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Lazy Evaluation {Kim Minji | JiU x Male Reader}

Tags: two ounces of mommy kink, one bowl of age play, two cups of heavenly chocolate, pinch of humor, lots of fluffy fluff-fluff, a plate of hearty cream pie, a single grain of femdom

TW: Math and computer science jokes, mindless smut

4.9k – Read it on AO3.

A/N: The science may not be correct. Please excuse me. Or maybe it is. Most jokes will fly over your head if you are not into mathematics and computer science. This is not a failure on my part, and I will never take full responsibility.

If it helps: It's part of the joke that you do not understand everything about monads... I'm just continueing the meme...

#dreamcatcher smut #jiu smut #male reader #mommy k!nk #dreamcatcher jiu smut #vanilla smut #fluff smut #dreamcatcher fluff #jiu fluff #dreamcatcher jiu fluff #kpop gg smut #kpop smut #kpop fanfic #kpop fluff

Top 5 Common Database Design patterns in Laravel

In the world of Laravel development, a well-structured database is the bedrock of a robust and scalable application. While Laravel's Eloquent ORM provides a powerful abstraction layer for interacting with your data, understanding common database design patterns can significantly enhance your development process.

These patterns not only promote code organization and maintainability but also enable you to adapt your database structure to the unique needs of your application. By mastering these patterns, you can build efficient, reliable, and easily maintainable Laravel applications that can handle diverse data requirements.

1. Active Record Pattern:

This is the most common pattern used by Eloquent ORM in Laravel. It encapsulates database logic within model classes, allowing you to interact with the database using object-oriented methods.

Application

This pattern is well-suited for projects of any size and complexity. It simplifies database operations, making them easier to understand and maintain.

Example:

Advantages:

Simplicity: Easy to understand and implement.

Code Reusability: Model methods can be reused throughout your application.

Relationship Management: Built-in support for relationships between models.

Disadvantages:

Tight Coupling: Model logic is tightly coupled to the database, making it harder to test independently.

Complexity: Can become complex for large applications with complex data structures.

2. Data Mapper Pattern:

This pattern separates data access logic from domain logic. It uses a dedicated "mapper" class to translate between domain objects and database records.

Application

This pattern is useful for large-scale applications with complex domain models, as it allows for greater flexibility and modularity. It is particularly useful when working with multiple data sources or when you need to optimize for performance.

Example:

Advantages:

Flexibility: Easily change the database implementation without affecting business logic.

Testability: Easy to test independently from the database.

Modularity: Promotes a modular structure, separating concerns.

Disadvantages:

Increased Complexity: Requires more code and might be overkill for simple applications.

3. Repository Pattern:

This pattern provides an abstraction layer over the data access mechanism, offering a consistent interface for interacting with the database.

Application

This pattern promotes loose coupling and simplifies testing, as you can easily mock the repository and control the data returned. It is often used in conjunction with the Data Mapper pattern.

Example:

Advantages:

Loose Coupling: Decouples business logic from specific data access implementation.

Testability: Easy to mock repositories for testing.

Reusability: Reusable interface for accessing different data sources.

Disadvantages:

Initial Setup: Can require more setup compared to Active Record.

4. Table Inheritance Pattern:

This pattern allows you to create a hierarchical relationship between tables, where child tables inherit properties from a parent table.

Application

This pattern is useful for creating polymorphic relationships and managing data for different types of entities. For example, you could have a User table and separate tables for AdminUser and CustomerUser that inherit from the parent table.

Example:

Advantages:

Polymorphism: Enables handling different types of entities using a common interface.

Code Reusability: Reuses properties and methods from the parent table.

Data Organization: Provides a structured way to organize data for different types of users.

Disadvantages:

Increased Database Complexity: Can lead to a more complex database structure.

5. Schema-less Database Pattern:

This pattern avoids the use of a predefined schema and allows for dynamic data structures. This is commonly used with NoSQL databases like MongoDB.

Application

This pattern is suitable for projects that require highly flexible data structures, such as social media platforms or analytics systems.

Example:

Advantages:

Flexibility: Easily adapt to changing data structures.

Scalability: Suitable for high-volume, rapidly changing data.

High Performance: Efficient for specific use cases like real-time analytics.

Disadvantages:

Increased Complexity: Requires a different approach to querying and data manipulation.

