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Great game, I love it! I hope the author is collecting juicy analytics. They would be useful if they ever want to bundle 100 levels in order of difficulty and

Great game, I love it! I hope the author is collecting juicy analytics. They would be useful if they ever want to bundle 100 levels in order of difficulty and release this as a Steam game (which I would absolutely buy!) I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. It’s subconsciously confusing to see a gate I place in one cell move to occupy pixels in the cell “above” it. I look forward to future days introducing new mechanics as well. Can I suggest a few, based on dynamics? - Food! The horse moves on every turn towards an attractor. Have a hay bale / giant sugar cube in one corner fall off the back of a truck / helicopter :) Horses start out dumb and move directly towards the goal before backtracking. Smarter horses path find the shortest route to the goal. - Goals! Now that the horse is moving, get the horse into a static horse box / cattle pen cell by strategically placing fences so that the path it takes towards the food involves walking onto the goal square. - Floods! Water encroaches from the edges on a turn by turn basis. Not only do you have to contain the horse, you also have to hold back the flood.

cubefox 9mo ago
> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. I think it should go up, otherwise it doesn't look like a wall. It would look like something the horse can step on and run over. For the water it makes sense to be flat flat and that the horse doesn't want to touch it: it is water-shy.
- stevage 9mo ago
  To me the current design doesn't look like anything at all. I don't see a gate or a wall, just two rectangles.
  - snewman 9mo ago
    +1 to this. It's also visually confusing, the gate looks like it's covering two cells. Great game! Feature request: add a button that shows my submitted solution. I'd like to be able to compare it with the optimal solution (so it'd be nice if a single tap could toggle between my submission and the optimal).
    - ianstormtaylor 9mo ago
      It would be nice if the “optimal” view visualized both my solution and the optimal one at the same time, like a Venn diagram.
      - the_shivers 9mo ago
        Just added this, check out "Optimal as overlay" in the settings.
  - layer8 9mo ago
    It also conceals the cherries when it’s on the field below them.
emregucerr 9mo ago
> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. I agree! It feels off compared to the overall aesthetic of the game. Awesome game though! Loved it.
doctordoctor2 9mo ago
IMO, the game is great to keep simple, but I’d like to play more levels than just daily, so could see people paying for the ability to play more, like NYT games, and could be part of a suite of game if curated daily by expert vs social curation. The blocks are small though for a small phone with big fingers. I also wonder if making it GPL and submitting to various *NIX distros would be best. Then it may need to be standalone with random maps created by ML or similar.
- maartin0 9mo ago
  It has a very pleasant editor to make + share custom maps, e.g. https://enclose.horse/play/a3OGcW https://enclose.horse/play/a3OGcW
- 47282847 9mo ago
  You can play the previous days and hundreds of user contributed maps! Check out the menu. Enjoy :)
  - webstrand 9mo ago
    Ah I did not see the menu at all
oliwary 9mo ago
Another thing to try could be to rank people in realtime instead of the one-off submission approach. I do this in https://spaceword.org https://spaceword.org (create tight crosswords using 21 letters), and I think it's quite motivating to see how you compare to others as you improve your solution. On the other hand, its a bit more taxing on the server, and then you also could not show the optimal solution.
- michaelmior 9mo ago
  Cool game! One minor feature request. It would be helpful to have some way to move the entire block of placed tiles around at once to give myself more room in a particular direction.
  - oliwary 9mo ago
    Thank you! :) If you click the three dots on the left top side of the letters area, you can shift all tiles in a direction.
- layer8 9mo ago
  I would prefer not being distracted by that, and not having information on possible solutions before submitting. Trying to find the best solution with added hints like that is a different game. So it should be opt-in.
anticorporate 9mo ago
> I hope the author is collecting juicy analytics. I hope they're not. Can't we have a few things in this world that are just fun without going and sticking surveillance on them?
- snackdex 9mo ago
  if the analytics lead to an actual game on steam im down
  - butlike 9mo ago
    You could just package an arbitrary 100 levels, let the player play them in any order, then give rewards for 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. levels completed/mastered.
    - Feathercrown 9mo ago
      This would still benefit from a difficulty rating system or order
    - Forgeties79 9mo ago
      Or go full on kaizo Mario and make it a random room out of the 100
      - snackdex 9mo ago
        naw im looking to have fun, not cry
