26: The number of hours left in Phase One of the Ruckingenur Challenge.
6: The number of entries I’ve received so far.

If you’re working on a level and are stuck, you can email me personally for help at zachbarth@gmail.com. If you have a submission finished, email it to me right away!

Thursday, after Phase One is officially over, I will begin judging the submissions; I’ll be contacting the winner(s) soon after that. If you submitted a level or are on my mailing list, you’ll probably be receiving a link to a beta version of the Ruckingenur Editor within a week or two from now. All in all, it’s a good time to be a Ruckingenur.

Continuing the countdown, there are only 8 days left until submissions are due for Phase One of the Ruckingenur Challenge. Y’all best get crackin’.

Yeah, how about that – an entirely hybrid circuit. The exochip on the left is the brain of the drone controller and dispatches commands to the entire drone network. The exochip on the right is responsible for interfacing to the controls and prevents the drone controller from sending any unauthorized commands. After being brought online through the chip on the right, the chip on the left may be instructed to send a self-destruct message to all active drones. Unfortunately, the right chip will not authenticate this command, requiring the player to kill the chip and fake its signal. Upon authentication, the self-destruct command is sent; across the region, drones shut off and come crashing to the ground.

So that’s it – those are the three levels that never made it in to Ruckingenur II. I’m excited to see what you can do!

Does anyone like these sort of posts? Although I don’t have any more Ruckingenur levels to post, I do have more mockups of old games and games that I never made which might be interesting. What would you like to see here between game releases?

As of writing, there are only 10 days left in the Ruckingenur Challenge. If you haven’t started your level yet, get to it – I’ve only received one submission so far!

If you’re lacking inspiration, here’s a special feature to help your creativity along: the fifth level of Ruckingenur II.

As it’s unlikely that I’ll ever implement these levels as designed, I will proceed with full disclosure: the final three (for a total of seven) levels revolved around the exochip as a critical component of the circuits. What is an exochip? As it turns out, the Tangential Forces weren’t acting alone in their campaign of oppression against the Northern Continent; although no one knows the origins of the Visitors, their hybrid biotronics were far superior to any other technologies available, giving the Tangential Forces the military edge they needed to take control. Exochips are the centerpiece of the Visitors’ hybrid biotronic technologies, and consist of a genetically engineered organism capable of interfacing directly to a wide range of electronic signals. While exochips are more complicated than normal integrated circuits and require a constant flow of nutrient-rich exobrine, they are able to trivially learn and reproduce almost any task and can instantaneously communicate with any other exochip via psychic network. They are used extensively in the network of autonomous drones that constantly patrols the Northern Continent, locating hidden insurgent bases and eliminating opportunistic targets.

Level five would introduce the player to exochips, which could be controlled by pulsing various pins mapping to goals, concepts, and positive and negative reinforcement in the exochips’ neural paths. When this drone transmitter was lost, it was disabled; thus, the player’s objective would be to re-enable the device and signal for a drone to return to it, offering the insurgents a chance to ambush the drone when it arrived in an exposed position.

It should be noted that I was unable to create an exochip mechanic that I was happy with and felt properly achieved the same level of reverse engineering verisimilitude as the rest of the game; this is why the last three levels were eliminated from the game.

A little bit over a month ago, Ruckingenur II hit Hackaday. Since then, I’ve had over 6000 downloads. Many of you have called out for more levels, which take a great deal of time to make. Others have called for me to create a level editor, something that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with, as I prefer to create games, not tools. As semi-detailed in the previous post, I’ve toyed around with the idea of making more Ruckingenur, but kept on coming up short. A flash of insight today, however, changed my thinking. Introducing…

(That’s the last flashing LED GIF – I promise!)

So here’s the deal:

Phase One

• You design a puzzle for Ruckingenur.
• All puzzle designs must be in on or before October 15th, 2008. (That’s two weeks from today, for those of you who don’t know what day it is.)
• You do not code anything, nor do you create any game art. This is purely design of the puzzle.
• You may submit as many entries as you want.
• If I receive fifteen (15) or more complete submissions, I will make a special version of Ruckingenur capable of playing levels created with the included level editor.
• The author of the best submission will win a Ruckingenur prize pack, most likely filled with electronics related prizes!

• Submissions may be emailed to me at zachbarth@gmail.com

Design Requirements

• Your submissions should include the following:
  • A short description of the puzzle, including an objective.
  • A semi-detailed description of the internal state, i.e. how the device works. It’s a good idea to think of your device as a state machine.
  • A short description of a possible solution. More solutions make for a better puzzle.
  • A list of all test points, describing:
    • How their voltages are determined.
    • How pulsing them high and low effects the state of the device.
    • How they respond to serial data, and when they emit serial data.
  • What registers are available if the test point corresponds to a debug pin on a chip, and how their values are generated and affect the device state.
  • Some sort of quick drawing (mspaint is fine) detailing the layout of all components and interface items.
• A list of any special art or rendering your puzzle would need. Assume that the level editor will include common components like chips, LEDs, switches, and displays and tools to draw common things like circuit boards and tracks between components.
• I suggest you play through Ruckingenur II again, paying attention to these details in the puzzles.
• A good puzzle shouldn’t let a player get stuck in a loop of unsolvability, where they’ve done something preventing them from solving the puzzle, yet are unaware that they are stuck because of it.

• A good puzzle shouldn’t require a player to use trial and error to solve the puzzle.

Phase Two

• After I finish the level editor, I will release it to the public. There’s a good chance that people who submitted an entry in Phase One will receive it earlier than those who didn’t.
• You create a level. While you won’t have to create any artwork, you will have to program the implementation (most likely in Python Lua, something you should look into if you’re interested in this).
• If you intend to create a level, you should really submit the design in Phase One. This will help me judge what functionality is needed in the level editor and ensure that it can create puzzles with sufficient richness and depth.
• You send me your level. I will work with everyone who submits a level to make sure that all the levels fit together coherently and with a uniform implementation of the mechanics. While I worry that this may seem authoritarian to some people, that’s really not my intention – I just want to make sure that, because of the uniqueness of Ruckingenur puzzles, everyone’s puzzles fit together.
• After collecting all the finished levels, I will sort them by difficulty and release a special Community Edition of Ruckingenur. Everyone who created a level will be gratuitously credited.
• Everyone wins!

• The author of the best puzzle might win something extra!

Constructive commentators are encouraged to leave constructive comments. If you have a question, ask it in the comments so everyone can see – I’ll answer it there. Otherwise, start working on those levels!