Competitive puzzle-design game Intricacy
Version: 0.2.2 Web: http://bit.ly/1i50pvY
If you like solving puzzles, what about giving designing them a go as well? Intricacy pits your puzzle designing skills against other players, giving your mind a real work out.
The game is inspired by Jason Rohrer’s massively multiplayer game of burglary and home defence, The CastleDoctrine. In Intricacy, however, the game involves players creating locks puzzles rather than home defences, to solve, against which the opposing player(s) control a hook and a wrench to manipulate pieces of the lock and clear the bolt hole.
Pushing and rotating the tools compresses springs, and pushes and pulls blocks which, in turn, are under the influences of other pieces of the lock. Blocks are connected by springs, pivots are twisted and balls are pushed by the forces unleashed. Where forces meet, rules are set out for the combined result.
The built-in server can run games on the local network or the Internet, and you can change port from the default 27001. You can connect to the official server, or specify another. But wherever you go to find competitors, it’s only by playing against others you’ll get to test your mettle.
Intricacy is written in Haskell, with both SDL and Curses versions (and the ASCII-art curses layout being the raw format for level storage). This release sees a number of useful bugfixes and minor improvements, but there’s
“Intricacy involves players creating locks as puzzles.”
certainly still opportunities to improve newbie-friendliness, to make it easier to get started.
Currently, it isn’t a well-known game, but it has real potential, and is definitely worth battling through the newbie stages. Beyond that, it’s not a large program, and the game’s physics are well explained. If you’re looking for an interesting Haskell program on which to improve your functional programming knowledge, look no further.