Set The Buttons - an old puzzle

[gryff]

I've always enjoyed the "adventure game" which means solving puzzles and following story lines.

 

Here is a puzzle I first encountered in the 1990s - three versions :

 

1. Easy - can be done with 3 clicks minimum

 

2. Harder - can be done with 5 clicks minimum

 

3. Hardest - can be done with 7 clicks minimum

 

Aim of the puzzle is to get all buttons green. You can click on a red button to turn it green - however,  doing so changes other  non-clicked buttons.

 

All the data necessary to control the behaviour of the buttons comes from the names of objects in the babylon file - exported from Blender - hence the string parsing you see in the javascript code.

 

The code took me longer than geometry building in Blender

 

Anyone recognize the puzzle - and what game did it appear in ?

 

cheers, gryff

[Kilombo]

Nice game, i don't remember, but it's fun to play

[BdR]

It looks pretty cool, but as a game it's very bare bones. There's no reset button so you have to reload the whole page to restart. There's no intructions, for example I only accidentally found out you can drag to spin it (nice touch btw). Also, you could add select buttons for the start-position, instead of having 3 separate files.

 

I think this type of puzzle is mostly known as Lights Out. I don't know which adventure game you mean, maybe a puzzle within Castle of Dr. Brain. Actually the crypt puzzle in The 7th Guest follows the exact same principle, see this youtube video starting at 3:10

[gryff]

Actually the crypt puzzle in The 7th Guest follows the exact same principle

 

Well done BdR . One of the first adventure games I ever played. It does not of course have to be turning lights on/off. Here is another example - this time with levers:

 

Levers Puzzle

 

Basically the same code, except that instead of triggering a change in the material of various buttons, it triggers an animation for the levers. I think it is a little trickier as it is harder to detect the relationships between the levers.

 

And interestingly, a variation of the same puzzle is used a second time in the 7th. Guest - the "Painting Puzzle" - see image below. No lights, buttons, levers - just portions of the painting.

 

but as a game it's very bare bones

 

It is not meant to be a complete game - just a kind of proof of concept (including my scripting ability ). The camera is just a standard ArcRotate camera from Babylon.js - so nothing fancy there . I did the whole thing to get away from a larger game I am slowly building - but was causing me problems.

 

As for the three files, I wanted fixed starting positions so that if anyone needed a particular solution I could provide one. In the 7th Guest itself, the starting positions for the coffins (and the painting) are randomly created - so it made it very difficult for people creating walkthroughs to provide a solution

 

cheers, gryff