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Empress of China is Jeroen_Sol's and my submission to the "Swap in the Middle with You" event. The first part of the game was done by Jeroen_Sol, and the second half by me. Unfortunately, things didn't go as planned for me, so my half is rather lacking.

Empress of China is two stories: it is the story of a girl named Lei, her two fathers, and her favorite book. It is also the story of a Chinese princess named Xiaoli, her servant Zhong, and her evil brother Jiang. But despite their obvious differences, the two stories are more similar than they seem...

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Difficulty problems and possible solutions

It's come to my attention that this game in its current state is... shall we put it... way too hard and frustrating to be enjoyable for anyone who isn't both a hardcore puzzle fan and a masochist.

Though difficulty is something I was definitely going for, and not something I want to remove from the game, some of the puzzles (in particular the Path of Light ones) suffer from a lack of visibility and direction. I definitely want to fix those issues by adding a few easy Path of Light puzzles before the first one, and adding a map into each room where you can't see the entirety of the puzzle in one go. That should already help a lot.

But those aren't the only thing my puzzles suffer from. They are also just generally difficult to such a level that they are too frustrating to appeal.

I've been toying with several ideas on how to make the game less frustrating, without making it much more easy.

One possibility I thought up (and Liberty also came up with the same idea in her stream), is to add an optional hint system that will propose to help you solve the current puzzle after failing it five times. (breaking a boulder in the boulder pushing puzzles, ruling out certain entry paths in the path of light puzzles, adding another word in the word puzzles, allowing you to get hit once or twice without failing in the spike puzzles)

Another possibility would be moving the switches that advance the plot one or two puzzles forwards, leaving the 4th (and maybe the 3rd) puzzles as optional, really difficult puzzles that net some sort of reward but aren't required to beat the game.

I feel doing both might be handholding too much, but I'm not sure which of the two I want to go with.

Any suggestions or other ideas would be awesome!

Posts

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Wow, this actually looks and sounds like really fun! Good job, you guys!
Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
I can't wait to check out your half, Someoneman!
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
Not many people do anything with Asian cultures and I don't know why.

I'll be keeping an eye out for this.
Frogge
I wanna marry ALL the boys!! And Donna is a meanc
18536
What's that?! A dungeon that looks like it's straight out of zelda?! I'm hyped you guys :D
I'm not sure the second path of light is solvable. I've been working on it for the last hour and can't seem to find a solution that works on it.
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
DAMN son, these are some legitimately hard puzzles! It makes me feel super dumb, and I love it!

I'm completely confounded by the entire path of light, however. Unlike the rest of the puzzles, I don't understand its logic or rules of this particular puzzle in any way. I only cleared the first puzzle by cheating, and even then I don't get it. Help? :D
Well, I've been working on the 3rd Puzzle for over 60 minutes now and haven't found a single workable solution. In fact, I've eliminated every starting point at this point. All of them ultimately require me to curve in on myself and lose by being trapped or leave me unable to hit certain boxes.
author=Ratty524
DAMN son, these are some legitimately hard puzzles! It makes me feel super dumb, and I love it!

I'm completely confounded by the entire path of light, however. Unlike the rest of the puzzles, I don't understand its logic or rules in any way. I only cleared the first puzzle by cheating, and even then I don't get it. Help? :D


Basically, the amount of lines inside of a box indicate how many "paths of light" have to be touching the box. So, a box with a single line inside of it can only be crossed once, while a box with two lines inside of it will have to be passed two times and three lines will require you to make a U-turn around the box.

Though, you shouldn't feel to bad. I was only able to figure out the rules of that game after I remember one of my brother's friends trying to solve similar puzzles in the game "The Witness".
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
author=thesacredlobo
Though, you shouldn't feel to bad. I was only able to figure out the rules of that game after I remember one of my brother's friends trying to solve similar puzzles in the game "The Witness".

That explains everything about this game.

Thanks! I'll try to give it a shot.
Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
@Ratty:
The glowing signs in the water are the Chinese characters 1, 2, and 3. They represent how many sides of that square must be turned on. You must also walk in one continuous path, without crossing yourself.


@thesacredlobo
Yes, the path of light puzzles are very hard, but they are definitely solvable. I put quite a bit of time into proving existance and uniqueness of their solutions. If you'd like, I can upload a walkthrough of the path of light puzzles in a few hours.

