[PokeThePower]

Personal opinion. Don't overthink 100. 100 will trap you. What people are actually enjoying is being a number.

So what you need to focus on is... regardless of the board... a number that a person can aim to beat.

Beating the board in 100 moves is kind of stupid.

Having 100 moves to maximize your moves is gold.

If a board can be beat in 100 moves... fine.

If a board's best move count, including all the special moves, is less than 100... CHALLENGE!

So... what you should be presenting to your users is a community generated list of goals to exceed regardless of whether you think they can be exceeded today or not. Perhaps tomorrow you will release a "powerup" that will allow all previous 100+ puzzles to be beat in sub 100 counts. The goal will not be 100... but the perfected play of X board. Constraining your game fun world to 100 moves is suicide. People just want to beat other people. Tell them that puzzle 563784987 has a high count of 138... and you will get people trying to reach 134... if they know that it will be communicated to the game's profile page.

So the game should be focused more around who can perfect the promoted tables and less about writing code that can detect tables that can be finished in 100 moves.

One is customer facing, one is developer facing.

[CatNapDreams]

Wieder, on 05 July 2016 - 08:45 PM, said:

Personal opinion. Don't overthink 100. <snip>

Wow! Such advise! Much helping! Keep thinking like that and you could eventually end up working in the game industry... at least the Indy market.
(That was a great set of focuses Wieder.)

CatNapDreams

[MusicallyInspired]

I've started working on Faceman again. Changed "engines" from Borland's conio.h (which draws way too slowly and flickers every time you move) to YouTuber Javidx9's olcConsoleGameEngine.h (actually, the GL version, so cross-platform). It's so nice not to have that flickering screen every time it draws something. I started initially just porting the exact same game and just changing all the draw calls. Once I finished that I started refining the game area a little bit. Now there's a dot for every square and some highlighted indicators tele-prompting where Faceman can immediately move. Still the same game otherwise, but it looks snazzier...unless it doesn't. I have also been really considering everyone's advise in this thread and I have newer and better ideas for game goals, powerups, special moves, and such. For instance, I plan to make the PgUp/PgDown and Home/End commands that send you to the edge of the screen and 'C' to the center to slide you to those positions rather than teleport causing you to pickup all gems within the path vector (this might also work nicely with touchscreen devices to swipe in your intended direction and watch Faceman slide with a fancy animation and pleasing sound effect). As well, having obstructions in the game field to block your progress and have to move around is a neat idea. I also like the idea of the screen edge commands being blocked and PgUp/PgDown/Home/End only sending you to the obstruction instead of the screen edge.

After I get it more worked out I'll look into making some actual pixel graphics instead of ASCII characters and see how I can spice it up. olcConsoleGameEngine.h's simplicity to output exactly what I want is a godsend right now though and it's getting things on the screen easily for me. Perfect prototyping game engine library. It's just a stupid little game but it's been fun working on it and learning more as I go.

Original game vs Update: