So I added if no animal moves after 100 attempts, restart. But it seems to get stuck all the time. So it loops around mostly and eventually falls to the stuck position. I have to think about this, is the entropy such that you'll never practically escape by randomly walking? I feel like if I add more conditions it just becomes an exhaustive search with billions+ of times the extra calculations.
    • ajkjk 4y ago
      I think if you refuse to duplicate states you'll get the solution pretty quickly.
    • klabb3 4y ago
      > I tried to fuzz this rather than use an exhaustive search. Shame. Shame. Shame. rings bell
    • tibbar 4y ago
      This can be a useful approach when you have a very large number of states (as long as you also don't revisit states). In this case, there are few enough states to just BFS the fastest way directly.
• bzxcvbn 4y ago
  Reminds me of baba is you.
• ars 4y ago
  I tried it on two different browsers and it does exactly nothing. It's just a diagram showing labels and lines? But nothing moves, and I don't see any rabbits or dogs. I checked developer tools, and there are no messages. Not really sure what it's supposed to do.
  • userbinator 4y ago
    I got this too (and yes, I did enable JS to try it out since the page title helpfully informed me it was a React App.) The lack of any errors or warnings in the browser console is definitely strange. I guess the puzzle is to... debug it?
• rozgo 4y ago
  Good job!
• tlyleung 4y ago
  Nice puzzle! It would be nice to indicate whether the transition with two conditions is an “or” or “and”.
• shanleyenator 4y ago
  That was a fun puzzle. I like that it was intuitive and you could figure out how to play without a stupid tutorial. Well done
• twayt 4y ago
  Game is stuck when rabbits and dog are on ship
  • rsstack 4y ago
    It isn't stuck, you lost :) Refresh the page to try again.
    • twayt 4y ago
      Something about "losing" a puzzle doesn't feel right.
      • rsstack 4y ago
        Same as putting the wrong letter in a crossword or making 6 wrong guesses in Wordle. Sometimes puzzles have to be started from scratch.
• patrulek 4y ago
  I had to read comments to find out its interactive...
• TrianguloY 4y ago
  On Firefox for android when you solve it (dog at the top, both rabbits at the bottom left) nothing happens. Other than that it's really nice!
  • hazzamanic 4y ago
    could be that you have dark reader extension enabled?
    • TrianguloY 4y ago
      Exactly. That's it. I suspected it later while reading other comments, checked on chrome and they flashed as expected. Too late to edit the post unfortunately.
  • eequah9L 4y ago
    Worked for me. All the fields flashed started and kept flashing different colors.
• twayt 4y ago
  Doesn't work on mobile was confused at first
• jansan 4y ago
  Another small improvement: It says "React App" in the tab, which should probably be "Dogs and Bunnys" or similar.
• zenmaster10665 4y ago
  Yeah this is fun and simple. Nice work!!
• darkwater 4y ago
  Nice one, finished in about 20 minutes, I think it can be seen as a variation of the classical (don't know the English name) "order the numbers from 1 to 9, whith a blank space", with some extra rules. By the way, on Firefox/Android a bunny flew away to never return when I was dragging it from the boat.
• eps 4y ago
  Is this playable on iPads? No element appears to be actionable... :(
  • Jtsummers 4y ago
    Yes. That’s what I played it on. Javascript disabled?
    • eps 4y ago
      No, just stock Mobile Safari with a DNS ad-blocker. Nothing exotic.
      • Jtsummers 4y ago
        So I finally pulled it up on my laptop, what's particularly weird about that is that all the resources when loading the page seem to be from the site, same domain. It's not pulling in resources from another domain that may be getting blocked.
  • avindroth 4y ago
    Same here. Thought the puzzle was obscure on purpose.
• RadiantJo 4y ago
  Intuitive and nice brain teaser. Should share it on some kid’s dedicated website. I bet they’ll love it.
• delusional 4y ago
  It's basically a formal version of a classic sokoban game. I really like it.
  • rmetzler 4y ago
    Sokoban was also the association I had.
• billforsternz 4y ago
  That was a lot of fun. Easy to figure out what the challenge was. Then puzzling, challenging gameplay and a satisfying conclusion in, I don't know, 15 minutes or so. Good work, well done, hope you do well with this.
• leto_ii 4y ago
  My two cents: 1. Like other people I found the UX a bit confusing (figuring out that two animals can occupy the same spot, picking which one of them to move etc.) 2. This one seems hard for a first level, if it's addressed to a general audience. Even figuring out that some edges are directed is not obvious if you don't know about graphs in advance. You should build a tutorial for non-HN people. 3. Are there other levels? 4. Lights are flashing way too fast at the end. A text message would also be nice. Otherwise a great job! Playable and fun once you get into it. Would totally play again :D
• nailer 4y ago
  I thought the dog would eat the bunny if they occupied the same space (and that stopping the dog eating the bunny was the point).
• jeffrallen 4y ago
  I love it. Post more!
• shever73 4y ago
  Very cool little game. More levels please!
  • drcode 4y ago
    Working on it
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• eporomaa 4y ago
  I got all the rabbits and the dog to one node and then I could not move anywhere.
• gpderetta 4y ago
  Very nice. But is there only one kevel or I just haven't figured out how to move to the next after completing it?
