Clean Escape

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February 19th, 2019

First post! I've been working on this for about 3 weeks now, currently the "game" consists of a rough layout of the ship you can walk around in...

Some stuff you can interact with and read...

And the main attraction, the pipe puzzle!

Which is the most recent addition and is what I'm actively working on. At the moment it has 6 "section types" and when you start the game it will randomize the layout on the wall and also randomly twist some valves. I'm not 100% happy with the difficulty here, the randomness means there are over 1000 layouts, and many more valve spin variations. So you can end up getting a variation that you just have to twist the last valve and bam, it's solved.

I've also tried a simple shuffle of the 6 sections, and having the puzzle only test for a solution when you press a button. I think what the best setup will be is probably a collection of hand picked possible layouts and valve configurations so that there is always a known number of valve twists a player will need to make as well as making the player try and "turn on the pumps" to test their current solution so it's not so simple to just twist, glance, twist, move and brute force it.

I want to incentivize actually mapping the pipes out, as well as dis-incentivize words, you know what I mean brute forcing or looking up a solution so some amount of randomness seems necessary...