Data Consistency: Can be challenging to maintain data consistency without a schema.

Choosing the Right Pattern:

The best pattern for your project depends on factors like project size, complexity, performance requirements, and your team's experience. It is important to choose patterns that align with the specific needs of your application and ensure long-term maintainability and scalability.

Conclusion:

This exploration of common database design patterns used in Laravel has shed light on the importance of strategic database structuring for building robust and scalable applications. From the simplicity of the Active Record pattern to the sophisticated capabilities of the Data Mapper and Repository patterns, each pattern offers distinct benefits that cater to specific project needs.

By understanding the strengths and applications of these patterns, Laravel developers can choose the optimal approach for their projects, ensuring a well-organized, efficient, and maintainable database architecture. Ultimately, mastering these patterns empowers you to create Laravel applications that are not only functional but also adaptable to evolving data requirements and future growth.

#laravel #laravel development company #laravel framework #laravel developers #database #design #coding #programming

difference between abstract class vs interface in .net core, interface vs abstract class in .net core, .net core interface, abstract class,

Interface vs. Abstract Class in .Net Core:

Q01. What is the use of Abstract Class and Interface in .Net? Q02. What is Abstract Class in .Net? Q03. What is Interface in .Net? Q04. What are the current fundamental rules of using Abstract Class in .Net? Q05. What are the things that are allowed in an Abstract Class? Q06. What are the things that are not allowed in an Abstract Class? Q07. What is the difference between the traditional Interface and the current .Net Core Interface? Q08. What are the new features allowed in the current .Net Core Interface?? Q09. What are the features that are not allowed in the .Net Core Interface? Q10. What are the similarities between Abstract Class and C# 8 Interface? Q11. What is the difference between Abstract Class and Interface? Q12. If both Abstract Classes and Interfaces are used for abstraction, what distinguishes them? Q13. What are the recent features introduced for the interface in .Net?

#crackjob #techpoint #techpointfunda #techpointfundamentals #csharpinterview #dotnetinterview #abstractclassvsinterface #interfacevsabstractclass

Thoughts on Drawpile 2.2 server architecture

Drawpile 2.2 (beta) is a major reworking of the client application's internals, but the server has remained untouched. To better support the "thick server" operating mode (introduced in 2.1,) it's time to take another look at the architecture. (Thick server is what I call a server that has its own copy of the paint engine so that it can generate a snapshot of the canvas state for new users on its own, thus eliminating the need for session resets and speeding up logins. A thick server is not, however, strictly better than a thin server as it requires more resources on the server side and is tied to a specific protocol version.)

Before we can start planning the next generation architecture, we need to take a look at the current state. Here's a rough architectural diagram of the 2.1 server:

At the heart is the Session class. This represents a running Drawpile session. It contains Session History, which is the session content, past and present. The session also holds the Clients, which are the users presently logged in.

The Session class is abstract and has two concrete implementations: ThinSession and ThickSession.

The SessionHistory class is also abstract and has two implementations: one that holds the session content in memory and one that keeps it in a file. The latter is useful for very long running sessions and for running on a server with limited memory.

Now, here is the kink that needs ironing out: the ThickSession implementation does not use the SessionHistory! (Or it does but only partially in a weird way.) Instead, most of the session content is kept in the paint engine. So what bits are kept where? I for one don't remember! A neater design would be to put the paint engine into a SessionHistory implementation.

Next, the Client abstract class has a concrete implementation for Thin and Thick server modes. There is barely any code in either implementation, so they probably don't need to be two separate classes.

A better architecture might look something like this:

Less classes, no inheritance, easier to understand. The above diagram was made with the C++ implementation in mind, but the Rust version should look just about the same. One difference between Rust and C++ is that Rust doesn't have class inheritance. It does, however, have traits which are similar to interfaces in other languages. In the above diagram, SessionHistory has been changed to an interface, which should make the design compatible with the Rust way of doing things.

Another complication in the present architecture is that a Session instance keeps a list of Clients, but each Client also keeps a pointer to the Session it belongs to. In Rust, this kind of two-way reference is difficult to represent and, in any language, is more difficult to reason about. The client has a connection object through which it receives messages before passing those messages to the session it belongs to, or the login handler if not yet part of a session.

