Summer of Math Exposition

nice

• The text is only slowly being revealed over time, but it would be great if clicking the mouse once would accelerate this or just reveal the whole text at once to read.
• There should be some icon which can be used to bring up an information box showing the relevant commands and controls for each level.

The controls felt slightly clunky at times. The game forces you to get to the fourth row for Conway’s Soldiers, and tiling the entire plane, which combined with the fact that there’s no way to skip the slow letter-by-letter animation, and the sluggishness becomes a lot more apparent.

Because there’s a lot of puzzles and each one was dragged out, the whole thing felt like a bunch puzzles, and would feel better if there was some hint that it lead to the initial unanswered question.

I love the cute drawings and the playful text! I feel like you made this with a lot of love, and I am happy to have experienced part of it. I also like your choice to break down the big exposition into smaller puzzles. Your use of an interactive game for this exposition was very clever and fitting. I also think the puzzles are organized in a way that makes sense, and the difficulty level is manageable—especially the helpful “give me a hint” popups if the player spends enough time on it.

My main criticism is something I personally also struggle with (a lot!!!!) in math exposition: while the puzzles are fun, I’m not sure where you’re trying to go with them or how they are meant to be connected with each other. The user interface requires that the player solve a puzzle before getting any more information, so I was able to slowly pick up the “point” as I solved the puzzles. I gather that the smaller puzzles (filling a 10 by 10 grid with rectangles, filling a square grid with water, etc) are meant to build up to the solution to the problem about getting a soldier 5 lines above the barrier. But I would have liked to know that this game is about this one puzzle before I solved them. One fix for this would be to start the game with a little blurb, like “This game is about the solution to a problem about soldiers infiltrating enemy lines. We’ll first play with some simpler versions of this problem. Then, we’ll play with various puzzles that will together build up to the solution to our problem!” It might be a good idea to replace the “Idk how to do an intro so… let’s just get to it” with this kind of blurb, lol.

I also have a few UI gripes, which I’ll just list:

• I wish there was a “back” button to go back on what the narrator said previously! In particular, I unfortunately couldn’t play past the challenge with the numbers in a 3 by 3 grid, because I couldn’t remember the controls, and trying to press every key didn’t work. Maybe you can put the rules up somewhere in the margins of the game canvas while a puzzle is in play?
• I think it would be very helpful to have a table of contents that the player can go to at any time, so that they may choose to skip some puzzles or return to old puzzles (maybe this could take the form of a kind of menu screen with the puzzles as different levels to choose from, like the one in the flash game “Fireboy and Watergirl”). I felt “stuck” at many points during the puzzles, because I felt like I didn’t have the controls to be able to go backwards or forwards in the game. Especially because this is a math exposition, I think giving the player a greater feeling of agency will help motivate them to play through the whole thing—maybe a table of contents can help give this greater sense of agency!
• There are a few typos—I don’t remember where, sadly! Moreover, I was a little unconvinced by the explanation for why we need at least 5 water sources to fill the grid.

Overall I think this game is a very clever idea, and I am sad that I didn’t get to finish it and see the solution. I hope you keep working on these kinds of projects!

might need to explain why the soldier needs to be placed before locking in the player

I love the concept of a math-related videogame with puzzles! One feedback I would give is that the dialogue should be written faster in general or there should be a way to skip to the end of the dialogue. Also allowing the player to go back or having the game controls / instructions permanently written / accessible somewhere would be great, since there were some times where I forgot how to perform an action and I couldn’t go back and reread it.