    - snackdex 9mo ago
      something in me loves progressively harder levels
- BloodyIron 9mo ago
  Collecting analytics like this is effectively the same as play-testing physical board games in-development. People play a game, information is gathered, and the game is tuned in response to that. If zero information were ever gathered, games could not be balanced or tuned for other things like unforeseen problems. Please, show me a piece of software, or game, that is perfect the first time it is made.
gwbas1c 9mo ago
Sometimes simple things are best. I really like the game as-is. This is a rather simple game to program. IMO, if you can program, take a few weekends to make your own game based on your ideas. If you can't program, your ideas will lead you to a wonderful learning project.
xg15 9mo ago
> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. It’s subconsciously confusing to see a gate I place in one cell move to occupy pixels in the cell “above” it. I interpreted it as standard "top-down" RPG graphics, where the Y axis always doubles as the Z axis. As such, I didn't find it visually confusing - but it did made playing on mobile annoying, because you often end up targeting the wrong field.
xg15 9mo ago
And of course: Buy additional walls using in-game purchases! (jk)
tgtweak 9mo ago
There is definitely a turn-based minigame here - get the most "distance" travelled by the horse, every turn the horse moves one block towards it's closest escape and you can drop walls to cause it to find a new path - in this one you actually lose when the horse can't get out but the goal is to get the horse to move as many blocks as possible using your limited number of walls (or apples which can attract it).
- mbreese 9mo ago
  I was initially expecting the horse to move after each turn. As it is, this is a logic game, similar to what I'd expect to see in the NYT Games app. Quite entertaining, but something that you could look at and reason about to solve. But, you absolutely could make this a turn based game where the horse is trying to escape and you (playing as the farmer), work to fence it in as it meanders towards a gate.
- dllu 9mo ago
  That reminds me of Paquerette Down the Bunburrows [1] which is a very fun pathfinding game where the bunnies will pathfind to try to run away from you. It's not exactly what you described, but it is very fun and surprisingly deep and challenging. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1628610/Paquerette_Down_the_Bunburrows/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1628610/Paquerette_Down_t...
banannaise 9mo ago
The turn-based version sounds interesting, but I think it falls on its face in practice. The game then becomes: 1. lure the horse to an optimal point on the map. 2. trap it in a small circle of fences. 3. build part of your final wall with the remaining fences. 4. one by one, move the fences trapping the horse in place into position.
plastic3169 9mo ago
Great game, I returned back to play next day. > I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. I also feel it would make more sense either for everything to be 2.5D or pure top down. Having appear / disappear animation is nice feedback to user though. Other thing is that maybe the hitbox should change when the wall comes up. Now to remove it you need to press the grid, essentially the root of the wall. Unintuitive to me. Thanks for the game, looking forward to when there is multiple horses or sheep to enclose.
the_shivers 9mo ago
Thanks for the feedback! I would have responded earlier, but I wanted to actually implement something you suggested: different walls. Alternative wall sprites, which don't occlude other tiles so much, are now live and can be adjusted in the settings. Re: analytics, the only serious plans I had were to use the daily level histograms to adjust difficulty. The idea of taking some levels and releasing them as a standalone game is tempting, but I wonder if doing this type of puzzle over and over again might get tedious? That's one of the reasons I thought it would work better as a daily game. Let's see how it's doing in a few months. I love the mechanic ideas. I think there are two big constraints on what kind of cool new features/gimmicks can be implemented though. First: if this is going to be a daily game, the new mechanics have to be intuitive enough to where somebody could figure them out their first time playing. I like the idea of cherries being misleading, and it's a fun troll-ish idea for a single player game, but it would be a mean trick if it were someone's first daily. (Then again, there's someone who's first Wordle game was probably MYRRH.) The other constraint is I have a solver that can guarantee the optimal solution is actually optimal. Some game mechanics might make this a lot harder, or even impossible.
- fercircularbuf 9mo ago
  Great game. I've been having fun with it every day, but today there is no puzzle! Be careful about this. I intuit that not having a puzzle on a day is enough to lose some players, with the number only increasing the more days you don't have puzzles. Not sure how you're doing it now, but you should easily be able to generate thousands of levels and have them all ready in the page like wordle.

