I was playing Mario’s Picross yesterday, and felt more enjoyment when finishing those puzzles than the puzzles in this game.
I worry that there is too much of a disconnect between “puzzle I just finished” and “prize I just received”.
I think maybe instead of “solve a very very small portion of this image to solve the whole image”, maybe players should be solving something more representative of the final piece.
I need to think through what that looks like, and how I model it in my current workflow.
Speaking of my current workflow.
Right now each puzzle has an .aseprite file, with two layers.
One, is the ‘prize’, which is the full size (400x240) image you see after completing the puzzle.
Each of these prizes were hand drawn on my iPad with Procreate, with the exception of one puzzle, which I used a nifty image util to convert it to 1 bit.
The other layer, is the ‘puzzle’, which is what you solve (15x15 max).
Each .aseprite file is picked up in a Make recipe that executes Aseprite headless to export the images.
build/images/%.exported: puzzles/%.aseprite
@echo "* extracting prize and puzzle images from puzzle aseprite files"
@mkdir -p build/images
aseprite -b $< --layer prize --save-as build/images/$*-prize.png
aseprite -b $< --layer puzzle --save-as build/images/$*-puzzle.png
@touch $@
This exports two images, one with -prize.png and another with -puzzle.png.
These images are read by a python script that marches through the pixels and parses the image data to store into a known internal format, and also to build the puzzle grid.
I’m thinking that each puzzle could be split up into 4 quadrants, and each quadrant’s puzzle would be a zoomed-out/blurred version of the quadrant. I don’t think I’ll build this through a script, I think this would be something hand drawn, to make sure that the main subject of the image is what drives the puzzle, not artistic liberties don’t mislead the puzzle definition.
This is all a hunch, really. I need people to try the game out for me to validate if ‘solving puzzle for prize’ isn’t as fun as it usually is in nonogram games.