Wheeeee

So when I said we had one almost finished, I wasn’t kidding :D. Here’s announcing our new game:

It’s your job to help the chefs prepare balanced meals for Mycenians — and what could be more balanced than nine different kinds of mushrooms? The catch: due to limited space in the kitchen (we… probably need a better excuse than this… help me out here) you can only have one of each kind of mushroom in each row and column. In fact, the chefs have commented that it seems remarkably similar to a game they heard tell of called Sudoku (lucky guess, whoever mentioned it on your surveys >:P).

Check it out in the Games menu!

Important note: rather than trying to guess what good nugget-payouts would be, we’re going to collect some data first. So, while it’s in playesting more, nugget payouts are very very low. We’re recording statistics for every game played though, to help us come up with good numbers. So, the more you play now, the better a result we’ll get, and the less likely we’ll need to change the payouts down the line. Also, once this comes out of playtesting, we’ll increase the cumulative games nugget cap to 3k per day :)

I’m very much open to interface suggestions, but please give the interface / mechanism a couple days to get used to before making them. Repeatedly clicking isn’t the nicest thing in the world, I know, but see what you think a couple days from now. And in your suggestions, do keep in mind that it should be playable on mobile devices as well, as well as playable *without* the numbers (this will be important later on :D)

As a veteran player of Sudoku, I do have one interface suggestion. In one of the app games I have with Sudoku, you have the ability to highlight a certain number (such as highlight all the ones). I think that would be a nice option to have, just to make the numbers more clear. Especially when there are no numbers. This was done by clicking on a number (in this case mushroom) already given to you. So if you clicked a five, all the fives would highlight.

But oh my gosh, I’m excited for Sudoku!

Edit: Glitch. The difficulties are backwards. I played a simple game and I was like “Man this is the hardest simple game I’ve played. Did I really pick simple?” So I exited it out. Then I was like “...what if?” Then I picked advanced and it’s the easiest thing ever.

That’s a great idea! Maybe by clicking the mushroom in the legend at the bottom…
Edit: this is not sarcasm - this is an idea for the future….

...Wow I’m dumb. ...or not? I’m clicking and not getting anything. Unless you’re not being sarcastic (Damn you and your sarcasm. I can never tell when you’re serious.)

Also did you see my edit?

Hm, maybe I did get lucky. As the beginning was easy but now it’s tough. But that still doesn’t explain why the simple was difficult too. I’ll have to try another simple and then I’ll report back with an edit.

Edit: Simple seems really tough for simple still. Now I’m wondering if it’s not the difficulties being mixed up rather than.. they’re not working at all. I don’t seem a big difficulty jump between simple and advanced. Which is.. strange. I don’t seem to see any difficulty jump at ALL.

Also, there’s no way to save the mushrooms we picked? I went away from the board and came back the board was completely restarted D:

Just to clarify, once the 3k cap is introduced does that mean we’ll be able to earn all of the 3k nuggets playing Cave In if we choose to? Or do we have to split it between Mushroom Meals as well?
I only ask because I am terrible at Sudokus… ^-^’

//Edit: Not having any problems with the interface, it’s super fun. :D But… Are the numbers still supposed to show up on the mushrooms you put in when you’ve gone with the no numbers feature?

...Sudoku! 8D OMG. I love Sudoku!!!!

I will play the heck out of this game. >:D

A suggestion -

If we pick to hide numbers, can we have it that it hides ALL numbers? So even the mushrooms we place.
If you want to have it that we can tell which ones we placed, you could do something less obtrusive and painful to look at [I think the numbers are painful, sorry], like a slight background colour change for those cells.

Aaaah! I love suduko so much!

The only issue though is (it might just be my weird mind) I’m having a -lot- of trouble playing the game without the usual dividing lines between the individual sudoku squares. Would it be too much to ask to add in those lines? I don’t know why it’s throwing me off so much, I’m normally a lot better at sudoku :c

And maybe Simple mode should cost 0 nuggets? The payout can be super low, but sometimes someone might just want to practice, or may not have many nuggets themselves.

I think it would be easier if we were able to select one of the mushrooms from the bottom, and then click the square you want that particular mushroom in. I would prefer doing that rather than clicking a square multiple times in order to cycle through the different mushroom choices. Also, if that was done you would have to make the playing screen slightly smaller because (on my screen at least) you have to scroll down to see the list of mushrooms.