  • 7thaccount 4y ago
    I'm assuming the author just made the one level. Iirc Conrad Barski is a medical doctor that made the famous Land of Lisp book for teaching Lisp programming. A pretty creative person. I assume the fun for them was in creating this and getting feedback and not necessarily coming up with 50 levels.
    • drcode 4y ago
      More levels will be coming :-)
      • 7thaccount 4y ago
        Awesome. I had 3 of my friends play it as well and they all caught on pretty quick and beat it. Suggestions: if you run HakanK's program in this thread(or have your own), you can determine the optimal # of moves and use that to score folks. It would be cool to be able to compare against my friend group that does daily games like this to see who got closest to the optimal number and who got the lowest time. I really enjoyed it! Edit: I don't care about leaderboards and would never suggest a login. Just something definitive that I could screenshot amongst friends.
• yakcyll 4y ago
  The labels as required preconditions take a moment to figure out, but I found it satisfying to do so. I'm a sucker for graph and topology puzzles, so this was very enjoyable to me. I loved that you could clearly sense progress mounting with each step. The flashing lights at the end could use a bit of calming down though. Fantastic prototype, is what this smells like : p
  • nzealand 4y ago
    Very fun. I also found it took a while to understand the rules, which I enjoyed, but others may not. You could add a restart button to encourage experimentation, or flash preconditions red when blocking passage to communicate rules more clearly, or start off with a simple puzzle that illustrates one rule then allow people to level up to more complex puzzles with additional rules. Nice job.
• MrTortoise 4y ago
  Great game I agree i don't think i have seen constraint as a game quite like this before
• max23_ 4y ago
  Nice puzzle! It would be nice to show how many steps were taken to solve it.
• usgroup 4y ago
  Feels like calculating forcing chess moves. I.e forced mates are conditional on where pieces can go and where the pieces actually are.
• going_ham 4y ago
  This puzzle is so cool because it revolves around casual graphs in classical planning problem! One can use heuristics based search to come up with optimal solutions. I really like this innovative approach to the design. However, one edge from house to tree wasn't clear at first because, I thought of it as logical or while it was about logical and. Other than that, pretty awesome work!! Edit:: Scrolling down the comments someone seems to already implemented a graph search. That is pretty quick: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32885309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32885309
  • 7thaccount 4y ago
    I'd love to see the formulation for this problem written out in proper form that can be fed to a solver like MiniZinc or CPLEX or whatever type of solver can handle it.
    • 7thaccount 4y ago
      It looks like Hakan K (has a super cool website where he solves all kinds of optimization problems for fun) was able to solve it using the Picat language in a very small amount of code with a solution (not sure if optimal): http://hakank.org/picat/dogbunny_puzzle.pi http://hakank.org/picat/dogbunny_puzzle.pi His website is a treasure trove for these kinds of problems and worth studying.
      • hakank 4y ago
        The solution is 26 steps and that should be the optimal solution.
        • 7thaccount 4y ago
          Awesome! Thanks for popping up and clarifying. For those of us that are not experts, how is this sort of problem generally classified? I've seen others on here say classical planning, but I wasn't sure if that is correct.
• MrTortoise 4y ago
  my 10yo and my 8yo loved this
• alex-gdv 4y ago
  that was a fun puzzle, are you planning on making more?
• x49asvk 4y ago
  This was a fun timepass for me, i am happy to have figured oyt and solved it in less than 4 minutes. Good job!
• cheunste 4y ago
  I feel like I've seen this in a Professor Layton game before. Just not laid out like this of course
• nullc 4y ago
  It would be useful to design beginner levels so that there are no states you can get into but not solve the puzzle from. I believe it's easily possible to make puzzles where you can move into a subgroup that doesn't include the solution. Where that's possible you really want to solve the whole thing mentally before moving any pieces. This seems like a visualized version of the logic problems on the LSAT (and used to be on the GRE?).
• imakeinternet 4y ago
  This was awesome. Loved it.
• StingyJelly 4y ago
  I love puzzles and flashing lights. Perfect! Only counter-intuitive aspect I figured out only after finishing the first play was that animals, even dog and bunny, can occupy the same spot. But since it's possible to finish the game without doing that (except the final move) it's kinda moot point.
• redanddead 4y ago
  This is HN and almost nobody is talking about how this was coded. The snapping is great. The tweening is great. I guess this is uses draggable? It could have gone wrong a thousand ways but its a great success in terms of usability (I'm on mobile) in terms of the puzzle itself I found it a bit confusing, but I'm sure you'll figure it out. it takes real initiative to just code a thing and try things out
  • drcode 4y ago
    Framer Motion
• pfoof 4y ago
  I really enjoyed it, took me time to realize that I can put two pawns at one place. Maybe some mobile release soon?
• smdyc1 4y ago
  Really enjoyed this. If this was a premium mobile game with more levels increasing in difficulty, I'd buy it for sure. Others have covered minor feedback like character icons overlapping on the same space, the flashing lights at the end, etc. So i won't. But overall, this is exciting!
• isthisthingon99 4y ago
  Fun game, but after the seizure, do I not get another board???
• log101 4y ago
  I love it!
• yusungsim 4y ago
  Hi! I enjoyed the puzzle and I liked how puzzle itself explains every rule within itself. :) I wrote an automatic solver for the puzzle in Scala and open-sourced in GitHub. : https://github.com/yusungsim/dogbunnysolver https://github.com/yusungsim/dogbunnysolver Check it out!
  • 7thaccount 4y ago
    Cool. I see it is a solution that has the graph embedded in the code though. Any chance you could build one to work off a generic input model that describes the starting state of the characters, nodes, connections, and connection rules? That way you could run it every day without code tweeks.
    • yusungsim 4y ago
      Yes! In fact, I already listed-up my future plan for refactoring the code at the readme. One of the plan is to use file I/O to get the graph structure and the rules. I expect there would be existing solutions for (de)serializing the generic graph. One tricky thing (I think) is to encode the connection rules in some parsable format. I'm planning on extending the connection rule to propositional logic and find some fancy way to efficiently en(de)code the PL formula. Maybe I should spend some more nights to refactor my ugly code :P anyway thanks for the reply!
• lr4444lr 4y ago
  Very enjoyable and well done, but not "new". This effectively the same as push maze, with non contiguous rule sets.
• 7thaccount 4y ago
  If this is by Conrad Barski (the Land of Lisp author), I wonder if early versions were done in Lisp and translated to JavaScript or whatever is needed for the web. Just curious how the development went.
  • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Maybe Clojurescript?
  • drcode 4y ago
    I have a puzzle generator in zig (tuned to be super fast at brute force graph generation) The front end is boring JavaScript, because I use react relay a lot on other projects, which is not clojurescript compatible
    • neonate 4y ago
      What are the main things that cause a JS program to be compatible (or not) with clojurescript?
    • 7thaccount 4y ago
      Thanks for answering! Good to know!
• raydiatian 4y ago
  Sweet excited for the abstract nightmares tonight where I’m asking myself about the deeper intrinsic connection between rabbits and trees and dogs and how it’s all a DAG and what do DAGs and dogs have in common besides three letters with a vowel in between Really stoked
• sheepdestroyer 4y ago
  It was fun
• etothepii 4y ago
  This seems a bit like an extended version towers of Hanoi.
• cortic 4y ago
  Just a static image, no animals or anything to click on, tried on Chrome 83 (no add-ons) and FF 88 (uBlock, disabled).
• Temporary_31337 4y ago
  Having programming background, especially grinding the fizz buzz algos for fangs prep definitely helps with this puzzle.
• abrax3141 4y ago
  Fun implementation. It’s isomorphic to a wide range of problems that have been used for centuries that are all isomorphic to constrained state search. The fact that the graph is explicit here makes the problem way easier. (One you may be familiar with that seems very similar is the parking problem where by sliding around the cars they (un)block one another. None of this is to take away from the fun setting and implementation. Just that it’s not a new type of problem, although it seems to be a fun new instance of a common type of problem.
  • MattRix 4y ago
    I would argue that the visual presentation and interface is a big part of what makes a puzzle, and changes how it is perceived, and therefore it is a new type of puzzle.
    • abrax3141 4y ago
      Fair enough. Depends how you arrange your ontology. But then anything is a new type of problem, so the claim becomes meaningless.
      • ptato 4y ago
        When you're solving the sliding cars puzzle as a person you're not thinking of graphs. The experience of solving OP's puzzle is entirely different from the one you mention. In theory you could stop, write down the underlying graph representation and solve it that way I suppose. Does anyone do that though?
        • abrax3141 4y ago
          You’re correct. (As I mentioned, having the explicit graph makes it easier, and as another person mentioned, this makes it an essentially different problem.) I wasn’t meaning to say that it’s identical. Just the closest thing I could think of offhand. When I was in grad school working on problem solving we used to make up new problems every day. Every little change changes the problem’s affordances, but if you define a problem type by the method of solution, all of this class are isomorphic (along that dimension). Again, none of this is to take away from the fun design of this problem.
• drcode 4y ago
  (author here) Great feedback! Yes, I am the "Land of Lisp" guy Sorry about the potential epilepsy trigger- that was the fastest way I could think of to code a quick "reward effect", I will do something different in the next version. I didn't really expect anyone to care enough to solve the puzzle lol. Now that I know people like the puzzle, I will build out the website and post regular puzzles, follow my Twitter @lisperati for updates.
  • rendall 4y ago
    That was fun. GG!
  • jeppebemad 4y ago
    Fun! Though I managed to break the game by placing all on the boat :)
    • lake_vincent 4y ago
      Don't rock the boat, baby! Don't tip the boat over!
    • hyperhopper 4y ago
      Break? That's just a failure condition as per rules, working as intended
      • aerovistae 4y ago
        Just needs a reset button then. Having to refresh the page is a bit silly.
        • yoz 4y ago
          Agreed, along with a message of some kind explaining what's happened. My kid ended up with all the animals on the boat and unable to move any of them off, and didn't know why. This was before she understood all the rules of the puzzle.
        • 4y ago
• padjo 4y ago
  Fun!
