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Perspectives on the Puzzle

One of the first choices that I had to make when implementing this episode was how to handle the burying of the balls. There were two ways that I could have chosen to handle this task. I could have the orbs and blue-screens randomly choose their destination. This would have added to the replay value as the player would have had to carefully watch the location that the balls ended up in. Instead I decided to hard-code the destinations. The reasons for this decision is that I was not sure that many people would replay it anyway, and it makes the solution much easier to explain to people.

In hindsight, randomizing the scrambling would not have been that difficult. If anybody reading this wants to implement a version of this episode with random ball layouts, I will describe how I would have done it.

First, the opening animation that shows the balls and blue-screens being scrambled would have to be coded instead of canned animation. I would simply have an array that represents the contents of each of the holes. The balls and blue-screens would be assigned a starting slot. Each pass through the scrambling, the array is shuffled using the card shuffling algorithm that I have used countless times before. The objects then move towards their new slot over a set number of frames. The number of passes could also be random. The final scramble contains the final location of the objects so the objects can be moved behind the appropriate hole.

The second half of the puzzle is a knowledge puzzle and should always be the same.

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