Edit: I thought of another thing. Once all nine of a certain mushroom is in the board, it would be nice if it wouldn’t be able to be selected anymore so you don’t put extra of that certain mushroom onto the board. This would only be the case if all those mushrooms had been locked, though.

Well, looks like I should never play a mycena game while half asleep xD I didn’t even realize nuggets weren’t being deducted! Thanks for the headsup!

Edit: But yeah, I kind of wish there was an easier way to put in mushrooms than clickscrolling. Maybe you click a square to select it and then type 1-9 to place a shroom?

Sweet, now we can commit Sudoku on Mycena!

Suggestions/things I would appreciate:

—Put a number in a spot either by typing the number (keyboard) or selecting it from along the bottom. Both equally good.

—I really love when Sudoku programs have a note function - so you can put a mini 7 and a mini 2 in a box as a note to self saying that box can contain either 7 or 2. That sort of thing.

—The little mushroom along the bottom blacks out once you’ve put at least one in every plate, so you can see it’s finished. Doesn’t prevent you from putting in more of that mushroom, and doesn’t say/imply you have everything right - just says you have at least one per plate.

Things I already appreciate:

—Sweet art! The mushies are adorable and distinctive. I especially like how 7 mushie lines up with the 7. The plates are pretty cute as well.

—Cute idea - a great way of doing Mycena-style Sudoku ^w^

—Fuck yeah, Sudoku. Thank you!

OMG! sudoku!! merry christmas to me :D

just played a game in the simple setting, it took me a while but I just wanted to see how it works. I agree that there should be some other way to input numbershrooms, since it is a bit time consuming to click through them. I don’t have time to test out the different difficulties right now but whatever they may be, I don’t think they’re relevant until a nugget output has been determined anyway :)

it looks good!!

So that one mushroom with the purple stem and the green top, and the red/pink speckles.

I have dubbed that one Grandma’s Night Cap.

I just played a few rounds, didn’t win anything,  fey is pretty terrible at sudoku,apparently? xD

Things I would change:
-Omg, new way to input mushies. I hate the scroll-click thing(sometimes i think your favorite thing is clicking, glitch. frsrs. everything needs SO MANY CLICKS!  <3 <3 <3)  Possible alternatives: I had been thinking a drag/drop from the bottom listy of mushies. But the others’ suggestions of using the number pad or something would also be nice(although force the usage of numbers a bit more)
-Some other colors in the lock option. like, “locked but unsure” lol! “just a wild guess”
-A quick clear function, so annoying when i was trying to go and fix mistakes. clicking 3904813ß85189u249^81291 times. Dx
-I kind of wish default was without numbers. Who needs them when there are cutesy mushies, anyways? But i think that’s my strongly visual self talking. I honestly don’t know how numbers would make it “easier” though??  symbol Mush vs. symbol Numb == still just symbols.

Things l like:
Dude, limited space in the kitchen is TOTES a good reason. Believe me, I work in one. :|
MUUUSSSHIIIEESSS!!! *gobbles them all*
ALL THE DIFFERENT LEVELS!  that excites me, the various leveloptions. eventhough i couldn’t even finish it on easy. I tried everything but simple. xD;;; And failed every time. Mostly due to impatience.

Longwinded babble is long winded. Anyways, I’m happy to see a sudoku-esque game here. :3

Numbers are easier, I feel, because you’ve been tuned to counting from 1 to 9 (..hopefully) from a very young age. It therefore becomes very easy to ‘count’ through them to spot the numbers that are missing when you are checking within boxes, rows or columns. (“1, 2, 3, 4, oh 5 is missing, 6, 7 is missing too, 8, 9 is missing.”)

If you’re very visually oriented and you’ve gotten used to all 9 mushrooms, then yes, I’d say it’s definitely possible that spotting the missing mushrooms is just as easy for you (or maybe even easier, though I’d have to see that tested to see it proven) as missing numbers :) I do believe that’s quite rare, though, so I think you’re just lucky :D

To give some ground to these statements, for me on simple I steady 8-10 minutes with numbers, but 15-17 without numbers. On easy, I steady 15 minutes with numbers, and 28-30 without numbers. With practise, both will get better I’m sure (I hadn’t done Sudoku in years, hence the bad times xD), but all the same, it’s a definite trend. In me, anyway.