Luckily, we don't have to try replicate this architecture 1:1 in the Rust version. Just a small modification is needed:

When a client connects, an asynchronous task is spawned to handle incoming messages. Received messages are first passed to the login handler. When the login phase completes, the client is added to a session. Further messages are then passed directly to the session's message handler, removing the need for the client to have a reference to the owning session. The client instance will still contain an object representing the network connection, but this will only be used for sending, not receiving.

The new server probably won't be ready for 2.2.0 stable release, but I plan on finishing it not long after.

Week 8 - digital model making

Pre class activity

This week we had access to a video of Andrew Simpson on model making. This video really highlights the importance of taking your early concepts and quickly moving to the 3D object. Through this process we are able to gain really valuable information on how objects interact with people, hands, other objects etc.. We can quickly make adjustments to angles, thicknesses, lengths in order to find the balance between an appealing form and practical function.

Andrew talks about the fidelity in model making in terms of the amount of detail used. For example you might make a low fidelity model to quickly assess the different dimensions and feel of the model, before progressing to a high fidelity model to test more details such as connection points to the razor head.

I really enjoyed the detail placed on getting the weight of he product right, in combination with material choice, perceived value, and the ability to test different models under scenarios such as usability when wet.

Weekly exercise

This week was one of my first times using a digital model making tool. It took me a long time to get going with this as my computer is currently out of action, so I was down in the DFL using their computers to access 3dsMax.

This was by far the biggest learning curve of the course for me! I’m feeling more and more comfortable with the physical model making and prototyping techniques but the digital environment is very intimidating. I think this is because I feel like I have control over the outcomes in physical making, but the large number of menus and controls hides what is possible in the digital world.

I tried overcoming a lot of these barriers by watching videos on YouTube of other users. A couple I found useful were

- these introductions to 3dsMax (1 and 2)

- this guide on making a chair

Reflections

It’s interesting reflecting back on my very first attempts at woodworking a few years ago, or even most recently crafting with blue foam. Last term I avoided working with blue foam because I didn’t know how to use the hot wire cutters properly (make sure there’s tension in the wire!) or how to get a nice finish (sandpaper is your friend), but now I feel a lot more comfortable. It’s all about using the right tool for the job. The same can be said for 3D modelling where you have to know the right tool in the program to achieve your outcome. This is why following guides is so useful where I can learn about the different tools and see how they are applied.

At first I really disliked the interface of 3dsMax because it felt clunky to navigate and move around your work. Turns out I was using a computer with a mouse that had a very sticky middle button that didn’t really work! Once I moved to a different computer it was a lot easier. The best command I learnt early on was (Z) which returns your view to the model you are working on as I found it really easy to get lost.

I was able to make my first initial shapes without too much difficulty, and learnt a couple more useful commands

- scale (R)

- move (W)

- rotate (E)

With these commands I was had a go at making a very simple chair using a variety of shapes

After a few days I was able to come back to the program and have a go at making a slightly more complex chair using more sophisticated commands. This utilised moving segment points, shift copying, chamfering, and using the bridge command to connect two objects.

I also used a number of the modifier commands to make an abstract shape (twist, squeeze, edit poly etc)

Week 8 - Digital Iteration

This week's tutorial was really interesting and entertaining. One of my personal hobbies is digital rendering (mainly in Blender), but it was really nice to go out of my comfort zone to a program I have only ever used once before. When I opened 3ds Max for the first time, I noticed how similar the interface looked to Maya. Being Autodesk programs natively, it made sense, but it was nice to have some element of familiarity.

During my year 10 and 11 high school holidays I completed a Cert IV in digital design for games and film. That coursed used Maya and Unreal Engine 4, so I had a bit of experience with the interface and principles of polygon modelling. However, 3ds max was probably one of the popular programs which I had the least experience with; so it was still a hugely informative and insightful process trying to adapt my knowledge between programs.

I started with the primitives menu, and imported a sphere into the workspace. I initially found myself struggling with the interface. There are a lot of options and features which are not necessary when learning the basics of a program. When starting to learn any 3d program, I often find myself spoiled for choice, and perhaps even too overwhelmed. I was very glad when the tutorial suggested hiding some superfluous menus from view, as I felt that it really cleared up the screen. After aligning the views (Image 1), I experimented with the modifiers tab.