• pacifika 4y ago
  It’s good and I enjoyed it a lot! the mental problem solving is similar to https://trainyard.ca/ https://trainyard.ca/ so I don’t think it’s a new type of puzzle but a new variant on the unlocking gating puzzle. Or maybe even sokoban
• bot41 4y ago
  FF throws an insecure warning so I can't check it out
• aqw137 4y ago
  Feedback: add restart button so I don't have to reload the page when I get stuck. Great game!!
• cobzilla 4y ago
  I really like the whole concept and execution! I like the lack of instructions, it makes it fun to explore the rules. In fact, unique rules per game might be interesting to discover. The UI is perfect, keep it simple and focused on play. Though, I agree with other comments that the final flashing lights should be slower. A move count and leader board for time to complete and fewest moves to complete would make this social-ish. Maybe hints for harder puzzles? I could see this going a long way, so many variations to explore!
• jonnycomputer 4y ago
  Inspired by resource allocation graphs?
• posed 4y ago
  Reminds of the game “We were here together”, where you and your partner have to be at certain position doing some coordinated actions to solve the puzzle and advance to the next stage.
• ronty88 4y ago
  Took 30 seconds to figure out what to do and then a minute to solve it. This was really good. Like many have pointed out, it takes a few seconds to figure out what is where and remember what symbol is under the animal but if this was a quick prototype, it's really good. Thanks for sharing it with us "Land of Lisp" guy.
• xtiansimon 4y ago
  Reminds me a little of Game About Squares http://gameaboutsquares.com/ http://gameaboutsquares.com/
• laserbeam 4y ago
  Quite nice. I enjoyed the distraction. Unsure if it's a new "type" of puzzle. Virtually any game with multiple characters, buttons and doors plays like this, and can be reduced to a similar graph. Despite that, I don't want to discourage you. Originality doesn't matter that much. Keep making puzzles like these.
  • omeysalvi 4y ago
    I agree, the title is a little self aggrandizing. As a game designer, I feel it disingenuous to claim it is a "new" kind of puzzle. The person just made a puzzle by adding rules to a set of constraints.
• benji-york 4y ago
  Suggestion: make the dog eat the rabbit if they occupy the same space. (I solved it without doing so because I assumed that was a constraint.)
  • drcode 4y ago
    Yes, I'm thinking of working this idea into the next iteration (though with a wolf instead of a dog)
• xani_ 4y ago
  Looks like a bit expanded goat, wolf, cabbage puzzle
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  I was clueless and gave up.
• shimonabi 4y ago
  Maybe just give a hint that you have to DRAG the animals. The symbols are very hard to make out when the animals are on them. If this is intentional, then cover them entirely.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jesse__ 4y ago
  Loved this! I don't have any feedback that hasn't already been mentioned, but I would like to chime in that I'd definitely play more levels if you build them!!
• saberience 4y ago
  Too confusing to understand what to do here.
  • sergiotapia 4y ago
    Basically click and drag the animals. The "paths" have conditionals that must be met by having any animal on the symbol to "unlock" the road.
• nxpnsv 4y ago
  I enjoyed it :D
• twothamendment 4y ago
  I shared it with my wife because she likes puzzles. It took her about a minute to figure out how the game worked. Once she knew what to do she how do play - she was done in under a minute and said it was fun. Nice work! Any feedback I would give is in other comments.
• JestUM 4y ago
  Once you get it, it's one of those games that give good vibes.
• archon1410 4y ago
  >site not found looks like there's some problem with the hosting
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• foobarbecue 4y ago
  Fun! UI complaint: the animals block the objects so you can't easily see what they're on, which is annoying. Maybe shrink the animals a bit more, use a 3d effect, or add an option to make them partially transparent. Or just make them sit next to the obj instead of actually on top. Edit: also, I expected OR rather than AND on the double constraint
• mkaszkowiak 4y ago
  Very fun puzzle! As for my suggestions: - consider writing key rules on the page. I've had an incorrect assumption that the dog and the bunny cannot occupy the same square. - displaying a restart button would be useful once there are no legal moves left (for ex. all characters stuck at the yacht)
• nabakin 4y ago
  I'd change the word "Get" to "Move". I spent a minute trying to figure out how this game worked but I think changing those Gets to Moves would've helped
• caf 4y ago
  As I moved the last piece I was 75% expecting to be rickrolled.
  • drcode 4y ago
    I wish I had thought of that lol
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Fun. Can't wait to see this in code interviews.
• pbronez 4y ago
  Fun! Would enjoy more of this. Thoughts: - good difficulty level. Needed to do a lot of doubling back to solve it. - Rules we’re easy to figure out for the most part. It would help to add more visual cues about (dis)allowed paths. Ie, given the node occupancy right now, which paths are valid? - it took me a minute to figure out that valid destination nodes highlighted when I started dragging an animal. Maybe make the invalid nodes red too. - I assumed that animals couldn’t share nodes. I didn’t try that for a bit, which slowed me down a lot. Wasn’t clear how to chose the “bottom” animal on a node. I also assumed that even if the rabbits were allowed to share a node, a dog and a rabbit could NOT share a node because the dog would eat the rabbit. - overall a nice example of complexity emerging from a simple rules, which is what you need for a puzzle. - it’s annoying that you can’t see the node label for occupied nodes - obvious stats to track include overall time to solve and moves to solve.
