Assembling a Puzzle

As you can see, the big challenge in this episode both from a playing and a programming perspective is to assemble a fruit battery. From a programming perspective this is actually slightly more challenging then it initially would appear because there are multiple ways of assembling the battery. Thankfully, there are only two routes that can be taken so we can build this puzzle using a relatively simple state approach. The one problem is that came up in design is how to get the player in a position to assemble the object. I did not want to have a new build system where players entered some type of inventory assembly mode. This would have given away the solution before the player even discovered all the pieces to the puzzle. Certainly, some type of build button in the inventory that lead to an object assembly system would be an option for a large variety of games and while such a system could be more complicated than what I did this episode, when you think about it, if the number of objects, and the steps to build the object are restricted, the same approach I used to create this puzzle would work great.

That being said, what I decided to do was to use the shelf in the plane as the assembly area. Players simply place the initial object (the orange) on the shelf. From there, they add parts until the assembly is complete. Here is a flowchart of the shelf states and what they look like in the game.