The modifiers in 3ds max were really interesting to play around with. Working with meshes can sometimes be a tedious and particular process, but it was really enjoyable creating something with no end goal in mind. I liked how using a squeeze modifier (Image 2) could generate an egg shape with the sphere primitive, and how the melt, twist and wave modifiers (Images 3, 4 and 5) could be pushed to the mesh extremes. When working with a mesh, the topology is important to the quality of the final form. As the entire object is constructed of tris and quads, the way they are situated on the model, and their resolution play an important role in what you see. For example, the more I increased the twist modifier, the more I could see the vertices sticking out of the shape. It goes to show that unless the resolution is increased, there are limitations to the modifiers usage, as they can 'break' your model.

The modifiers in 3ds Max are very different to the ones in blender, I definitely feel like in any 3D program, anything you can create in one is attainable in the other; however 3ds max has a lot of mesh deformation modifiers out of the box. Although I thought these created really interesting and abstract shapes which I certainly enjoyed, I realised that I couldn't think of many instances where I would use some of the modifiers on a real project, but I think they are really valuable for niche tasks.

My favourite part about the exercise was learning poly modelling in 3ds Max. Poly modelling is a core part of most 3d modelling programs; and the skills are usually transferrable between. There are some really fantastic modelling tools in 3ds max which make the process of modelling enjoyable. I had a look around my desk for some quick and interesting forms I could make, and started with a really simple apple using the sphere I had in the viewport. I utilised the 'soft select' (Image 6) feature to move many verts at once, to create the top and bottom crease in the apple where the stem travels. To create the stem, I used the cylinder primitive and used the taper/bend modifier to create a curved and natural form (Image 7).

Next, I used the cylinder primitive and used the scale and extrusion feature to get the barrel of a pen. To create the tip of the pen I target welded the vertices together to get the point. I created a new cube primitive to create the clip on the pen, and extruded it (Image 8); also creating a bevelled edge to round it out slightly. Using the same techniques, I also made a stool from my room (Image 9). I really wanted to experiment with as many features as I could in these exercises, so with each 'sketch' I tried to focus on a tool I hadn't used before - as it felt like the best way to improve (Image 10). Still getting comfortable with the Poly Modelling in 3ds max, I also made a cupcake (Image 11) from the basic cylinder primitive to try and improve my modelling quality and speed; making simple extrusions, scaling the rings in, rotating them to get the icing layers. I played around with NURMS subdivision on the mesh to smooth it out, and was really happy with the results.

Finally, I wanted to use all the skills in conjunction, as well as using a tool which really sped up the workflow. I knew from Blender and Maya that loop cuts sped up the process, but I could not find them in 3ds max. After researching the issue on different forums, I found that it went under a different name; Swift loop Though it was very basic problem solving, it goes to show that these skills and programs have transferrable knowledge; and doing a simple search of your problem can lead to new ways of solving them. Swift loop was really useful in creating a loop cut between two parallel edges; adding more geometry for manipulation. When creating the tape dispenser, I noticed that the subdivision was rounding the model out too much, to the point where it no longer registered as a tape dispenser. So I used the swift loop feature to create loop cuts close to the bordering edges to reduce the interpolation between the curve (Images 12 and 13). This taught me that the subdivision modifiers aren't just something that can be added to a model to instantly make it look better; they require some manipulation and editing to get the desired effect.

I found 3ds max challenging but really interesting and insightful. As I am familiar with other programs of similar nature, it took me a while to get out of my own head; using shortcuts and hotkeys from the other programs and wondering why it wouldn't work. Overall, I think that its really rewarding to pick up another program, as it expands my skills and approach to modelling. If I were to redo this activity, I think I would try and make some more complex forms now that I have gotten more comfortable with 3ds Max; perhaps moving onto a product or more complex object. I am really looking forward to creating the bottle concepts in 3ds max next week, as I believe it will be another chance to improve my skills.

Thoughts on the Pre-Class activity - Andrew Simpson case Study

I believe that digital modelling and physical models have a closer relationship than people think. Form and Materials are an important part of perception, but there are qualities of both physical and digital modelling provide when compared to one another. Digital models allow for material iteration, simulation and rendering. Physical models allow for the physical contact, and interaction with the end user. When Andrew discusses the importance of materiality, it drives home the necessity of experimentation and versatility in design. The idea of new materials informed new processes in his decision making process, and it lead to different material types being explored.

