Quest For The Wingz

[SwordGrunt]

Great job! Glad you enjoyed it.

[GooRoo]

Sept 12, 2017 3:57:15 GMT -8 rohit said:

I finally finished it. Did not get the PERFECT though as I did not have a save to go back for the 5 coins.

Thanks SwordGrunt for the awesome, enjoyable level

At least someone has managed to finish it, even short of a "PERFECT!" score. If you have a screen grab of your completion results, that should be enough to release this one ... long overdue.

[Zu]

Any news on that Statz page?

[GooRoo]

Well, I have quickly given up on any attempt to play this quest. Anything that starts out with the need to survive random actions, for which the solver has absolutely no control ... and lasts for close to half a minute before the solver regains control over hir own Gruntz is ... Bjarni-esque. Nothing but cruel and unusual punishment for the solver. The poor Grunt gets a Go-Kart in an area rife with hazards such as Holez and Rolling Rockz, and either rides into a Hole or is squished by the Rolling Rock. I am NOT a lucky individual, so after half a dozen attempts ... and restores after failure ... I quit. Not fun ... especially when if the toyed Grunt ever survives, then the three have to get past the Grunt with Boxing Glovez, while avoiding being punched into a Hole.

[Zu]

I found that one way to semi-reliably get past the toyer is to use the other two gruntz and the toyer himself to block the way of the gokart, so that it's stuck going up and down on the right side of the starting area... but yeah, I never figured out what to do after doing that.

My personal suggestion would be to consider marking this as a Frustrating level... it does seem to fit the bill with that starting bit, after all.

[GooRoo]

Feb 5, 2018 17:04:23 GMT -8 Zu said:

I found that one way to semi-reliably get past the toyer is to use the other two gruntz and the toyer himself to block the way of the gokart, so that it's stuck going up and down on the right side of the starting area... but yeah, I never figured out what to do after doing that.

My personal suggestion would be to consider marking this as a Frustrating level... it does seem to fit the bill with that starting bit, after all.

I am just completing the reconstruction of indices for "Separate Wayz" and will come back and make another try at this one when I have verified that everything works as intended on the indices.

[GooRoo]

Two of the solver's Gruntz and the enemy Toyer (with Boxing Glovez) provide blocks in three directions. Unfortunately, the Go-Kart moves randomly in EIGHT directions, with five of them usually fatal.

I won't do it, but any other staff member may feel free to change the difficulty to "Frustrating" with my

[Zu]

Feb 5, 2018 18:35:32 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

Two of the solver's Gruntz and the enemy Toyer (with Boxing Glovez) provide blocks in three directions. Unfortunately, the Go-Kart moves randomly in EIGHT directions, with five of them usually fatal.

That may be true, but you're forgetting about rocks, which also block off a significant portion of possible routes.



In any case, I'm going to go ahead and move the thread to the Frustrating section and update the indices accordingly, since it's unlikely that there's going to be a third staff member to share his opinion on the matter.

[Deleted]

Even though it's stated that the release date is 6th of February (and available for download) , it's still in BETA-testing state. Did someone forgot to edit that?

[Zu]

My bad.

[swietymiki]

Take a look at some older messages of the thread again. Same problem was encountered over 2 years ago:

Mar 26, 2016 8:57:56 GMT -8 SwordGrunt said:

Huh, so this level was never released. For some reason I thought it was...

From what I remember the first two problems you bumped into require smart positioning of your Gruntz. Enemies always prioritize attacking (and giving toys to) Gruntz on the four cardinal directions before checking for the other four possible tiles around them, except when retaliating immediately (i.e. their stamina is full after their pain animation is complete).

You need not worry about taking hits from the boxing enemy; grab the Springz when he just finished his attack, so the recharge time will be enough for you to move away from the deadly spot it lies on, and on top of that your bare-handed Grunt will likely be attacking him right afterwards, triggering retaliation (since the recharge time of bare-handed Gruntz is, if I'm not mistaken, slightly lower than Boxing Glovez, which becomes noticeable after a few blows traded). When you know where to go with each Grunt, it rarely goes wrong.