• 1970-01-01 4y ago
  I couldn't understand how everyone was able to understand the puzzle and solve it without hints. Took me a few minutes to realize this is an interactive, click-and-drag game. I don't need any hints now. :)
• imglorp 4y ago
  This looks like a fun TLA+ exercise.
• ada1981 4y ago
  Doesn’t work in safari or chrome on my iPhone.
  • dgfitz 4y ago
    I thought it was just me, glad you posted this.
• fardo 4y ago
  Older analogues exists, but not exactly in this form. Two puzzles from Logical Adventure of the Zoombinis are very close, though. The first is Captain Cajun’s ferryboat, which you can see at https://youtu.be/_JlMcs_2xes https://youtu.be/_JlMcs_2xes. The constraint is that all zoombinis you seat on the boat must share at least one trait with at least one of their neighbors. It doesn’t really impose spatial dependencies of movement like your puzzle does though. For one that does, but by taking on a cartesian grid, you can look to Bubblewonder abyss https://youtu.be/vx1yFKVdq9o https://youtu.be/vx1yFKVdq9o, which on its hardest difficulty adds many, many rules to moving between nodes based on traits, plus re-use toggles (so if a node is visited twice, it goes two different places, “capture” triggers of glowing colored particles that holds one Zoombini captive, and a “release” button that lets it go.
• olibhel 4y ago
  Kudos on the puzzle; very easy to understand what needs to be done/achieved to solve it. You could change the page title from "React App" to something more appropriate.
  • drcode 4y ago
    This just shows you how spur of the moment my website was :-)
• soared 4y ago
  This feels very very similar to learning how to complete sliding puzzles for the first time! Recreating that feeling of moving around pieces to eventually understand the logic is great! Also feels similar to the problem of getting a fox, a chicken, and a sack of grain across a bridge.
• Insanity 4y ago
  That was very fun, would definitely play more as a casual game on my phone while commuting or during other downtime activities:)
• NickC25 4y ago
  Really enjoyed this. The lack of additional hints and instructions made it much more enjoyable than if everything was handed to me. More of this, please!
• soheil 4y ago
  Took me 4 minutes to solve it. A few issues: - It's not clear that you can drag the characters. - Tried to scroll and thought something was wrong when it wasn't working. - Looks like you can also drag the main map image at least on Firefox which makes it slightly more confusing for those without much experience with React or programming in general. - The rabbits looked scared or sad I thought the puzzle had something to do with that, it doesn't.
• MobileVet 4y ago
  “I wish this was daily” - my 7 yo son. Nice work!! Edited: typo, with -> wish
• sixdimensional 4y ago
  This seems to be a kind of Petri net[1] almost. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petri_net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petri_net
• TGRush 4y ago
  This should have a mild epilepsy warning.
• raldi 4y ago
  My daughter is indignant about your inconsistent use of rabbit vs bunny.
  • drcode 4y ago
    Yeah that was by accident, I whipped this up kinda fast
• scubakid 4y ago
  Do you think you might try to procedurally generate additional levels? Or craft them by hand?
• uptownfunk 4y ago
  I may be a bit thick but can someone explain this to me? I can’t seem to solve it despite trying for quite a while.
• sabujp 4y ago
  If you're on mobile and you need to move a character to the left, you will want to swipe to the left very slowly to avoid triggering the gesture for moving back a page.
  • drcode 4y ago
    Yeah that's annoying, I'll have to see if the back gesture can be disabled
• ALittleLight 4y ago
  I love it. I suggest making it so the dog and rabbits can't occupy the same space. I solved it this way afraid I would lose if I let a dog dog on the same node as the rabbit (just seems like they wouldn't get along). Then, I had to restart to see if they would and was a little disappointed to find they did. Do you have an automated solver or a way to procedurally generate games? You could produce one a day and get the next wordle going.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• addajones 4y ago
  Loved your puzzle, it was really fun. It took me a bit but I was able to solve it. :)
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  How do you generate levels or at least validate they’re solvable?
• smrq 4y ago
  When I was young, I had a book of mazes-with-rules[1]. This would have fit right in! There were definitely mazes that involved multiple entrants into the maze, and rules governing whether edges were allowed to be taken. Thanks for unlocking an ancient memory. I'll have to see if I can track down my old copy of this book. [1] https://www.logicmazes.com/super.html https://www.logicmazes.com/super.html
• ericskiff 4y ago
  Well, I quite enjoyed that! Well done, and I agree that I haven't really seen this type of puzzle before. It's similar to those slide around number/picture puzzles. I did a bit of experimentation and figured out that characters could overlap places and then the rest was just figuring out how to get to positions that I could move forward from (getting the dog up to the top loop, etc) Nicely done!
• closedloop129 4y ago
  This is fun. A minor issue: It would be nice if nodes could be skipped. E.g. initially, the dog is on the tree and can move to the carrot in two steps. It is required to make both steps and drop the dog on the well. I would prefer if I could put the dog directly on the carrot, or if I could put the dog on the carrot after hovering the dog over the well.
  • brandnewaccount 4y ago
    I like having to drop the dog, it makes it easier to figure out the rules initially without instruction. Also it forces more explicit play, rather than just checking where you're allowed to drop the dog. Obviously it's not very hard to figure out, but I'm imagining kids might end up playing this--having them drop the dog makes sure they understand the solution.
