Thinky Stream: Bombs and Peaks

8 thoughts on “Thinky Stream: Bombs and Peaks”

1. From a Steam review of Bombe: If you’re the kind of person who’s memorized the 1-3-1 corner pattern, or who loves churning through possibilities to arrive at a conclusion of “aha, THAT mustn’t be a mine!” – this game is 100% for you.

   Ooh they got my number there. Sounds kinda like an anti-Hexcells.

2. Bombe is interesting but the interface is… a thing.

   CHECK OUT THE STREAM ON YOUTUBE TO FIND OUT WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT

3. Well I feel like I have the hang of a lot of the interface, but the level select is mysterious (what are those percentages), and the help is pretty opaque. Like I’m on this level and I know how to solve it, but the rule I want involves five regions, and I just got a help thing that seems to show how I can connect two parts to form a new region in a way that I want, except the help thing doesn’t have any words and doesn’t show me what to do at all? I’m like, yes, it would be nice if I could do the thing that you are illustrating there, but you haven’t told me what button to press?

   Bombe Level (Hexagon 5×4):
   ⠨⢵⠯⣽⠣⡂⣯⠺⠅⠿⢽⠁⠀⡄⠂⡻⠢⡬⡥⡶⡥⡬⠢⠺⠢⡃⡆⡅⡁⡟⠡⡂⠱⡟⡁⠰⡂⠱⡂⠳⡟⡂⠲⠡⡁⠰⡟⡁⠰⠢⡽⠇⠰⠍⡈⠦⠀⠕⠠⣅⠁⣝⢆⡦⠅⠀⠴⣆

   The real interface defeat is the thing where Steam has decided not to let me type anything into the text boxes, which makes it hard to buy the full game. Which maybe would solve my problem.

   I played a bunch of Golf Peaks around when it was in one of those yottabundles. Nice game but I didn’t feel compelled to do every last level, or even every last main path level. I certainly did the thing where I tried to get from the flag to the ball a bunch of times.

   Lovux which was on the site in the intro. seems to be by the folks who did Quadrata, which I found all right but kind of slight. “Passes the time nicely but I won’t miss out if I miss out,” as you summarized my review. Probably the new one is at least that much!

4. Solved the Bombe interface issue: I had to drag the action thing between the two little boxes I wanted to join in a region. This is somewhat an interface issue but more a “why don’t you use words in your instructions” issue.

   Haven’t solved the problem with text entry in Steam.

5. Ooog Bombe is destroying my mind in a… mostly good way? There is this one level (in the squares, left column, second from bottom) where it is like, spend several hours figuring out one square must be blank, spend several hours figuring out how to convince the game of this, it doesn’t blow the board open. Repeat with a bomb. Repeat with a blank. I tried to write some all-purpose rules to solve it in a way that’s smarter than me and got thousands of regions and then had to figure out which rule to delete to make it go away.

   The interface is getting a bit… yeah, though. I unlocked painting and it seems to flat-out not work? I also unlocked filters and it allows you to find exactly the region you’re looking for and then you can’t do anything with it. (Or at least you can’t do the thing I want to do, which is send it to the “hidden” map where I keep the stuff I’m working on.) You have to turn the filter off and try to find it again, which is a problem when there are literally 75 regions intersecting a given square. I feel like the development of the interface is still running a bit ahead of the testing.

6. Matt, I’m pleased you’re exploring Bombe. I haven’t been back myself – I chose to focus on Bilattice and then I had to prep the new stream. But the interface is definitely a sore point. I respect it’s building out some real uncharted territory in terms of the interface design, but it makes for a particularly formidable presentation.

7. I saw a Steam comment where someone asked him to enable drawing on the grid and he said it’d be hard, so I think what happened is probably that he’s pushing some features out that he’s still planning to work on later. The filter thing seems kinda similar, like he set up filters and they’re in the game even though they’re super awkward to work with.

   On the other hand I just had something where I set up this little bitty auxiliary general purpose rule and it broke the level open in a way I wasn’t anticipating and that was satisfying.

8. There are definitely levels where I spend literally hours staring at what I have till I figure out what space I can clear, even more hours trying to figure out how to put my deduction into rules that the game can understand, probably an hour or two scattered around in there waiting because I have so many dumb rules that the game hangs when I zoom/drag/click, a half-hour or so finding the key regions I need on the godawful mess I’ve made of the main map so I can transfer them to the hidden map where I do all the work, and… I clear that space and that’s it. Imagine progressing at the rate of Maze in Bonfire Peaks except you have to do like five of those in a row.

   I’m not complaining that much, it’s a workout.