The slider puzzle! For this one I took inspiration from Jeremy’s “Annoying Game” from Assignment 3, I wanted to create a similar puzzle with more limitations to further sustain the user interaction. I ended up making quite a difficult puzzle that I still struggle to solve.

I used a series of gswitch and gswitch2 objects to route signals between scissors and glue objects. This enabled me to control the movements of tiles quite easily, by just grabbing out two target entries in a list and swapping their index.

The concept of the puzzle is deceptively simple, however, in effect, it is somewhat like a Rubik’s cube, as making a movement in one area will disrupt other areas which you may have already solved. This is often unexpected by the user of the puzzle, which will lead to a lot of frustration from the realisation that what they would like to do (and believe they should be able to do) will only make things worse.

From my testing so far, people will often spend upwards of 10 minutes attempting to solve this puzzle before giving up. I think it’s fair to say that this project sustains the user’s attention for quite a decent amount of time.

Download the Max Patch here.