• wez470 4y ago
  Loved it. Great work :)
• Stormwalker 4y ago
  This is not new type of puzzle, the most basic version of is defined like this: The man needs to cross the river with a wolf, goat and a cabbage. Wolf would eat goat, goat would eat cabbage, boat has only room for two. Every kid in Russia knows that puzzle, although your implementation is quite good.
• SkipperCat 4y ago
  What I really liked about this game was the lack of instructions. It's like you get two games in one - figuring out how to play and then figuring out how to win.
• londons_explore 4y ago
  When two of something are on the same tile, I think you need a different image - or to add some kind of stacking visual or something
• zacharycohn 4y ago
  I'd love to see a "this is how many moves it took you" score when you win.
• rumblings 4y ago
  interesting game
• hacoo 4y ago
  This is a fun puzzle! Great job. It took me a minute to figure out the rules, but I was able to with some experimentation. I think the lack of explicit instructions adds to the charm. There’s lots of other elements you could add to these puzzles to spice them up, eg, wolves that try to eat the rabbits, or streets which are blocked at a certain frequency by cars. Some feedback: - needs a reset button! And maybe a sad-rabbit ‘you failed’ notification if you get stuck. - it already looks good, some cute animations would go a long way if you decide to work on the presentation - you could make it a little more obvious what moves are available when you pick up a dog/rabbit, the shift from white to blue didn’t always ‘grab’ my eye and sometimes I didn’t notice a move was available. Again, a simple animation would help - overall I like the minimalism though, so I don’t think you need to go overboard with visual improvements :)
• fferen 4y ago
  1. The animal icons didn't show up for me until I refreshed the page a few times. (Edge, Windows 10) 2. Would help to say "Somebody at bone AND Somebody at flower". I first interpreted it as OR and thought it was broken when it wouldn't let me move.
• whycombinetor 4y ago
  I found a state with no legal moves within my first handful of moves - everything on sailboat is irrecoverable. Cool game!
• sbf501 4y ago
  It's a state machine, so it is probably easier for programmers to solve than non-programmers. It's basically a debugging puzzle. :) How about a bigger one? Or a random generator?
• dpcan 4y ago
  I don't like how the thing I have to move covers up the things I have to look at. Lost interest pretty quick because of this, but it seems like it would be pretty easy to put the moving thing next to the symbol or something.
  • UberFly 4y ago
    Same here. Found it more frustrating than fun for this reason.
• kjkisielewicz 4y ago
  damn that was hard
• kjkisielewicz 4y ago
  Damn that was hard.
• quadcore 4y ago
  I liked the fact it didnt count steps and has no score. More casual that way. Idea: rabbit grab an object (e.g. a key) and needs it to reach a cell.
  • mmastrac 4y ago
    That feels very https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_(1980_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_(1980_video_game) like
• maneesh 4y ago
  This was so fun! Make one new puzzle a day like Wordle and I'll get addicted for sure :)
• fruntonm 4y ago
• marcodiego 4y ago
  Interesting puzzle. I teach search algorithms, so it was somewhat quick for me to solve. We now need a way "randomly" generate the initial state.
• grzes 4y ago
  only one level? c'mon this is great!
• blakesley 4y ago
  Love it! I refer to these kinds of puzzles as "state mazes", but maybe that's not quite the right term. Many variations are explored in "logic maze" books like Mad Mazes (https://smile.amazon.com/Mad-Mazes-Intriguing-Twisters-Puzzle/dp/1558508651/ https://smile.amazon.com/Mad-Mazes-Intriguing-Twisters-Puzzl...). Most of them use simpler mechanics and look more like mazes, but some toward the end start looking like your puzzle.
• inopinatus 4y ago
  Fun, but alas not new: conditional movement of entities through a graph towards a win-state configuration is a decades-old staple of game puzzles. For someone with the relevant experience, less than 90s to clear. I did like the presentation, however! I think it has potential for a series of escalating difficulty.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lurquer 4y ago
  You can get into 'irreversible' states unless I'm mistaken. With a bunny on house and a dog/bunny on sailboat, the game is stuck. (Not a bug... maybe a feature... but you have to start over unless I'm mistaken.)
• CSMastermind 4y ago
  The "and" condition (must have someone on the flower and the bone) confused me because I thought it was an OR condition. Took me a few tries to realize what the constraints were. I'd like to see these be autogenerated, that seems like a fun problem to solve.
• hamburglar 4y ago
  I Kobayashi Maru’d it by setting the animals’ absolute positions in css.
• techzerd 4y ago
  Fun puzzle. Nice flashing lights as a reward
• barbazoo 4y ago
  That was fun!!! Thank you!
• luvz2code 4y ago
  Really cool game and idea. Please build more.
• lxe 4y ago
  This was great.
• jmkd 4y ago
  Ultra frustrating, impossible learning curve. Tried twice several hours apart, no progress. Congratulations if that's what you wanted.
  • __alias 4y ago
    That's a shame for you as the general sentiment is how approachable and easy to pick up it is!