I found Andrew's discussion on model fidelity really insightful. I perceive high and low fidelity models to represent how close the model is to a refined product. Whilst a high fidelity model would be fantastic to show clients or to use in renders, low fidelity models are required to quickly iterate on concepts and ideas to test the boundaries of the product e.g. material, form, colour. High fidelity models are more refined, and have more time put into them, to explore how the end product will feel for the user. High fidelity and low fidelity models are both important, and when Andrew talks about the non-uniform relationship of the two in his process, it shows that design is not a linear process; rather a circular one driven by prototyping and feedback. If a high fidelity model still doesn't feel right, faster, low fidelity models can be made testing a range of new ideas; to be taken through the process of design once again.

#ides1262 2021 week 8

Starker 007 AU >>

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The painting is hideous, there are no two ways about it.

The longer Tony stares at it trying to find a justification for the thirteen-thousand dollar price tag, the more dumbfounded he becomes. Affixed to the wall it presents like a gaudy canvas banner, a bewildering clutter of haphazard spills and splotches that might have a certain panache adorning the walls of the penthouse of the pretentious elite, but Tony can’t make sense of it.

The gallery is lined with paintings of a similar aesthetic, abstracts that look like psychedelic blood-spatters, moody self-portraits and ten-feet-tall modernism canvas of writhing, spaghetti-lines that looks like it belongs in a first grade art class.

Maybe Tony is a simpleton, but he has at least some taste.

A man slips beside Tony to observe the painting, head tilted up to peer at the artwork in quiet consideration. Outside the corner of his vision Tony can tell the man is stunning. Suit expertly tailored, the sharp lines of his jaw and cheekbones beautifully chiseled, milky skin brushed with a hint of gold and long, long that fingers that wrap around a perspiring glass of Sauvignon Blanc.

Tony sips his whiskey, a smooth burn down his throat as his interest is piqued. He’s seen a hundred, a thousand of men just like this one - well dressed and impeccably styled - but however girt by the exquisitely woven threads he may be, the unconscious tug of the mans smile seems genuine in partner with the down-to-earth brown of his eyes. He’s beautiful but doesn’t flaunt it.

It takes only a beat for the man to notice Tony’s staring, the mellow harmonic chords of the piano lulling away in the near distance. He offers a shy smile at the attention, turning his gaze back to the painting to resume his quiet scrutiny, eyes flickering over the slapdash strokes.

Oh yes, Tony thinks. He’ll do just nicely.

He clears his throat roughly, catching the startled gaze of the younger man, mouth falling open in quiet surprise.

#starker #starker moodboard #tony stark x peter parker #spy au #007 au #tw: violence #tw: blood #tw: guns

Why Puzzle Platformers?

Why are there so many puzzle platformers? Was everybody simply copying Braid, hoping for the same level of success? And more importantly, now that Braid has been out for over a decade, why are people still making them?

If you make games, you already know why there are so many puzzle platformers, but I haven’t found a comprehensive answer to this question anywhere I can conveniently link to.

There are different ways to read that question:

Why are people adding puzzles to platformer games?

Why are there so many commercial indie puzzle platformers?

Why weren’t the same puzzles presented in an abstract, more puzzle-focused way?

Why are people adding puzzles to platformer games?

When it comes to jam games or small shareware projects, we should first ask “Why platformers, puzzle or not?” Part of the answer is probably “because platformers are easy to make with GameMaker“. Another part of the answer is “Because in a platformer, the player character interacts with the level, items, and NPCs, but these do not, for the most part, interact with each other, which makes a platformer comparably easy to implement (compared to an RTS game) and design (compared to RPG games), and platformers don’t need many extradiegetic UI elements.“

But beyond that, when you can add other mechanics to games, why puzzles?

The two obvious candidates to add to games are combat/stealth, and puzzles.

You can could also add multiple-choice dialogue, inventory, RPG elements (quests, skill points, classes), or procedural generation to any sidescrolling game, but none of these cannot carry a game on their own when you tack them on to a platformer. If the dialogue is actually substantial enough to carry a game on its own, the 2D platforming may stick out as “tacked-on” instead.

Strategy or economy (building, trading, tactics and management) are better served by a mouse-based UI. Dialogue-heavy or text-based games usually don’t have platforming sections, but platformer games can have some dialogue. In both cases, the pacing and movement of a platformer undercuts these game mechanics, and a different UI would be a better fit.