cubefox 9mo ago

> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. I think it should go up, otherwise it doesn't look like a wall. It would look like something the horse can step on and run over. For the water it makes sense to be flat flat and that the horse doesn't want to touch it: it is water-shy.

stevage 9mo ago
To me the current design doesn't look like anything at all. I don't see a gate or a wall, just two rectangles.
- snewman 9mo ago
  +1 to this. It's also visually confusing, the gate looks like it's covering two cells. Great game! Feature request: add a button that shows my submitted solution. I'd like to be able to compare it with the optimal solution (so it'd be nice if a single tap could toggle between my submission and the optimal).
  - ianstormtaylor 9mo ago
    It would be nice if the “optimal” view visualized both my solution and the optimal one at the same time, like a Venn diagram.
    - the_shivers 9mo ago
      Just added this, check out "Optimal as overlay" in the settings.
- layer8 9mo ago
  It also conceals the cherries when it’s on the field below them.

emregucerr 9mo ago

> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. I agree! It feels off compared to the overall aesthetic of the game. Awesome game though! Loved it.

doctordoctor2 9mo ago

IMO, the game is great to keep simple, but I’d like to play more levels than just daily, so could see people paying for the ability to play more, like NYT games, and could be part of a suite of game if curated daily by expert vs social curation. The blocks are small though for a small phone with big fingers. I also wonder if making it GPL and submitting to various *NIX distros would be best. Then it may need to be standalone with random maps created by ML or similar.

maartin0 9mo ago
It has a very pleasant editor to make + share custom maps, e.g. https://enclose.horse/play/a3OGcW https://enclose.horse/play/a3OGcW
47282847 9mo ago
You can play the previous days and hundreds of user contributed maps! Check out the menu. Enjoy :)
- webstrand 9mo ago
  Ah I did not see the menu at all

oliwary 9mo ago

Another thing to try could be to rank people in realtime instead of the one-off submission approach. I do this in https://spaceword.org https://spaceword.org (create tight crosswords using 21 letters), and I think it's quite motivating to see how you compare to others as you improve your solution. On the other hand, its a bit more taxing on the server, and then you also could not show the optimal solution.

michaelmior 9mo ago
Cool game! One minor feature request. It would be helpful to have some way to move the entire block of placed tiles around at once to give myself more room in a particular direction.
- oliwary 9mo ago
  Thank you! :) If you click the three dots on the left top side of the letters area, you can shift all tiles in a direction.
layer8 9mo ago
I would prefer not being distracted by that, and not having information on possible solutions before submitting. Trying to find the best solution with added hints like that is a different game. So it should be opt-in.

anticorporate 9mo ago

> I hope the author is collecting juicy analytics. I hope they're not. Can't we have a few things in this world that are just fun without going and sticking surveillance on them?

snackdex 9mo ago
if the analytics lead to an actual game on steam im down
- butlike 9mo ago
  You could just package an arbitrary 100 levels, let the player play them in any order, then give rewards for 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. levels completed/mastered.
  - Feathercrown 9mo ago
    This would still benefit from a difficulty rating system or order
  - Forgeties79 9mo ago
    Or go full on kaizo Mario and make it a random room out of the 100
    - snackdex 9mo ago
      naw im looking to have fun, not cry
  - snackdex 9mo ago
    something in me loves progressively harder levels
BloodyIron 9mo ago
Collecting analytics like this is effectively the same as play-testing physical board games in-development. People play a game, information is gathered, and the game is tuned in response to that. If zero information were ever gathered, games could not be balanced or tuned for other things like unforeseen problems. Please, show me a piece of software, or game, that is perfect the first time it is made.

