I'm quite happy at the speed of the progress I did, I got a 10 hour sleep since the start of the jam and I have done this so far : https://gyazo.com/b4c6f40ddbea68358c141bfef50f9bbf

A challenging "open puzzle"

I've finished my game, now I'll polish and maybe improve graphics. The game is very challenging for what it looks like and I'm pretty proud on that!

The goal of the game is to achieve the biggest amount of score (yes as simple as that).

In order to gain points you will need to build things like Mines, Wind turbines, Factories, Markets and Banks.

To build something on a tile you need to meet all the building's requirement.

Building a house is a simple as having an adjacent farm.

But a bank will need a market, a worker (house), a mine (gold) and a wind turbine to be adjacent.

Banks will give 5 of score, house and farms -1, etc...

There's also terrain tiles that influence score.

Grass has no effect, water tiles can't be built on, forest tiles (the darker ones) multiply's the tile score by 2 and sand tiles multiply the tile's score by 0. So building something wealthy on certain tiles can be an advantage.

A brainfuck puzzle game :smile:

The goal of HexCity is to amass the highest amount of score. Simple enough.

Score

Each building you place will increase your score by this amount :

House : -1

Farm : -1

Mine : 1

Wind turbine : 1

Factory : 2

Market : 3

Bank : 5

Rocket Silo : 8

Placing Requirements

Here where the challenge lives : To place a building you need to meet every requirement that the building has.

House : For a worker to live, he simply needs an adjacent farm in order to eat.

Farm : A farm can be placed anywhere, except next to another farm.

Mine and Wind turbine : Both need only an adjacent worker house.

Factory : A factory needs an adjacent worker house, wind turbine and mine.

Market : A market needs an adjacent worker house, wind turbine and factory.

Bank : A bank needs an adjacent worker house, wind turbine, mine and market.

Rocket : A rocket silo needs and adjacent worker house, wind turbine, factory and bank.

Special tiles

You may have noticed that there is different tile colors. These are :

Light green : Grass (Normal tile)

Blue : Water (You can't build on this tile)

Dark green : Forest (Double score tile, this means if you build a market you get 6 points instead of 3, but if you build a farm you get -2 score since it's originally -1)

Beige : Sand (No score is calculated on this tile, this means building something with low score on this tile is ideal).

Interested in trying the puzzle when I submit it?

Make sure to follow me on LD

Black or blue I'm still trying to choose my logo...

A challenging brainfuck puzzle :thinking:

The goal of HexCity is to achieve the highest score. Simple enough.

Placing Requirements

Here where the challenge lives : To place a building you need to meet every requirement that the building has.

| Building | Requirement | |--------------|----------------------------------------------| | Worker house | Farm | | Farm | Not next to another farm | | Mine | Worker house | | Wind Turbine | Worker house | | Factory | Worker house, mine and wind turbine | | Market | Worker house, wind turbine and factory | | Bank | Worker house, wind turbine, mine and market | | Rocket | Worker house, wind turbine, factory and bank |

Score

Each building you place will increase your score by this amount :

| Building | Score Value | |--------------|-------------| | Worker house | -1 | | Farm | -1 | | Mine | 1 | | Wind Turbine | 1 | | Factory | 2 | | Market | 3 | | Bank | 5 | | Rocket | 8 |

Special tiles

| Color | Name | Effect | |-------------|--------|--------------------------------------| | Light green | Grass | None | | Blue | Water | Cannot place a building on this tile | | Beige | Sand | Score is not calculated on this tile | | Dark green | Forest | Score is doubled on this tile |

Make sure you follow me so you get it once the Compo is over :smile:

HexCity is out! Game Page ! Good night folks!

Congratulations to Paxiuz for finding a solution giving 76 score on HexCity which is the current world record

HexCity is a compo game about placing buildings on tiles while following very simple rules that leads to complex gameplay.

The world record of 76, could be the best theoretical score. Some have even talked to me about bruteforcing HexCity, which could lead to an optimal solution.

Even after over 6 hours of studying the game Paxiuz admitted that the game did not reveal a guaranteed best pattern. He believes that 80 is impossible and doubts that anyone could beat his score of 76.

The current optimal solution for HexCity

The update 1.0.1 includes * Better tooltips * Hotkeys (1-8 for buildings and U for undo) * Swapped farm and house in the menu

Download it on Itch.io

I use Ubuntu 16.04, comment your game that runs on Linux :smile:

Make sure you rate my brainfuck puzzle game HexCity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNtMpo_RG2o

Play it here

I'll play all games posted in the comments that run on linux and require no mouse control (since I'm on a laptop)! Thanks!

My submissions HexCity turned out pretty good. I got alot of feedback such as "Make it for Android", "Add this, Add that". I did, I pretty much did everything people suggested:

• Leaderboards
• Alot more levels
• Goals and things to unlock
• Better graphics (Ok they aren't really that good)
• Achievements
• Saved games
• New mechanics
• Remove button
• Placement highlighting
• And more :smile:

The game is still not finished, but I'll release it for Android this summer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kieQuE09c0

I got quite a lot of :heart: yesterday on my post for showing the differences between my LD38 compo entry HexCity and my Android game Hexpert.

Today I decided I'll get a bit more technical (not too much :wink:) with the design decisions and the problems I've encountered while making my first game for Android.

If you've played HexCity, you know the game is hard to understand and the game itself is very hard to play. It's a puzzle that really makes you think a lot of moves in advance and it's very hard on new players.

I already knew I was going to implement multiple levels, so it was very important that my first three levels were designed in a perfect way. The player had to get a grasp of the core mechanics without the need of an external video or a wall of text (Please never do this to your game).

