Development Update: March

26/03/2023

It's been over a month since I last published a blog post, so I thought I'd check in with a few recent development updates.

Hints and The Seer

I'll start off by talking about 'hints' and then meander my way through to the relatively new 'Seer' nodes at the Jellyfish attractor. So, first things first, we didn't include hints in the earliest versions of wyfio and there are a few reasons why. So here's a list:

• The 'primary' hint is, more often than not, the puzzle title
• There's a level of meta-context between some puzzles that can assist in finding solutions
• The emergence of AI chat bots seemed as if it would have some utility as a basic hints system
• We were wary of potentially 'coaching' players towards a solution and;
• We had no idea how many players would test themselves against the gameboard, how hard/easy they would find the content, and therefore what the basis for a hints system would be anyway! :)

However, as we progressed we found that:

• AI chat bots don't – yet - have much utility as a hints system
• We were reasonably happy with the difficulty balance and;
• We enjoyed implementing the 'Alchemist' character and thought adding another NPC type figure to the gameboard would be interesting.

The result of trying to balance all of these considerations was The Seer. These nodes are unlockable at 10, 20 and 30 solves respectively. The Seer - cryptically of course - provides additional information towards solving unsolved, or minimally solved, puzzles. We could add more hints to these nodes or expand the number of nodes as the overall content grows. So whilst we'll use these nodes sparingly, they're there ready to use if we think there's a sufficient need to use them.

Solve Rates

In the previous blog post, I mentioned the 'small numbers problem' as it applied to the solve rate calculation. Rather than wait/presume that an increase in the player base would help resolve this issue we thought we would take action. Firstly, we pruned out some old test accounts from the database. Secondly, we changed the solve rate to be the % of successful solves of players that have solved at least 1 puzzle. If somebody didn't have a single solve to their name, then it didn't make much sense to factor them into the overall solve rate – particularly given that 'start here' isn't really much of a challenge! But these simple changes have massively improved the accuracy of the solve rate. The main limitation of the solve rate now is with new puzzles, but I think that's just unavoidable and time is the only solution (?).

New Puzzle Content and the Leaderboard

In addition to hints and solve rates, we've also been developing new puzzle content, finalising the puzzles at the wave and mycelium attractors. Interestingly, this has brought up an issue that we hadn't really given any thought to. An issue compounded by having a more active, and competitive, player base.

That is, on the current leaderboard, where players are tied on number of solves, the player who reaches a particular number of solves first, places higher. With a 'static' gameboard (i.e. fixed set of puzzles, no new content post initial release) this wouldn't really be a problem. But with a 'dynamic' gameboard (i.e. ongoing development and addition of content) it could result in one player overtaking another, simply based on log-in time, particularly if any newly added content was relatively 'easy'. The only real mitigation we've got against this potential problem right now is not to release boat loads of easy content in one go. There's enough of that on the gameboard already isn't there? ;)

So there you have it. I hope that's useful and sheds some light on some of the thinking behind recent changes.

If there's anything you'd like to propose I cover in a blog post, please get in touch via any of the social links and let me know!