You can give your platformer a theme like horror, romance, science fiction, or medieval fantasy.

Puzzles are something you can add into a platformer game, either in between difficult platforming sections, or in combination with them. You can even alternate between stealth/combat and puzzles. Puzzles can be easy or difficult, and you can use them to break up levels or slow down the pace of an action platformer, or centre your whole game around them.

It takes some skill to design a puzzle mechanic that stands on its own, but it’s much easier to design an simple and easy one-off puzzle that you can throw into a platformer level. Easy puzzles are easy to balance: They have a binary win condition and an intended solution, but often no explicit failure state.

If adding another mechanic to a platformer makes it a puzzle platformer, is Speer a puzzle platformer? Is Super Meat Boy a puzzle platformer because you sometimes have to push buttons and the levels are self-contained? Is Outer Bounds a puzzle platformer? It’s not a bright line, but many action games that are lumped with “puzzle platformers” are still about jumping and running, but with a move set that isn’t 100% copied from Mario Bros.

If the main appeal of a game lies in the platforming, then as long as it’s solvable and doesn’t get in the way, it’s a good puzzle. Puzzles in platforming games can present their own platforming challenges, and rely on a slightly different kind of platforming execution skill, instead of puzzle-solving as a core aesthetic and source of difficulty. Players can be forced to traverse the same terrain back and forth along different paths. This can squeeze more gameplay out of fewer designed levels. Combined with traditional platforming obstacles like enemies to avoid, spike pits, moving platforms, one-way platforms, this can lead to more varied and difficult platforming challenges. Instead of getting in the way or breaking up the platforming bits, puzzle mechanics can go hand-in-hand with the platforming, without presenting a challenge in terms of puzzle solving, but only in terms of executing the solution.

Why are there so many commercial indie puzzle platformers?

For commercial games, the answer is more complicated. Maybe the premise of the question is not even true. Trine, Fez, Limbo, and And Yet It Moves all can in one way or another be described as “puzzle platformers”, but no two of them are in the same genre. If you cast a wider net, you get games like Mushroom 11, Owlboy, The Cave, Starseed Pilgrim, and Gunpoint.

Like “Action Adventure”, the phrase “puzzle platformer” has become a catch-all term for sidescroller games that aren’t punishingly difficult.

Of course, many commercial long-form games are classical puzzle platformers. Braid, Vessel, Closure, The Swapper, and Snapshot. These games are about puzzles, not about platforming.

Many smaller games like WarpSwap, ElecHead, Ministry of Synthesis, or LegBreaker are just exploring one puzzle mechanic to exhaustion in a series of one-room puzzles. Larger or long-form games often expand their repertoire of mechanics to create puzzles based on different mechanics held together by common themes or a story, or they focus more on platforming.

Why weren’t the same puzzles presented in an abstract, more puzzle-focused way?

Simple Controls and User Interface

If you see a puzzle platformer, you don’t need to figure out the controls or UI first, you can just pick up the controller and start running around. In their simplest form, the controls for a puzzle platformer are four directional buttons plus one for jumping and one for interacting the with puzzle mechanic, but more complex controls schemes are common.

The controls make writing a puzzle platformer for a game jam much easier than a mouse-driven puzzle game: You just need to check six keyboard buttons. If you are making a big commercial title, ease of implementation in terms of programming is not really a factor: After a day or two at most you’ll have implemented whatever mouse picking, widgets and UI elements you need. What’s much more time consuming is figuring out where to put the buttons so they don’t obscure the scene, or how to communicate which objects are clickable. Getting user interfaces right requires playtesting and iteration. A puzzle platformer might only need a context-based prompt that says “press X to interact“ or “walk into a boulder to push it“.

Game Feel, Embodiment and Characterisation

Another benefit of puzzle platformers over abstract puzzle presentation is game feel. The player controls the player character, and feels like a the player character existing inside the space of the level, increasing immersion compared to the feeling of a person sitting at a computer thinking about a crossword puzzle.