Also, for intermediate (and definitely hard), I’ve had to take the board without numbers to paper, to figure it out with numbers & then go back and solve it here >> That’s mostly due to the lack of notes, but.. even then, lol. -sucks at images-

-x-

Regarding the ‘simple’ difficulty feeling ‘harder’ than the easy or even the intermediate difficulty, for me personally I observed that, having had experience solving (a -lot- of..) Sudoku, I was just thinking too hard on the simple ones. When I chose to reduce my strategy to thinking simple, I started getting steady times & never getting stuck. When I tried to think hard, making notes as I went, I oversaw simple things because I tried complicated strategies.

I also observed that intermediate did end up getting harder at some point. Even though the beginning, or certain intervals, were fairly easy.

I was cheeky & went forth and checked a couple games in a difficulty rater, and they matched up perfectly to regular, ‘known’, widely used easy/medium/advanced/hard levels, so I do think the generation algorithms are probably correct.

-x-

Another thing I’ve reported to glitch:
- Tapping quickly on mobile leads to zooming the screen. This is really annoying xD He reported he’d see if he could block that :)

I’ve noticed something when trying to do ‘Easy’ level.

Out of ten games, none of those games started with all nine numbers somewhere on the board. Compared to other ‘easy’ Sudoku levels in books and online, 10 out of 10 all started with all nine numbers. I noticed this from the very first game I started playing on ‘Easy’.

I timed myself doing ten online Sudoku games and came out with an average of 4.88 minutes.
When I timed myself doing ‘Easy’ level Mycena Mushrooms (in SAI, because I needed to be able to do notes of probable numbers) it’s taking me an average of 22 minutes to complete one game.

If, say, ‘Easy’ level was listed at 100 nuggets, and I wanted to max out on Sudoku and not Cave-In, I would have to sit here for 11 hours in order to reach that max.

I play Sudoku all the time, and for me the ‘Easy’ level seems more like ‘Medium/Intermediate’ than Easy, and I honestly think it’s because it’s not giving you all nine numbers on the board somewhere. D: I can’t be sure this is the cause because I can’t find any game that starts with all nine numbers anywhere to do a calculation and to time myself. But I think that is what is throwing me off… Something’s not quite right. e___e’

I think the ‘simple’ difficulty on mycena has a generation algorithm that is comparable to maybe a 2 or even 3 star puzzle in a puzzle book :) The puzzle books usually offer sudoku that have extra numbers already filled in that were not essentially required to be able to complete it (which seems to be the simplest puzzle option here), just for the sake of teaching players how to think logically and know how to reason to fill them in.

In my head I totally keep referring to the difficulty levels as easy, medium, advanced and expert, lol, instead of simple through hard =P

With regards to the pay out, I think glitch is going to look at the average amount of time the difficulties take players (all together) and then up the nugget reward such that ‘on average’, capping through sudoku would take just as long as capping through cave in. For individual users that would still be way off the mark, though, so then you get to pick whichever is either faster or more enjoyable to you :)

I’m really curious about how everyone is timing, on average :D /totaldataanalysisgeek

ee~ I’m a little overexcited xD

Mobile comment: There is no way to ‘lock’ shroomies on mobile since there isn’t a right click button.

General comment: Agree with plasma x_x It’s possible but annoying when you are missing one of the numbers.
Another thing is there has been more than one occasion were I have played now, on easy, and gotten to the point where.. I just couldn’t go without making an intuitive leap. Algorithm seems like it needs to be tweaked so that ‘Easy’ actually is ‘Easy’? This seems to be an over arching complaint as I skim this board. I’ve only gone higher than easy a couple of times to test the ‘Levels not actually lining up’ theory. But..it didn’t seem that different?

Idea also, if the payout is high enough, make it so that partially finished puzzles can still pay out after a certain point. (This would be one way to get around the time it takes to finish one.) As long as the numbers that are filled in are still correct, then you’re fine. have the scoring system set up that the prize for winning is worth it though. I’ve personally only completed one puzzle but I got almost to completion before time restraints or other factors fell in.

A way to save your numbers would be nice. Close Tab+come back to it numbers still there.

As for the numbers- if you’ve learned to do sudoku already you’re going to be used to counting 1-9 as you’re doing it. But whatevs.

People have already mentioned the varying ways you could change the interface, Possibly even integrate like a box containing 9 of each mushroom? (like think as if they’re in a kitchen- wooden box thing) click the mushy you want then click where you want to place. =)
Not sure how to fix the earlier mentioned ‘Can’t lock due to lack of right click button’ issue though on mobile.