The same applies to the toyer enemy: there are two rocks on the lower right corner of the area, so attracting the toyer and moving your Grunt to that spot, then moving your two other Gruntz to the two clear tiles above him guarantees there's nowhere for the Grunt to go with his mobile toy... breaking it immediately.

[SwordGrunt]

Feb 5, 2018 19:15:21 GMT -8 Zu said:

Feb 5, 2018 18:35:32 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

Two of the solver's Gruntz and the enemy Toyer (with Boxing Glovez) provide blocks in three directions. Unfortunately, the Go-Kart moves randomly in EIGHT directions, with five of them usually fatal.

That may be true, but you're forgetting about rocks, which also block off a significant portion of possible routes.



In any case, I'm going to go ahead and move the thread to the Frustrating section and update the indices accordingly, since it's unlikely that there's going to be a third staff member to share his opinion on the matter.

I'm a few months late, but again, this isn't blind luck. I've playtested this level dozens of times. Though I honestly never thought of the way you did it in that video, which is a nice solution to it as well knowing the Go-Kart always moves 2 tilez at a time. However, it's still a 50% chance of it moving north vs. it moving northwest... so I'll explain the intended solution.


You have three Gruntz and there is one enemy Grunt. Look at the cornerz of this rock-and-hole covered area. Each corner is blocked by two rockz such that there are only three possible directionz to go. One of them can be blocked by the enemy and the other by your two Gruntz.

Now this is important: Grunt AI prioritizes cardinal directionz over intercardinal ones, likely because they're "farther away" even if it's only 1 tile. This means the toy will always be given to a Grunt immediately north, south, east or west, ignoring the ones north-east, south-west etc. It's the same for AI attacking your Gruntz, which is useful to control which of your Gruntz gets hit by a powerful enemy if you have to "share the pain"... such as in my level "Backwoodz".

So how do you "trap" your own Grunt while he is given the toy? Any of the four cornerz will work just fine. I used the closest (lower right) one in testing, but it requires faster clicking; the lower left one gives you the most time to select and move your Gruntz appropriately. So the lower left corner is your destination for the Grunt being chased by the Toyer, who will be right behind him and will land on the tile immediately to the right. As for your other two, one of them can stand right above the lower left spot: it will be standing northwest of the enemy when it arrives and so will be safe from being given the toy; the other one will have to fill the last open tile and will thus also be adjacent to the enemy. In order to avoid receiving the toy on the wrong Grunt, this one has to move to his location as the Toyer approaches his own. Gruntz block a tile as soon as their movement towards it starts, but any action against them can only happen once they've fully reached it.

The red arrow is the path your Grunt should be taking as soon as he's being chased by the Toyer. The yellow arrow is the last Grunt's crucial movement that should be done when the enemy Toyer is just about to reach his spot.



If you set everything up properly, you'll have a Grunt trapped with a harmless broken Go-Kart!

[Tomalla]

This custom level by any means should not be given "Frustrating" rating. As far as I can see, it was dubbed frustrating only because of this toyer puzzle, which seemed primarily luck-based at first but surprisingly turned out to have a ridiculously simple solution (hats off to you SwordGrunt!). In my opinion it should be in the "Hard" category at least, perhaps "Very Hard" if anybody raised any objections. When I beta-tested this level I remember getting stuck several times   but none of the obstacles were luck-based or in any other way frustrating.

Any plans on changing that rating?

[GooRoo]

Jun 11, 2018 7:12:50 GMT -8 Tomalla said:

This custom level by any means should not be given "Frustrating" rating. As far as I can see, it was dubbed frustrating only because of this toyer puzzle, which seemed primarily luck-based at first but surprisingly turned out to have a ridiculously simple solution (hats off to you SwordGrunt!). In my opinion it should be in the "Hard" category at least, perhaps "Very Hard" if anybody raised any objections. When I beta-tested this level I remember getting stuck several times   but none of the obstacles were luck-based or in any other way frustrating.

Any plans on changing that rating?

I can certainly do that ... if I remember to do it two days from today. (Getting prepared to my 76^th birthday tomorrow,and lots to get done before the day.)