Many big-name 2D puzzle platformers like Braid and Snapshot have a rather zoomed-in view that focuses the level player character and the immediate surroundings, instead of showing the whole level. This allows the game to present important characters, items or places in great detail, and lets the camera pan to frame the most important parts of a scene. Animated movement in a two-dimensional space can give weight and character to the player character, and connect the gameplay to a story. NPCs can live inside a level, next to their home, their things, and their friends.

Imagine the same thing in a tower defence, or a racing game: You’re walking around in a level, and suddenly you meet an NPC, you’re having a conversation, and then you go on your merry way. Characters and environmental storytelling are not unique to platformers, but it’s more difficult to pull off in a game without a player character existing in the world with the NPCs. Puzzle platformers keep all options open.

Of course, this is not the only way to connect characterisation and puzzle gameplay, and it can be done in abstract games. Just in the most recent Ludum Dare, I played the game Interstellar Connection, a puzzle game with a rather abstract, disembodied presentation, in which the characterisation was delivered through dialogue. (I should briefly remark on two aspects of Interstellar Connection here, even though it has very little to do with the rest of this post. First, the game is at its heart a bunch of mazes that can be solved by backtracking. Every puzzle is equivalent to a maze graph, but the presentation makes use of a quirk of human cognition to prevent you from seeing the solution the way you would see the solution in a small maze. Second, I don’t think this mechanic can support a long-form game. If it weren’t for Ludum Dare, this would have been a forgettable minigame, not the main meat of the game, motivated and contextualised by the plot.)

Characters living inside a world could also be achieved with isometric graphics, first- or third-person 3D, or in a text-based game, but they don’t work well in self-contained or grid-based puzzle levels. We’ll get back to other aspects of more open level design later.

Puzzle Design

In a puzzle platformer, you have a player character, and you can have different kinds of obstacles, like pits filled with spikes, ledges, and doors. In a top-down platformer, you can of course also have doors, but you won’t have the same dynamics of gravity with falling down, of dropping things. It’s easier to get down from a ledge, or to drop something than to lift it.

With a visible and embodied player character instead of an abstract cursor, every puzzle can be complicated by combining manipulation of the puzzle environment with traversal of the level:

The level has an “obvious” solution, but the real challenge is navigating the environment to get there.

The challenge is to manipulate the environment to open a path for the player to jump to the right place to implement the solution.

The level has a “red herring” solution that solves the main puzzle but leaves the player trapped behind an obstacle, unable to progress without undoing it.

Level Design, Progression

Multiple puzzles can be placed in the same platformer “level” or “room“. In a “pure” puzzle game, puzzles are self-contained, with a beginning and an end, a starting state and an explicit solution condition. In a platformer, the goal can be implicit: You want to go from left to right and traverse the obstacles.

If a puzzle has an obvious missing piece, it can be a prompt for the player to explore the surrounding areas, to look for a tool, or for a certain puzzle piece that is exactly shaped like the gap that needs to be filled in the puzzle.

Strange Keyworld is a puzzle platformer, almost a puzzle metroidvania. Every so often, instead of reasoning through the puzzle that is currently shown on the screen, you need to explore the adjacent rooms to find another piece and bring it over. Although the puzzles in Strange Keyworld are mostly self-contained, they are still embedded in the larger world.

Most levels in Braid are bigger than one screen, and they have more than one puzzle. Often the first order of business is to get your bearings and explore. Then you learn to traverse the level to get everywhere, identify and separate the different puzzles, and only then can you think about solving all the puzzles by manipulating time and level state to get everywhere.

An interesting twist on this happens in Recursed: Levels are always on one screen, 20x15 tiles... but you need to explore inside all the chests to see what the level actually looks like!

Of course, you could have the same kind of dynamic in an abstractly presented puzzle with a mouse-based UI, where you can zoom in and out, drag the viewport around, or enter doors (and Recursed-style chests) by double-clicking. Then you’d lose the sense of exploration and progression, and the challenge of traversing the space via platforming. Exploring a large level would be easy, but tedious. You would need to program (as the developer) and then learn (as the payer) a new user interface, or you can just move a player character in a world. This ties back into the very first point: Platformers don’t need many extradiegetic UI elements.

tl;dr “Puzzle Platformers” are actually a bunch of genres in a trenchcoat. Character-focused 2D side-scrolling graphics are compatible with many different mechanics and game designs. Character-focused 2D platforming can counterbalance the abstractness of puzzle games.

#game design #puzzle platformer #puzzle game