  • CannisterFlux 4y ago
    I feel like you and I are visitors from an alternate universe, because everyone else seems to find this the best thing ever, whereas I couldn't understand it at all. Initially the animals can't move at all, just snapping back to their original location when you try to move them. Then when they do move (you can move them to blue spaces), they end all stuck and you cannot continue. OK then.
  • anshumankmr 4y ago
    Same here. No shame in it.
  • anshumankmr 4y ago
    Same here. No shame in it. Wouldn't say it is frustrating but it is a mild annoyance. However, the issue for me was that Darkreader extension was on which made the circles invisible to me.
  • jerrygoyal 4y ago
    rule: you can move across the path when either there's an arrow or the condition is true (i.e. someone at carrot)
• whiterock 4y ago
  might be an off-beat opinion, but I think the rules are perfectly clear as is. Took me around 5 minutes from first sighting.
• Misterioso 4y ago
  671098
• pengaru 4y ago
  That was a fun few minutes of my life I don't want back, great puzzle concept built around dependency hell!
• cols 4y ago
  Super fun game solved it in < 5 min. Would love to have more levels! You might consider updating the meta tag that handles the Open Graph text preview image. Right now the text preview image of your website on an iPhone is the React logo. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2444/_index.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2444...
• eXpl0it3r 4y ago
  Reminded me a bit of the game Baba Is You
  • robot9000 4y ago
    First game I thought of. Baba is hardcore.
• neeldhara 4y ago
  Prompted by a question on Twitter: it turns out that the puzzle is also NP-complete: https://www.neeldhara.blog/posts/dogs-bunny-puzzle/ https://www.neeldhara.blog/posts/dogs-bunny-puzzle/
• meitros 4y ago
  This was fun! Would definitely play a mobile puzzle game with levels like this
• stevage 4y ago
  This was great. I experienced much of the name confusion as other people but it only lasted a minute or two so not a problem worth solving imho. Nothing happened when I reached the win condition though. Shrug.
• 48cfu 4y ago
  [dead]
• binaryblitz 4y ago
  Really fun game! I'd love more :) SEIZURE WARNING: Once you win, there is a lot of flickering.
• zotronix 4y ago
  Really fun to play! Reminded me of CodeMaster [0] [0] https://www.thinkfun.com/products/code-master/ https://www.thinkfun.com/products/code-master/
• koinedad 4y ago
  Nice algorithm inspired…the Leetcode study definitely helped!
• malkia 4y ago
  That was fun :) - thank you - https://imgur.com/a/ZBh9EHq https://imgur.com/a/ZBh9EHq - more coming?
• School-Cotton 4y ago
  If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy Heroes of Sokoban: https://sites.math.washington.edu/~ostroff/puzzles/Heroes_of_Sokoban.html https://sites.math.washington.edu/~ostroff/puzzles/Heroes_of... Note: it doesn’t work on mobile. (Once you beat it, google Heroes of Sokoban 2 and 3 for more levels)
• graypegg 4y ago
  Simply put, I think it’s fun! I’d love to see a move counter, to compare with an optimal solution. Work it into a randomly generated daily puzzle and you might have something!
• plushpuffin 4y ago
  This is pretty cool! Conceptually it's pretty similar to a classic Mac game I remember from the 90s called The Tinies. The goal is to get each "Tiny" creature to a bed of the same color. Where it gets complicated is that each creature will in a straight line move up, down, left, or right as far as they can until they hit a wall. You can't stop in the middle of the floor and turn, although there are arrows on the floor that will redirect them, and even teleport pads. Each tiny also acts as an obstacle to other tinies, so you can place them in a particular location to force another tiny to stop short so they can be moved in a different direction some distance from a wall (similar to your conditional graph edges). https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3493-the-tinies https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3493-the-tinies
• nstart 4y ago
  Throwing in a note of appreciation here. Had friends over to dinner last night at our place and at close to midnight a fun debate broke out about puzzles like wordle, and quordle and the like. I shared this URL with my friends and said “no instructions, you just got to do it. All I will say is that it can be done” It was so funny to suddenly go from noisy bunch of us to each person quietly studying the problem followed by the occasional “wth??” They all want to know if this is going to be a daily thing now. The only question mark we have is whether the game will be fun on a regular basis since so much of the fun (and satisfaction) actually came from figuring out the rules of the game in the first place :D
• anon25783 4y ago
  Would be even cooler if the page procedurally generated a new puzzle every time it reloads. Not sure how you would go about procedurally generating nontrivial but possible puzzles; that could be an interesting computer science challenge.
• ryukoposting 4y ago
  That's an awesome game. It took me an embarrassingly long time to solve.
• cinaptic 4y ago
  Took a Second to get the instructions and it was fun, thanks for something new and different
• issung 4y ago
  This was a lot of fun! Please make more levels and post them here! My main complaint is the 2-way path on the left (Somebody at Bone/Somebody at Flower), I couldn't tell which restraint was for which direction, a simple arrow should fix this.
• Daneel_ 4y ago
  Good fun, but not intuitive for people who drive on the left-hand side of the road (the somebody at bone/somebody at flower path assumes right-hand drive). Occupying the same space also feels wrong - I didn't even try this until both bunnies had to go onto the carrot.
