Skullerful - Ant Hill
| Skullerful - Ant Hill | |
|---|---|
 The 15th level of Skullerful - Ant Hill | |
| Map information | |
| Reward | 18 FFA Points |
| Difficulty | Very Hard |
| Location | FFA+ |
| Mapcode | skfa |
| Creator | rmanimal |
| Publication | May 31, 2022 |
| Progress Saver | Each puzzle |
Skullerful - Ant Hill 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 Ant Hill section.
Contents
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 Ant Hill campaign focuses on ramping up the difficulty of puzzles using number tiles.
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
Ant Hill has a cave aesthetic, with walls made of mostly brown blocks like brown terracotta and spruce planks. There are occasional splotches of gray in the wall as well. There are a few NPCs scattered throughout the puzzles and several elephants.
Challenges
This map is featured in 1 challenge: The Pure Puzzle Marathon.
History
"After finalizing the rules and making a general tutorial area, I set to work with making a main puzzle set for the map concept. By this point, I already decided that Skullerful would work best if it receive puzzle packs over time like Flow did, and I learned that the idea could work from Another Castle. I wanted to keep the first area simple and gradually introduce more mechanics into the maps as time went on, so I mainly stuck to using number heads and the color direction rule to make the levels complicated. In the beginning, the puzzle set was going to be lengthy and use all of the 8 skull types. After designing several of the Ant Hill puzzles, I pivoted to focusing on the four main skull types since they proved to be more complex than I had anticipated and tighter designed.
Once I made ten puzzles, I began working on the aesthetics for the area. At the time, I focused mainly on shaping and neglected the palette itself since I was still in the mindset that randomized block palettes were fine and worldedited that later into development. It looked admittedly dreadful, even to playtesters, so I asked Mercata for advice and received several tips like using slabs and stairs to add depth and having better lighting to improve the look of the rooms. While the room designs definitely improved as Ant Hill progressed, it still is overall the weakest part of the map to me when I look back on it.
One of the most difficult aspects of the map was actually scripting it. I didn't use any sort of system that could help organize scripts, so I was constantly forgetting which functions existed and losing track of both variables and custom types I made for the map. Eventually, I began using GitHub, as I had used it a little bit when making a developer update to the server itself a few years back. Even after migrating everything, I took a few weeks figuring out how to make the scripts work for the map. A good amount of effort went into the solution checker system since it did a good job of clearing up how the rules of the map worked with the feedback it gave.
The map was submitted to Board for testing after 13 puzzle rooms were completed. While it received some activity, I moved it to the regular process after a week since not much feedback was being generated. During the Testing period, I added 3 more puzzles since I learned pretty quickly that the jump from puzzle 12 to the final puzzle 13 was very large. Even still, I needed to nerf puzzles 8, 10 and the new final puzzle more to create a better difficulty curve for the map. An interesting choice I made between Board reviews was adding secrets to Skullerful, where many of the unnerfed versions of puzzles went. I also built several new puzzles for this purpose, two of which were meant to be showcases of the red and purple skulls, but I messed up and accidentally made both feature purple.
While I was working on Skullerful - Bee Canyon, both the hub map and Ant Hill were nominated and eventually voted into FFA+! I was estatic to see people enjoyed the puzzles, and it encouraged me to try and make the next area better."
- rmanimal
Trivia
- There are secrets hidden throughout Skullerful. Completing these secrets unlocks more skull sets.
- The map was submitted with the name Skullerful - Ant Hill without realizing that a map already exists by the name Ant Hill.