Is one of the rules that you have to use all the puzzle pieces? Because puzzle #3 is easily solved with only two pieces yet that is not the "correct" solution.
There's a "help" popup indicating the existence of keyboard controls. Then, in level two, you have to rotate tiles, for which no control is documented. What gives?
Oh man I was so confused when I couldn't solve level 2. I even double checked the instructions that there was no rotate key. I'm on a laptop with a nub for a mouse and I'm spamming various keys to try to figure out how to get a piece to rotate and I haven't been successful.
I can also select a piece and hit space and it grows in size and goes outside of its box for some reason? Is that relevant to solving puzzles? Or a bug? I guess I won't find out since I can't rotate pieces to progress further ....
One unstated rule is that you have to use all pieces. Number three can already be solved with two pieces and that also doesn't count. I strongly dislike this kind of puzzle.
That also happens on an earlier level. The answer appears to be that there is an undocumented requirement to use all of the tiles. I'm not sure why Google appears to believe that documentation is weakness.
There's even documentation. Clicking on the (i) icon says "Place tiles on the grid to create a path for your marble". It would be so easy to just change it to "Place all tiles..."
"Chrome's FileSystem API is disabled in Incognito Mode to avoid leaving traces of activity on someone's device. Sites can check for the availability of the FileSystem API and, if they receive an error message, determine that a private session is occurring and give the user a different experience."
This is neat. Clearly a lot of work has gone into and I appreciate that. It's nice and smooth for me on FireFox (for mac). The music is a nice touch too.
For those puzzles with the "reverse" tiles that bounce the ball back, I had to turn off my expectations of where the ball is going to go next. In puzzle 5 you send the ball straight out to a reverse tile and my expectation would be for it to just bounce straight back to the entrance tile, but no... it turns left after that. Just a minor complaint. This is just a fun set of puzzles to announce Google IO, not a game I actually spent money on. Also, they control the world of the game and set the rules. Games are all about learning the rules set by the creator which can often defy expectations.
> For those puzzles with the "reverse" tiles that bounce the ball back, I had to turn off my expectations of where the ball is going to go next. In puzzle 5 you send the ball straight out to a reverse tile and my expectation would be for it to just bounce straight back to the entrance tile, but no... it turns left after that. Just a minor complaint.
It's much worse than you make it sound; exactly the same tile layout gets you different results in different places.
Shockingly low quality compared to the sort of stuff Google used to put out. For instance the games they put out in 2010 promoting html5 just showed a way higher level of craftsmanship. To me this really exemplifies how nobody at Google is having fun anymore - someone got assigned this as a task and they did just a solid job, nothing special.
Maybe I’m just salty that Google got rid of its coding competitions after 20 years. No fun allowed.
Spoiler alert: in puzzle #3 what properties does the "track switch" piece have that makes the sphere take the turn instead of going straight on its way back from the bouncer? Doesn't look very physically correct.
Focus on laying out all the pieces, such that there are no dead ends. There's very few ways to do that, afterwards you can quickly brute-force the rest.
The winning move might be to not play, tbh. It was by far my least favorite level.
Clicking start leads to "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)." apart from Safari, which serves me up a frozen game. Console errors complain about
"THREE.WebGLRenderer: A WebGL context could not be created. Reason: WebGL creation failed:
* tryNativeGL (FEATURE_FAILURE_CGL_FBO)
* Exhausted GL driver options. (FEATURE_FAILURE_WEBGL_EXHAUSTED_DRIVERS)"
Any tips? Are there magical flags that should be set somewhere?
Things started getting tricky at level 7. I can see that level 8 is solvable, but I'm not going to have time to solve it before leaving for work. Neat little puzzle.
The presentation is nice but the content of the puzzle put me off. I think if you suggest a physical puzzle by presenting it as a rolling ball then you should honor correct physical intuition such that a ball isn't going to turn left by itself as it does in puzzle three. I'm interested in testing my wit, and I am fine with losing, but I am not interested in just finding the correct way to clap like a seal for the puzzle designer.
> such that a ball isn't going to turn left by itself as it does in puzzle three.
I'm willing to deal with some trial and error with stuff like that, as long as it's predictable and cause-and-effect is consistent. What I'm not willing to deal with is what I'm seeing in puzzle seven. I have a crossroads with a U-turn to the north and a curve to the south. The ball enters the crossroads from the east and goes south. If I remove the northern U-turn (which the ball hadn't visited and was therefore useless), the ball now goes north (and into the void) instead of south to safety.