When event judging is over, I'll probably go back and add one or two more really easy puzzles so people actually understand the rules of the game. The puzzle is indeed heavily inspired by The Witness, and so is the game's stinginess with its information.
You'll probably have to since I doubt I'll get to the end of this game otherwise. Since, I'm pretty much tired of trying to figure out how to get past the third puzzle at this point and I can only imagine the next puzzle being more difficult.
Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
If you'd like to give the third PoL puzzle one more shot before I upload the walkthroigh:
Start at the second entrance from the left.
Not really. Mostly because that entrance is a non-starter with the way the puzzle is setup. At least, if I'm understanding your directions correctly.
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
Wooohooo!!I totally beat all the light path puzzles by cheating!

Anyway, beyond that, the ending and the supposed correlations between the real world and the story definitely felt rushed and phoned in, but I probably wouldn't add a message box apologizing.

Still, as obtuse as some of these puzzles were, I actually liked the challenge (for the ones that I solved on my own, that is). I especially liked the spike pit puzzle.

Overall, while flaws exist, it's still one of the more enjoyable entries that came from this event. Nice work!

... erm... yeah sorry about the cheating but I just really wanted to get on with this game. :x
Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
After judging is over, I hope Someoneman will agree to us putting this back to production and working together to make his half less rushed and actually be puzzle-oriented. I will also add some more introductory puzzles at the very least to the PoL puzzles. I might also put in an in-game hint system or something. I'd like for this game to be enjoyable but hard.
Well, I figured out why your tip was useless. I was on the fourth puzzle, not the third one.
Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
Ah, yes, that does explain a lot.
I didn't want to write a review because I feel like you'd think I was hating when I'm not, but God Almighty this is a bad game... with some really nice parts.



I found all the puzzles except the rock push one to be extremely onerous.

The light walk had no clues as to what you were supposed to do at all and it took someone else telling me to figure out what the aim was. Even then, we had to look into the game to finally solve the third and fourth ones because they were, quite frankly, ridiculous.

The word puzzle started out okay but the association between some of them were ridiculous as well. We had to look up ship plans to actually find the solution of one because who in the hell knows that kind of obscure word? If you're making a word puzzle, it's HIGHLY recommended that the words actually, you know, be guessable? And that you don't have to leave the game at any point just to search for solutions.

The spike puzzle is frustrating but at least you have control over the pieces of it because it has a very clear cause +> effect. Same with the boulder push.

This isn't a case of "Oh, x is bad at puzzles" or just sweeping it under the rug and saying "They're hard, duh!" It's bad puzzle design. You need to let the player know what they need to do in order to get to the end of the puzzle and you need that information clearly presented. Not being able to see half the maps in the light puzzle made it impossible to plan ahead your route. Not knowing obscure terminology made the word puzzle unsolvable without having to resort to leaving the game to search for the answers.

Don't get me wrong - the ideas are really good. The smoothness of the light puzzle walking had everyone on the stream just drooling and wanting it. The actual idea of the light puzzle is great! But the lack of being able to plan a path from looking really broke it.

The boulder push was actually the best designed just because you could see what you were doing and could plan ahead. You knew what the goal was, you knew what you needed to do and you could easily experiment in your mind and plan a path.

The words needed to be a bit more apparently connected to each other without being obscure terms. The first one was good - it made you feel like you were smart and rewarded you for thinking about what they had in common, but the last three were a lot harder because it was impossible to tell what those things had in common. Horse could have referred to any part of the horse (maybe horse head would have been better), Stem... don't even get me fucking started. People had to google that shit.

Frankly, if someone is tabbing out of your game to find an answer then your puzzle has failed. Sorry, but it's true. The idea is to keep them in the game and use the information presented to them within the game (or general knowledge... GENERAL) to figure out what you mean.

As for the rest of the game? It's great. I liked it a lot. The edits were nice, the graphics were used well, the writing was pretty good and the characterisation was neato-burrito. The general layout and ideas were great.
Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
You make some really good points, and you've already given me some ideas as to how to make some of the puzzles more clear, at the very least.

The PoL puzzles definitely need a few easy puzzles to start off with and a way to overlook the entire puzzle at once.

I personally believe in attacking a puzzle with everything you have, including the internet if the situation calls for it, but I suppose I can make the word puzzles a lot easier. It's true those puzzles are impossible without the use of google in their current state.
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