Skullerful

Skullerful
Map information
Reward	1 FFA Point
Difficulty	Very Easy
Location	FFA+
Mapcode	skf
Creator	rmanimal
Publication	May 31, 2022

Skullerful is a pure puzzle map by rmanimal that rewards 1 FFA Point when completed. Use "/join skf" to join the map directly. It is also the map hub for three other maps: Skullerful - Ant Hill, Skullerful - Bee Canyon, and Skullerful - Caterpillar.

General

Gameplay

All Skullerful maps use the same puzzle base: you must put skulls, each with different rules, on a grid. Skulls can face only the cardinal four directions. The board can also have other objects, such as numbers that need a set amount of skulls to look at them. If all the skulls the player has are placed on the board and all requirements are fulfilled, the level is complete.

When joining a puzzle, the player is also given a guidebook which contains general puzzle information and describes each of the different puzzle elements, such as different skull colors, in detail. The guidebook changes to have different pages depending on what is relevant to the player's current puzzle.

Each puzzle also has a computer monitor head that can be clicked. These will give the player several options, some which relate to the current puzzle like clearing the board of skulls, and allows the player to warp back to the hub.

Marker Skulls

Marker skulls are a gameplay addition that takes more of a sideline than other mechanics. They allow the player to place gray skull markers on the board that do not impact the puzzle and are mainly there to let the player mark down skulls on the physical board. The main way to enable these is through the Settings head in the Skullerful hub, though the skeleton NPC in Tutorial Level 1 also allows the player to select them.

Aesthetics

The hub area and tutorial share the same aesthetic. They both use crimson blocks for the floor and deepslate bricks for the walls and ceiling. The end of level buttons have a deepslate and ore design. Most of the NPCs in the hub and tutorial areas are knights.

Skull Sets

Skullerful offers a unique type of cosmetic limited to the Skullerful maps that allows the player to change the skull heads to other sets of player heads. These skull sets can be unlocked in several different ways, such as beating some of the earlier campaigns or finding all collectibles in an island set in Skullerful - Caterpillar.

Challenges

The hub map, Skullerful, is featured in 3 challenges: The Pure Puzzle Marathon, Hexa Chapter III: New Heights, and Hexa. Unusually, the map is not featured in any yearly assortment challenges, possibly due to being a hub map.

History

"Inspired by iOS puzzle games like Reiner Knizia's City of Secrets Skyline and Lazors, I wanted to make my own pure logic puzzle. While I had made a puzzle map before with Miner's Millions, it was a map extremely intertwined with Minecraft mechanics which made it volatile to maintain. With making a new puzzle, I wanted something that was possible to draw on paper to solve.

At the beginning, I got the idea to use Minesweeper style heads and different skulls for what the player places on the board. The idea for skulls to have their own rules and to have number heads felt natural, but there was a core part of the rules I felt like was missing. I wasn't sure what the puzzle design would look like for a while, so I made a couple of puzzles messing around. I also experimented with puzzles that only allow one color of skull on some tiles, but these felt too restrictive usually to be a meaningful modifier. It wasn't until around a month or two of experimentation later that the color direction rule was added. Another idea from this time that got rejected was the concept of a wild card skull that could be any color. During the early days, the map was called Skull Stockpile.

From there, making the first draft of Skullerful - Ant Hill was essentially me gradually learning how to make puzzles with the rules I had set for the current design. Based off of the Emerald Skull head by TheFoxPlush from Minecraft Heads, I made a rainbow set of 8 different skull colors (and used the colorize option from a sketchy Minecraft modding program to change the colors). Each of the skull colors also was given their own distinct design on top of the head for colorblind assistance, and orange was changed to magenta due to looking too similar with red for some types of colorblindness. I was initially going to use everything from red (3 adjacent) to purple (3 in line of sight) in Ant Hill, but decided against it since it make the puzzle design much worse trying to wedge in the needier skull colors early into my experimentation process. I also enlisted the help of swifph with testing some of the puzzle designs, who also suggested having the hallway visuals for puzzle rules in the tutorial areas.

Once a set of puzzles was complete, I built 13 rooms for Ant Hill and got aesthetic advice from Mercata for improvements. After that, both the tutorial and Ant Hill were submitted for Testing, with the idea being that I could add more puzzle packs (like Flow) in the future that would include more skull colors. After building the rooms and using Github for script storage, I submitted both maps to Board proper, as there was no real feedback I was getting from the Testing phase. I must have realized early that the final level was way too hard, as the map got 3 puzzles added between the last two puzzles of Ant Hill before the whole thing received a formal review.

After a bit of a break from Skullerful getting published, I started working on puzzles for the next area. I briefly considered a geode-style area before deciding that I needed to improve my aesthetic design so I wasn't building more caves. I got help from wavelyte's gradient guide and the player herself for creating the canyon aesthetic and got to work on designing and building the areas. During the map's development, wavelyte also began turning Bee Canyon into a meme by getting people to say bees all the time.

Bee Canyon was probably the quickest out of all of the campaigns to create, and was mainly focused on the magnet mechanic. Even through Board, the map stayed mostly the way it is, with the biggest change of note being that all raw iron changed to packed mud to make ground areas easier on the eyes. The difficulty of the puzzles was also more consistent compared to early renditions of Ant Hill. Puzzle areas across the board were more spacious as well due to the canyon aesthetic.

For Caterpillar, I wanted to make a map that was both more open and more visually distinct between puzzles. The original idea for the area was Caterpillar Cosmos, where each set of puzzles you could choose from would take place on different planets, and would work similar to the Bejeweled 2 where you only needed to do 4 of 5 puzzles to progress to the next area. Due to the major requirements of this new system and several other factors, the map suffered serious droughts of activity. It got to the point where I didn't consider it a serious project and stopped working on it for over a year.

Near the end of 2024, work dried up and I got more unexpected time to myself. I dedicated a lot of it to reaching the puzzle quota needed for Caterpillar, and I decided to make the map island-based instead of astronomy based to get things going. I got some help from wavelyte for the palette of Itty Bitty Woodland and completed the first island in February 2025, at which point the map finally felt like something that could realistically exist again. After a few more months of building, with some bizarre island themes mixed in, the map was finally submitted to Board. A few months later, that map was then finally moved to FFA!"

- rmanimal

Trivia

• There are secrets hidden throughout Skullerful. Completing these secrets unlocks more skull sets.
• The "bees!" meme and association with rmanimal comes from advertising done during Skullerful - Bee Canyon.

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See all maps from rmanimal