Zen Garden Puzzle: Three Moves Suffice

Today it's three months since the release of my last game Zen Garden Puzzle. While financially it has been a failure, and is orders of magnitude away from recovering the development costs, it has been appreciated by players, receiving nothing but 5-star reviews on the App Store.

A few people have been engaged enough to solve hundreds of puzzles, but only a handful have reached the elusive 10th Dan achivement. To earn that achievement, you have to take advantage of one of the selling points mentioned in the App Store blurb: "no matter what you do, you will never be more than three moves away from the puzzle's only solution."

After seeing the game for the first time, most people doubt that this is actually possible. Some asked me if you need some amount of luck to be able to do so. The answer is: it's always possible, and you don't need any luck, only skill. I could provide a mathematical proof, but I don't want to be more boring than usual, so I'll just show how to solve one puzzle.

Nontrivial Games on Paper

The Italian magazine Amico Logico, which should be out today, contains a page of puzzles that I designed.

Amico Logico is probably the best logic puzzle magazine currently available in Italy. Its strength is variety: in 84 pages, it contains about 150 puzzles of more than 40 different kinds, and the editors strive to provide new kinds of puzzles in every issue.

On the uniqueness of solutions

An exchange of comments in the Willa's Walk review prompted me to talk more in depth about solution uniqueness in logic puzzles, and its possible use as a shortcut while solving the puzzles.

First of all, one question which I'm often asked is: why should logic puzzles have a unique solution?

The easy answer is: why not? When you solve a crosswords puzzle, you take it for granted that there is only one valid solution. So why should logic puzzles be any different?

The more articulated answer is: because logic puzzles are puzzles that should be solvable by logic, and logic alone; no guessing should be necessary.
Solving a logic puzzle should consist of a series of logic deductions which allow you to exclude possibilities, until you are left with only one option. If the puzzle didn't have a unique solution, you would inevitably get to a point where you have two equally valid options, and you cannot choose between them, because they both lead to a different solution.

Once it is determined that a puzzle has a single solution, a question comes to mind: can one use this knowledge to make deductions and find the solution more easily?

Games accessibility

I just noticed a post on the blog of the Voxel Agents, authors of the excellent Puzzle Retreat, talking about what they did in the game interface to ensure that the game was playable by the largest possible audience. This earned them the GDAA's Accessibility Award.

Incidentally, I totally love how the GDAA press release that talks about the importance of accessibility is written in black over a very dark grey background, making it almost unreadable even for a normal-sighted person.

Anyway, I found interesting that many of the things mentioned in the post also apply to Zen Garden Puzzle. The lack of timers and penalties is the most obvious one, of course.

Announcement: Zen Garden Puzzle for iPhone and iPad

My new game, Zen Garden Puzzle, is now available on the App Store!

You've probably already seen the video, so let's talk in more detail about the mechanics.

Zen Garden Puzzle: First gameplay video!

Zen Garden Puzzle has been approved by Apple and will be available on the App Store from December 12th!

To whet your appetite, I have prepared a first video to show the game mechanics and interface.

Zen Garden Puzzle: Evolution of graphics design

My new game, Zen Garden Puzzle, is finally ready and is waiting for review from Apple. If nothing goes wrong, it should be on sale a couple of weeks from now, just in time for Christmas.

I had talked about this game almost exactly 6 months ago. My original intention was to write regular updates and release the game in September, but development was harder than expected and it absorbed me completely. I'll try to make up now for the lack of updates.

When I review games, I try to see past the presentation and judge the core mechanics, but it's undeniable that a good looking game is more enjoyable than a bad looking one.

I wanted this game to look good, but I do all the graphics myself and as an artist I'm not half as good as as a programmer. To overcome my limits, my initial plan was to make a minimalistic game, with very simple abstract graphics. Initial prototypes looked like this.

Brain Twirler among the 50 best Italian games for iPhone

Today I was gladly surprised to discover that the editors of the iPhoneItalia website have selected Brain Twirler among the 50 games that will be voted by readers to choose the best Italian game of the year, for an event to be held on July 28th, 2013, at the Aquafan Riccione water park.


©2013 Nicola Salmoria. Unauthorized use and/or duplication without express and written permission is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicola Salmoria and nontrivialgames.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Update: Brain Twirler 1.0.2

A small update to Brain Twirler has just been approved by Apple.

The only significant change is to what happens when you tap a solved puzzle. Previously, it would just go to the next puzzle, but this was confusing many people. Often times, people would select a solved puzzle, and then tap through a number of solved puzzles before reaching the first unsolved puzzle. So now tapping a solved puzzle jumps right to the first available unsolved puzzle.


The state of the puzzles is persistent between sessions, so if one wants to play again a solved puzzle, it needs to be explicitly restarted using the restart button.

There's also small changes to the graphics.

Have fun and thanks to all the people that downloaded Brain Twirler!


©2013 Nicola Salmoria. Unauthorized use and/or duplication without express and written permission is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicola Salmoria and nontrivialgames.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Announcement: Brain Twirler for iPhone and iPad

Brain Twirler is now available on the App Store. It is my second game for iPhone and iPad, and the first to appear under the Nontrivial Games label.

The inspiration for this game came from Spin Mix by Ivan Vassilev, which I reviewed some time ago.
It is played on a grid containing some dots, and pieces resting on the dots. You have to rotate the pieces around their endpoints, avoiding intersections, until the red piece is at the top of the screen. The first puzzle is trivial, and acts as a tutorial:

There are three kinds of pieces. The red one is the shortest, and there's always exactly one, because it is the piece that needs to be moved to the goal position.
The yellow pieces are twice as long, while the blue pieces are something inbetween (sqrt(3)/2, to be precise). All pieces can turn by 60 degrees at a time, but the interesting thing is that while the red and yellow pieces can be parallel to each other, the blue pieces are offset by 30 degrees. This adds variety to the puzzle mechanics.

The dashed circles indicate the pieces than can be moved. This is useful while learning how to play, and gives a substantial help while playing. For an additional challenge, there's the option to turn them off.

There's support for unlimited undo/redo, which is preserved for all puzzles, even after quitting the app, and even after restarting a puzzle (after restarting, you can use the redo button to replay the solution step by step).

I'm particularly pleased by the style of the thumbnails in the puzzle list. They remind me of some abstract art paintings.

I wanted a clear progression throughout the game, and I didn't want to have too many puzzles, because the mechanics could get boring after a while, so the game has just 50 puzzles. Puzzle 1 can be solved in 1 move, Puzzle 2 in 2 moves, and so on; Puzzle 50 can be solved in 50 moves.

You get one star for solving a level, and two stars for solving it in the optimal number of moves.

It gets much harder to earn 2 stars in the later puzzles. How well you did is summarised in the puzzle list, using a "par" notation.

61 above par! I have to improve that one.

At the beginning, 4 levels are unlocked, and for every puzzle you solve, a new one is unlocked.

If you get stuck in a puzzle, there's a built-in solver which will suggest the best move from the current position. You are awarded an extra hint for every level you complete with 2 stars. If you run out of hints, you can get more through in-app purchases. I think limiting the number of hints should avoid the risk of spoiling the game by abusing them, while still leaving the option open when you are seriously stuck.

I tried to include the most possible variety across the puzzles, by changing the number of blue and yellow pieces. In most puzzles there's a combination of both, but there are also some with a single type, like puzzle 43:

If this game does well, I hope to also update Twin Beams in the future, adding new puzzles and switching to the Brain Twirler user interface style, with native iPad support.


©2013 Nicola Salmoria. Unauthorized use and/or duplication without express and written permission is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicola Salmoria and nontrivialgames.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.