In HexCity, my compo entry, the learning was done like this :

Not only the fact that you can't hover on Android, it is not good design.

Hexpert uses a lot of small things, that together, teaches the player how to play! My game actually has a textual tutorial, but even if the player skips it, he will still be taught on how to play

Let's take a look on how I did that!

When you go in the first level you will get this screen (without the red highlight :sweat_smile:)

This is my textual tutorial, it doesn't matter if the player reads it or not, but it will help if he does.

The fact that the house is cut in half (shown by the red highlight) shows that the player can scroll down and read the rest that didn't fit in.

But let's assume the player just doesn't care and pressed OK without reading.

The player will see the content of the screenshot above. If you played HexCity, you will notice that there's no score, there's only the standard grass tile and the only available buildings are the farm, house, mine, wind turbine and factory. The first level removed useless complexities that will be introduced later.

The player will see the objective next to a shiny gold medal Build 1 factory. Now it is very likely that the player tries to place a factory (if he did not read the tutorial) By doing so he will click on the factory.

On the top of the screen the building requirements are written, he will see that he does not have the required buildings. If he actually tries to place it, an "X" will briefly appear with a sound that gives feedback that it's an invalid move.

The player will see the formula : Factory = House + Wind + Mine. It will be very likely that the player tries to build the house first, since it is first in the equation.

The house only needs a farm. The only tile you can place it is highlighted. This is not only to show the valid move, but it also teaches the player that the tile must be adjacent. A few players were confused in HexCity, because they didn't understand the fact that the buildings needed requirements that needed to be next to each other instead of being placed on the map somewhere.

Once the building is placed, the player will most likely try to place the two missing buildings : The mine and the wind turbine, which both only require a house.

Now he places his factory and has completed the first level of Hexpert!

But what if he misplaces a building?

Hexpert introduced a remove option, by clicking on the bulldozer, you can remove the buildings not used to construct others.

You can't remove the house, because the two mines and the wind turbine need it! You can't remove the farm either, since it's part of the level!

That was the first level!

You can play Hexpert on the Google Play Store by clicking this

Time to get into the next two levels. Note that the first level used a fork formation. You had a farm and house being the long part of the fork and you had the mine and wind turbine being the pointy parts that allowed the factory. In the next two level, we will reuse this fork formation that the player is already familiar with.

When entering level two we are prompted with the new building : A market!

Now let's get an actual look at the level :

Doesn't the level look familiar? It is basically the fork formation turned 45 degrees left with a bit added! :smile:

The player, already familiar with the fork formation is very likely to start like this screenshot above. Note that the fork formation is absolutely not the only way to make a factory, but it's definitely a decent way of playing that will help the player later on. In HexCity, some players really struggled to make factories, some had 3 houses to build it! By the way the subreddit /r/Hexpert is available to post Hexpert related strategies. The subreddit has no activity, because this is the first place I post it :smile:.

Let's finish level 2 now :

Once the factory is placed, the only tile left finishes the level with the placement of the market. The player also realizes that he can use the same wind turbine for the factory and the market. Another strategy that the player is taught here.

Level 3 is quite similar to level 2 :

The bank is introduced to the player, the first building with four requirements!

We have again the fork formation preceding a market. The player already understand that you can use the same wind turbine for multiple buildings. Once again, the level is not really hard, you can place the bank at the last tile and finish it!

The first three levels are done and the player knows how to place buildings even if he did not read the tutorial!

I have a lot of other things I can talk about, if you enjoyed the efforts put into this make sure to :heart: the post.

Mike said on Twitter Suggestions will be open Monday (or now if you guess the URL). :smile:

Wait no more!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/theme

Get Hexpert here on Android! :smile:

This is what HexCity looked like in the compo (Ludum Dare 38)

Hexpert has pretty much all the requested features people wanted from Hexcity

• Multiple levels
• Leaderboards
• Better graphics
• Ability to remove buildings
• Level entering animation
• Zoom and pan
• New mechanics
• Unlocking levels
• Achievements
• And much much more :smile:

Here's a few other screenshots!

Level selection!

Placing a rocket by using the same factory (cool trick for HexCity/Hexpert players)

A very tight map with water blocking a lot of possibilities

A lot of work was put into this, people using Github as VCS will understand :sweat_smile:

Hopefully this inspires people to keep working on their Ludum Dare entry :smile:

Get Hexpert on Google Play now!

I have noticed a trend in Ludum Dare themes, there are two categories that I have identified, these are descriptive themes and meta themes.

Descriptive Themes

• Roads (LD13)
• Caverns (LD15)
• Islands (LD17)

These themes have no design requirement, they just require you to have your game themed with this setting.

Meta Themes examples

• Delay the inevitable (LD50)
• Stuck in a loop (LD47)
• Keep it alive (LD46)

These themes are more of a design constraint for the game designer. The challenge of this type of theme is to create a game satisfying some requirement, such as having something inevitable eventually happen or being forced into a loop.

Which ones do you prefer?

Most recent LD themes have been meta themes, except "Unstable" which is a bit of hybrid. For this reason, I would like to see more descriptive themes like "Garden", "Ocean", etc.

To avoid bias, I won't say what this poll is about: https://forms.gle/Z5TseBqPFUosBrMDA

It is 1 question and I will post the results later.

Thank you for those who answered the controller poll.

I wanted to share my ongoing gamedev journey with everyone. I hope this video helps you find inspiration to participate in LD53!

https://youtu.be/rk9vEnjvi54

To see the raw feed, visit https://ldjam.com/feed/raw

Since the feed is now being filtered by account history, it's hard to find posts of new developers.

You can visit the /feed/raw version of the site and get the raw feed. This has a bit of spam but you'll see posts of people just joining!