  • minitech 4y ago
    > Good fun, but not intuitive for people who drive on the left-hand side of the road (the somebody at bone/somebody at flower path assumes right-hand drive). Both have to be occupied at the same time; it’s not directional.
• sarora27 4y ago
  Great game! Reminded me alot of the game, "Baba is you". Keep it up! Would love to play other levels :)
• rounakdatta 4y ago
  This is so cool, just like that Missionary-cross-bridge or the Family-cross-bridge puzzle!
• mastermedo 4y ago
  It took me a while ti realize what the edges even meant. I didn’t find it obvious at all. After a few trial movements and staring at the screen in disbelief, I got it. One thing that I would definitely change is getting stuck. There shouldn’t be a state that you can’t get out of.
• NikhilVerma 4y ago
  So much fun! It'll be nicer to highlight the paths which are "available" given the criteria. It could be only enabled when you start dragging an entity
• xenreal 4y ago
  expected to have confetti at the end. nice puzzle
• llanowarelves 4y ago
  I think I broke it. Both rabbits at house, dog at ship. And nobody can move anywhere. Edit: seems like there are quite a few more situations like that. I am just gonna consider it "You Lose" -- when you are forced to refresh the page.
• brunooliv 4y ago
  Can't wait for regular puzzles like this!! This was awesome! From a technical perspective, I'm wondering if there are some kind of generative procedures that can generate "solvable" graphs? Very curious about it :) Also how to get the solution from a previously generated graph although that might be simply some DFS/BFS across several "start" nodes where the search stops once all the target conditions are met. Still very interested though and amazing job!!
• polymax 4y ago
  I would classify this problem as a multi agent path finding problem on a directed graph with conditional edges.
• Liriel 4y ago
  Well that was fun!
• birracerveza 4y ago
  This is excellent, please build on this idea.
• hnbad 4y ago
  I found it frustratingly tedious[0] but solved it. In my experience that means other people will love it, especially if they like logic puzzles. It took me a while to realize you could put two animals on the same node as the animals are large enough to cover the entire node, which normally means they can't overlap. It also wasn't immediately obvious how multiple conditions on the same vertex interact, i.e. whether it's an either/or or and. This was a problem for me because I couldn't initially see the covered symbols and thus didn't know one condition was already met. The only real problem, as others have pointed out, is the strobing effect. If you want an easy option that's safer and more pleasant consider simply adding confetti: https://www.kirilv.com/canvas-confetti/ https://www.kirilv.com/canvas-confetti/ [0]: I don't like thinking too many moves ahead so I often found myself having to run the same animal in circles to activate a condition I had overlooked. Again, this is a me problem. It's why I don't like chess.
• vladde 4y ago
  I don't get it. I beat it. It's a neat puzzle, but why the tremendous upvotes for this?
  • EmilioMartinez 4y ago
    No reason, the sweetness/ingenuity just hits in the right spot for a lot of us
  • PebblesRox 4y ago
    I guess a lot of people played it and enjoyed it. I wonder - am I more likely to vote for something interactive like this game? I.e. does the fact that I was actively playing rather than simply passively reading put me in a more active state of mind?
• GnarlyWhale 4y ago
  Anyone else get tripped up by being able to place bunnies and the dog on the same space? Instinctively I expected that to trigger a failure state.
• EmilioMartinez 4y ago
  I love it! Here's more unrequested feedback and ideas Having two conditions on the same edge was confusing because being on different sides reads like an OR. And it's too my personal preference that it be entirely pictoric (eg. the same tiny tree but drawn inside a little circle through the edge as forming a part of it, or the same but crossed out for the bone). That way AND vs OR would be easy to read too, depending on weather the icons go along the edge for AND (eg in two little circles, or maybe a bigger one split across), or the icons are on the sides of the edge (with the circle being cut by the edge)
• fortinb 4y ago
  Doesn't work in Qutebrowser.
• cronoz 4y ago
• cronoz 4y ago
• jdaxe 4y ago
  It appears as though the website is down, I'm getting "Site Not Found"
• pinglin 4y ago
  Cost me 10 min to solve the puzzle. Quite an enjoyable game! My only feedback is to highlight the condition which blocks the path on the UI.
• mattfaus 4y ago
  This reminds me of https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/09/17/transmission-a-game-about-networks/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/09/17/transmission-a... which was a lot of fun.
• Tcepsa 4y ago
  It was fun and engaging and I enjoyed it! That having been said, and I apologize for raining on the parade, but I do not think it is a new type of puzzle. It's basically a visual representation of a state machine. I believe the classic "Get the farmer across the river with his wolf, goat, and cabbage" puzzle is the same sort of puzzle and could be represented in a similar way. If there is some aspect of it that I have failed to take into account that makes it unique, I'd very much like to know! And again, thank you for sharing this; it was fun ^_^
• Oliviai 4y ago
  I like the UI design of this page, but I often forget what the symbol under the rabbit or dog is, it would be nice if it could be displayed, just a small question
• bartoszcki 4y ago
  This is awesome. Please create more of this!
• agmz 4y ago
  Simple concept executed well - got hooked into it straight away. Would be cool if you could figure out a way of automatically generating more, then you could show a different one every day like Wordle.