Tag - solution - ancient wisdom

Tuesday 28 April 2009

level 62

By James on Tuesday 28 April 2009, 18:58

solution

By popular request (well, by one request), here's the solution to puzzle 62 - the Corroboree level from Ancient Frog LE.

I think I made a mistake in using the perfect solution as the par value. The game would be less frustrating (and a bit richer) if the par value reflected a really good but not necessarily perfect solution, and if it were then possible to come in under par. Players wouldn't be banging their heads against the wall on the really nasty levels, and there'd be a feeling of having beaten the game if they got a better score.

There's a fair bit of smoothing out of the progression and difficulty in general that I'd like to do now that I've seen it played by a much broader base of people, but I don't like to change a puzzle that someone is in the middle of at the time the update goes out.

Meanwhile, 1.06 is getting ready to release. The trouble with optimising is that there's no absolute end to it, and once I've started I find it hard to stop.

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Wednesday 1 April 2009

level 88

By James on Wednesday 1 April 2009, 10:13

solution

This wasn't requested as such, but it's a tough one, and a good puzzle to illustrate how the game is played.

A lot of puzzles have this core element - there's a gap across the board of one peg width, and to bridge it you have to arrange the frog so it can make a sidestep. In this case you have to sidestep across the gap more than once before you're in a position with enough room to make the turn to the goal.

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Sunday 29 March 2009

solution to level 8

By James on Sunday 29 March 2009, 08:35

solution

I'm considering making an archive of the solutions to all the puzzles. Meanwhile, level 8 has been requested:

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Saturday 7 March 2009

a twisty turny puzzle

By James on Saturday 7 March 2009, 18:16

solution

I'm rather pleased with the way that turned out. It looks like something by Eadweard Muybridge.

Here's the solution to another level. Unless you have a photographic memory, this shouldn't prove to be a spoiler. I like this one because it's such an apparently simple layout - home position, goal position right next to it and facing the same way, and one spare peg - but the solution goes round and round in circles.

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puzzle hints

By James on Saturday 7 March 2009, 17:35

solution

I had an email from an Ancient Frog player, frustrated that he couldn't reach par on the 'easy' puzzle 15.

Difficulty ratings are an inexact science in Ancient Frog - in many cases, a puzzle will switch from frustratingly hard to really trivial just by changing one move. I try to rate them so that puzzles requiring twisty turny routes are marked harder than ones which are mostly solved in a straight line. Overall, the difficulty levels average out to about right, but sometimes they just don't reflect what a particular player is experiencing,

Anyway, I sent him the solution, at least in part to show that the par rating was achievable. It was a bit of a faff describing the route (using ascii art), so I decided to write a little tool to generate solution slideshows.

Here's the output for puzzle 15. (look away if you don't want to know the results!)