Skullerful - Bee Canyon

Skullerful - Bee Canyon
The 14th level of Skullerful - Bee Canyon
Map information
Reward	18 FFA Points
Difficulty	Very Hard
Location	FFA
Mapcode	skfb
Creator	rmanimal
Publication	November 3, 2022
Progress Saver	Each puzzle

Skullerful - Bee Canyon is a pure puzzle map by rmanimal that rewards 18 FFA Points when completed. Use "/join skf" to join its hub map, Skullerful, and navigate to the Bee Canyon section. Bee Canyon is only accessible after beating the three tutorial puzzles.

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. The Bee Canyon campaign focuses on making different types of puzzles using the new magnet heads.

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.

Progress Saver

Skullerful features a robust progress saver, accessed by clicking the computer monitor head in the hub. This progress saver can bring the player to any puzzle of any campaign in Skullerful. Using the progress saver will nullify the player's time. This will still award the player a completion, but they will have a blank time for that completion.

Aesthetics

Bee Canyon uses tall rooms with canyon walls for each of the puzzles. The rooms use a gradient of packed mud on the bottom that transitions all the way up to the raw gold blocks in the ceiling where the ochre froglights are. Each of the rooms have honey dripping from the upper walls and beehives with large numbers of bees swarming above where the player is. Most puzzles also have robot NPCs with bee puns and golden shovel arms.

Challenges

This map is featured in 1 challenge: The Pure Puzzle Marathon.

History

"While I was making Skullerful - Ant Hill, I wasn't sure what the next campaign area would look like. I began thinking of the next theme as early as Ant Hill undergoing its second review process on Board, though most of the ideas were pretty similar to how Ant Hill was laid out. Swifph also helped out by making a geode themed room that could serve as the area design. I ruled it out at some point since I realized making all of the Skullerfuls different cave aesthetics was a bad idea, and the room went unused until I repurposed it for a secret in Skullerful - Caterpillar. Eventually, I settled on making the next area bee themed and went with that, making an entirely new honey themed tile set for it.

At the beginning of Bee Canyon's development, I was going to make a harder version of Ant Hill, with more skull types and larger puzzles. Trying to start the first few puzzles was rough, and I briefly experimented with needing two skull sets for puzzles, but it wasn't until I began adding magnets that the concept for the area solidified. Even after the main mechanic was scripted, I still had some difficulty with making a better difficulty curve than last time. I got swifph to do some playtesting to do that, who also asked to design one of her own puzzles. I liked the puzzle enough to keep it as puzzle 10 in the final map.

Despite not intending to, Bee Canyon both turned out to be 16 puzzles long and started a vague alphabet bug theme that the maps have kept since. During development, I also told wavelyte about the map. She proceeded to advertise it by making the bees meme saying it over and over again for over two months. She also made the astrobee skin, which is still my current skin to this day. Overall, I liked how Bee Canyon turned out, functioning similar to how Ant Hill does with puzzle design. The only thing I would maybe change are the number of secrets, as there was only one throughout the entire map which is low compared to Ant Hill and Caterpillar."

- rmanimal

Trivia

• There are secrets hidden throughout Skullerful. Completing these secrets unlocks more skull sets.
• Due to wavelyte's advertising of this map, the "bees!" meme came to be.
• There is a giant bee outside of the puzzle areas named Sparkles. While there is also a large bee in puzzle 14, that one was built based off of a Heads Database head instead of a more mob accurate bee model.

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