gwbas1c 9mo ago

Sometimes simple things are best. I really like the game as-is. This is a rather simple game to program. IMO, if you can program, take a few weekends to make your own game based on your ideas. If you can't program, your ideas will lead you to a wonderful learning project.

xg15 9mo ago

> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. It’s subconsciously confusing to see a gate I place in one cell move to occupy pixels in the cell “above” it. I interpreted it as standard "top-down" RPG graphics, where the Y axis always doubles as the Z axis. As such, I didn't find it visually confusing - but it did made playing on mobile annoying, because you often end up targeting the wrong field.

xg15 9mo ago

And of course: Buy additional walls using in-game purchases! (jk)

tgtweak 9mo ago

There is definitely a turn-based minigame here - get the most "distance" travelled by the horse, every turn the horse moves one block towards it's closest escape and you can drop walls to cause it to find a new path - in this one you actually lose when the horse can't get out but the goal is to get the horse to move as many blocks as possible using your limited number of walls (or apples which can attract it).

mbreese 9mo ago
I was initially expecting the horse to move after each turn. As it is, this is a logic game, similar to what I'd expect to see in the NYT Games app. Quite entertaining, but something that you could look at and reason about to solve. But, you absolutely could make this a turn based game where the horse is trying to escape and you (playing as the farmer), work to fence it in as it meanders towards a gate.
dllu 9mo ago
That reminds me of Paquerette Down the Bunburrows [1] which is a very fun pathfinding game where the bunnies will pathfind to try to run away from you. It's not exactly what you described, but it is very fun and surprisingly deep and challenging. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1628610/Paquerette_Down_the_Bunburrows/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1628610/Paquerette_Down_t...

banannaise 9mo ago

The turn-based version sounds interesting, but I think it falls on its face in practice. The game then becomes: 1. lure the horse to an optimal point on the map. 2. trap it in a small circle of fences. 3. build part of your final wall with the remaining fences. 4. one by one, move the fences trapping the horse in place into position.

plastic3169 9mo ago

Great game, I returned back to play next day. > I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. I also feel it would make more sense either for everything to be 2.5D or pure top down. Having appear / disappear animation is nice feedback to user though. Other thing is that maybe the hitbox should change when the wall comes up. Now to remove it you need to press the grid, essentially the root of the wall. Unintuitive to me. Thanks for the game, looking forward to when there is multiple horses or sheep to enclose.

the_shivers 9mo ago

Thanks for the feedback! I would have responded earlier, but I wanted to actually implement something you suggested: different walls. Alternative wall sprites, which don't occlude other tiles so much, are now live and can be adjusted in the settings. Re: analytics, the only serious plans I had were to use the daily level histograms to adjust difficulty. The idea of taking some levels and releasing them as a standalone game is tempting, but I wonder if doing this type of puzzle over and over again might get tedious? That's one of the reasons I thought it would work better as a daily game. Let's see how it's doing in a few months. I love the mechanic ideas. I think there are two big constraints on what kind of cool new features/gimmicks can be implemented though. First: if this is going to be a daily game, the new mechanics have to be intuitive enough to where somebody could figure them out their first time playing. I like the idea of cherries being misleading, and it's a fun troll-ish idea for a single player game, but it would be a mean trick if it were someone's first daily. (Then again, there's someone who's first Wordle game was probably MYRRH.) The other constraint is I have a solver that can guarantee the optimal solution is actually optimal. Some game mechanics might make this a lot harder, or even impossible.

fercircularbuf 9mo ago
Great game. I've been having fun with it every day, but today there is no puzzle! Be careful about this. I intuit that not having a puzzle on a day is enough to lose some players, with the number only increasing the more days you don't have puzzles. Not sure how you're doing it now, but you should easily be able to generate thousands of levels and have them all ready in the page like wordle.