Then you have the obnoxiously loud music that can't be turned off separately from the sound effects (so you either have annoying music or no audio feedback at all), a condescending "keep trying" popup that treats every test as a failed attempt, slow animations that make for an annoyingly slow feedback loop on trying new things...
It's a really cool concept, fun presentation, but execution is all sorts of terrible. You could easily run a game design masterclass centered on fixing this thing.
Just assume that there is no goal other than closing all the paths. A tile that connects to empty space means you're wrong. A tile that connects to another tile means you're right. Any and all other "rules" will be changed as necessary to ensure that, if a solution is pretty, it's also correct.
I scratched my head for a while trying to find a configuration where the ball traversed that Y piece intuitively (entered the curve from the west, was reversed, and then exited the straight to the north) before giving up and trying the same "impossible" solution.
Maybe it's a tie-in to their presentation - perhaps they have a new model like Sora which has a poor understanding of physics. (This would explain why the ball starts flat and ends going uphill as well.)
Start, curve west to south, "Y" piece, curve north to east, curve west to north, reverse, back through the last two curves and the "Y" piece (unintuitively the ball will take the left to the finish).
There’s nothing wrong with it. That’s part of the fun of games – feeling smart and accomplished.
But it’s pretty clear and obvious (to a reasonable person) how the game works and you seem to want to just brag about how you’re clearly a better thinker and smarter than the game designer.
It's not clear at all and you can read comments here to find that out.
I don't know the game designer especially but what I actually think is that the system (ie org+people) that produced this puzzle is much smarter than I am. I just don't think the puzzle design is appealing and I gave an impersonal argument to that effect. You have a duty on this side to take comments in good faith. If I give you a factual argument about why I dislike a puzzle you don't just get to accuse me that it's really about intellectual girth.
Bugs are the fun part, though maybe not the bugs that end the game. Level 11 you can place the minimum number of teleport tiles and lose, but the ball doesn't shatter and finds its way to the next teleporter, turning the color back on.
> Congrats! You're among the first to solve the puzzle - but the I/O 2024 date will only reveal itself when more players crack the code. Share that you solved the puzzle using the hashtag #io24puzzle.
Well... that's disappointing...
Edit: when clicking 'continue', it does reveal the date: May 14, 2024
Seems like this crowd is upset over a children's puzzle game. Thought it was alright, has decent graphics that shows what can be done procedurally without the need of carefully hand crafted assets.
I don't think it was intended to be a children's game; they're not the target market for Google I/O.
But also, in this be situation there isn't much positive to be said about the game. Everything about it is badly done. I'm fairly sure the criticisms (vague and badly communicated rules, clunky UI, graphics style that doesn't fit the puzzle, announcing music without a separate music control, way too many slow animations in the wrong places, browser compatibility issues) would be the same if this was a Show HN.
It's just that none of it is being given as constructive feedback. But even that makes sense: unlike for a Show HN nobody will be applying the feedback to fix the game.
(What I don't get is how this is so high on the frontpage, unless it's just for the schadenfreude.)
There are frustrating implimentation details like puzzles not being solved if you do something that looks obviously right but some subtle unwritten rule means it's wrong. In game design (and all UX really) when something looks right then it should be right. The user shouldn't ever have to think very hard to understand why something is wrong. This game fails in that regard.
See if being a children's game has any impact on your feelings about Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby then :p.
Small Google games are often actually really decent, especially in comparison to this, so I think that's where some of the disappointment comes from. The Doodle Champion Island one was my favorite.
For a quick, breezy puzzle that you should be able to do within the space of a coffee break, this feels like it moves way too slowly. Takes a bit for the ball to start rolling and the fancy zoom-in animation gets tedious fast.
There is a famous Marissa Meyers party at Yahoo! that this reminds me of. I thought with all the layoffs, Google was getting disciplined and everyone in line. Maybe that is not the case. When Microsoft brought in Nadella, they did some belt tightening as I recall. My understanding is that Meta is using the whip to get everyone focused. So maybe they have a better future? Or maybe G doesn't think they have an existential threat.
You are indeed correct, although a few Googlers typically will help as well with the launch. If I remember correctly the front end JS devs handle most of the site and the puzzle itself is done separate. However, perhaps they changed it up this year.
