Hi! I'm Moracan! I've been playing around with PICO-8 for around 2 years now, and today I finally released the "full" version of my game: Grid Shift!
Grid Shift is my version of a pretty popular logic puzzle named Towers, also known as Skyscrapers. This digital version of that puzzle includes randomly generated puzzles, customizable board sizes (1x1 to 6x6), a hint system to help newcomers to Towers and graphics that aren't simply numbers, they're numbers on towers. With color!
You can go to the Itch.io page for more info.
Many many thanks to Lazy Devs Academy for their amazing PICO-8 tutorials, they helped me understand most PICO-8 shenanigans really easily!
Also, if you are a fan of logic puzzles like me, you will love Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection! It in fact was a big inspiration for this project!
Looking forward to learning some more PICO-8! (Also, it's my first time uploading to Lexaloffle, so apologies if I messed up somewhere)
Apologies if it was weirdly explained.
It's a logic puzzle game similar to Picross and Sudokus. You have to fill the board with numbers (towers of different heights) using the hints at the sides.
If the hint is 3, for example, it means that if you were to look at the board from the hint, you'd see 3 different towers.
Towers that are higher than others will hide them from view. If you were to look at this:
5 4 3 1 2 <-
From the direction of the arrow, you'd see 4 towers, because the 2 is higher than the 1 and thus obscuring it from view.
Little trick: If a hint is a 1, that means that the highest tower is right next to it, hiding every other tower behind it.
It does require a fair bit of imagination, I'll admit. There are some more detailed instructions on the itch.io page, I'll add them here as well.
I'm having a lot of fun with this!
This is my first exposure to the Towers/Skyscrapers puzzle, so my comments are those of a novice.
The presentation is very fun. I believe I'm tuning an alien radio. Great colors and sound effects. Height color coding the towers is an huge readability improvement over the STPPC version. My minor feedback is the "puzzle solved!" menu makes taking a screenshot of one's result a bit finicky, since its movement covers the stats.
It took me a bit to grasp the strategy, and it's been fun to figure out. Imagining myself as the sideline number 1 being satisfied by the towering number 5 was the easy first step, but following patterns took a few plays to recognize. Given the clear violation indicators, I felt comfortable speculating some tower heights and making adjustments on the fly, rather than relying on perfect deduction. I could see it being reasonable to make some guesses along the way when racing for the best time. I really like the timer for tracking one's performance.
I think the hint mode input could use some refinement, since pressing X+O will inadvertently lower the currently-selected tower.
Thank you for sharing Grid Shift, well done!
@skarrmann thank you! And I fully agree with the hints and win screen being a bit finicky, that is something that I should fix in an update. Thank you so much for checking the game out! :D
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I had never played skyscrapers before, but knew the rules because I encountered them on some sudoku/skyscaper hybrid puzzle on a cracking the cryptic video. This was unfortunately my downfall : on these hybrid sudokus, not all tiles were skyscrapers so I wrongly assumed that some tiles could stay at 0 and not count...
Spent 1h30 on a 5x5 without finding the break in...
After that I realized my misunderstanding of the rules and quickly did a few 5x5, and confidently tried 6x6... and got stuck.
This is a very nice puzzle game. Interface wise, towers of the to row can hide parts of the clues, and I wish I could write notes on the tiles. I actually copied the 5x5 on paper to be able to do just that.
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