no ai would be nice, it's completely calculatable (you can make the process faster by starting from end and start simultaneously as the narrow bridges reduce the problem nicely.)
The idea is just to have right amounts of sideways rolling of single squares at a time combined with cartwheeling the narrow bridges two squares at a time. Ie it's an integer fitting problem.
Somewhat fun at the beginning but quickly boring. 

it's completely calculatable

Agreed. This is a maze, in the broad sense of the term, becuase you can create a graph of all possible states (there aren't that many) and connect the states to each other by legal moves. Then just find a route from the initial state to the goal state. 

The fun in this case comes from the process of calculation. 

Hi can someone either get whichever Amazon Marketplace slackers I ordered Dark Messiah off to deliver the damn thing, or do something to make English weather more like summer so I'm not so desperate to play games. Kthxbyewtf. 

Check with sean connery about a weather control device.

Or bush for a nuke to threaten amazon with. 

The fun in this case comes from the process of calculation.

Well, I don't know that the computer can be said to be having "fun" but it does give it a chance to use its CPU and memory cache and stuff.

If you're talking about what makes it fun for humans, the fun of a maze game like this is that the motion through the state-graph mostly corresponds to the motion through the physical space, so you can generally tell that you're progressing, but the individual steps required to progress are not always obvious, becuase sometimes the physical progress and state-graph progress are divergent. So the cases where you have to go farther from the goal to get closer to the solution require you to overcome your gut feeling and use your analytical capacity, which is fun for people who like puzzle games. 

there is also the aspect that the solution to each maze involves re-using learned patterns which is a standard video game design concept. Players learn small techniques that they can combine to solve larger problems. If the route through the state graph didn't involve repeated use of a handful of simple techniques, it wouldn't be much fun. These techniques also need to correspond to recognizable patterns in the physical design of the maze, so that people can recognize them easily. 

This is actually a subject I've thought about a lot in the past. The idea of making a state graph for a maze game is an interesting one to me.

First, you can use the state graph to programatically prove that the maze you've created is solvable. One of the advantages of this is you could have the computer randomly generate a bunch of mazes, and guarantee that none of them are impossible.

Second, you could use properties of the graph to determine how "hard" or "easy" a maze is, or other properties. This can't replace the subjective human experience, but combined with your own experience, you could come up with some rules for what makes a maze hard/easy and fun/tedious. For example a graph could have many choices from each state, and a very short path to the goal, or very few choices at each state, and a very long path to the goal. Also, are all moves reversible, or are some moves one-way only? Are there any unwinable states that you can get into? Are there a lot of loops that lead back to previous states, or do most wrong moves lead to dead-ends?

One more thing to note about this game is that there is almost always a move from each state that kills you. These could instead have been illegal moves that you were prevented from doing, which would not change the complexity of the maze but would change the feel of the gameplay (removing the threat of pushing the button at the wrong time.) I think the choice to allow falling into the void is good, becuase it fits better with the loosely-physics-based theme of the puzzles (all rules except for the teleportation switch are based on gravity and the weight of the block.)

Making rulesets that roughly correspond to players' real-world experience is a good practice for games and makes them more accessible. 

The next level would be to randomly generate a solvable maze and have the player design an NPC and threw it in there, then watch how it fares.

The CPU would handle all the avatar's 'thinking', throw in a few enemies and maybe the option to continually create NPC's as the first tries to solve the maze and you've got game.

What happens if two of the NPC's meet? Depends again on how the player created them.

That's a world away from the topic, but I can see it working, though maybe a bit too D&D for mainstream (who don't like tweaking curiosity vs. aggression stats, usually).

With enough variables it could work, but the concept would need nailing down so as not to go off on a tangent during production. 

 

The next level would be to randomly generate a solvable maze and have the player design an NPC and threw it in there, then watch how it fares.

That's a cool idea, though i'm not sure that a maze is the best choice of environment. A more open environment with obstacles sort of spread around might be better.

Actually, it would be cool to see an RTS where you design your own units. I guess you'd have to design them before the battle started. In this type of game, I would make the cost of a unit based on the complexity of its ai program, so players would have an incentive to get the best results out of the simplest AIs.

This would also mean that even if you had a super-smart AI that could win the round for you (like he knows the exact route to the enemy base or something) he would be so expensive that you'd have to wait until rather late to build him, and you'd be vulernable in the meantime. 

game where you designed units was Master of Orion.
That was fun!
The AI designed spaceships too.

Of course, like with many games, there were somewhat clear optimal solutions. And when you have some experience playing the game, they become obvious and thus remove any decision making from the game and make it just boring. (Have I talked about the CIV3 settlers already?.)

That's a thing most game designers haven't realized - you have to keep the player making decisions that are not obvious. (At least in non-twitch games.) 

It's hard to make a game that is not random (rock, paper, scissors) and not obvious.
Chess is one - there is no one sure tactic to win. 

That's why I said about having more than one NPC trying to get through the maze - maybe when they meet each other they could fight, get in each others way (forcing a different route) just ignore each other or try and help an injured comerade - all depending on how they'd been built.

This still might be boring - drop only one guy in there and he'd eventually finish.

But how about multiplayer - maybe four different people dropping thier creations into a maze.

Chess is rigidly structured, it's the other player with thier behavioural input (not least your own as well) that gives any one game randomness.

In this game idea that'd come from how many characters a player dropped into a maze and how they built them. 

metlslime knows it all.

been playing Flatout2 with coworkers, great fun 

nice. camera's a bit wonky but I really liek this. 19% in according to the save game. 

I think that's what bothers me with Picross DS, it's all about being methodical and you never really have to change strategy. 

Is excellent. The sequels are pretty good as well. 

yeah have them too, along with like 15 other games I need to play :) 

Is one of my favorite games ever (so is the original PoP.) The puzzles, the level design, the artwork, the storytelling, writing, voice acting, are all excellent. The combat is the weakest part of it IMO, and even that is pretty good.

Never got either sequel because I heard so much about how they were "ruined" on internet forums. Maybe I should try them. 

But more gamey. But they kept the original play and expanded on where it lacked as well as occassionally spoiling stuff.

But the bosses in the second one were great and the fighting much more entertaining. 

 

puzzles and level design are great, I originally thought the puzzles would shit me given the lack of saving but its implemented really well, and that rewind dagger thing works quite effectively.

combat is a fair bit of button mashing for me, but it does look cool. 

Got my Dark Messiah, played a bit, is good. Seems a bit harder than the demo or maybe I practised in the demo a bit more. Nice proper fantasy style. Not played much so far.

Been playing a bit more Guild Wars: Nightfall, well as in just started it, as a Dervish. Knowing my steez about GW I've monched on up to level 7 fairly quickly. Quite good but the general setting is not that rad - give me the Shiverpeaks anyday!! Absolutely loads of new options and tweaks which is kinda cool. I like the one that pops up saying "You have been playing for 3 hours. Please take a break". Well, I did.

That is all. 

sands fo time. Defnitely a great game. Camera's bit wonky like I said and the fights get tedious. I think its because there's no combat progression, the first fights are so easy you never learn how to fight properly and then when you get to difficut ones, you have to learn a technique there.

envinments are fantastic.

Painkiller is next.