Introduction
Circuit Puzzle is a 2020 Uzebox puzzle game developed by Artcfox based on a physical board game. The goal is to complete a circuit by connecting the pieces such that there's no loose ends except at switches and the ground "-" piece. There's 60 puzzle to complete which this TAS completes in a little over 10 minutes.
The developer's website: https://sites.google.com/site/artcfox/
Uzebox wiki page (which for some reason is down?): https://uzebox.org/wiki/Circuit_Puzzle
Official developer GitHub link to a download of the game since the Uzebox site is having issues, with the compiled game in the "default" folder: https://github.com/artcfox/circuit
As "research" for the All Platforms Challenge, I played a fair amount of RetroAchievements sets for Uzebox games. Circuit Puzzle was a cute game and it didn't seem too hard to make a TAS. For the most part this is straightforward but there's a couple of quirks to note.
Run notes
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.10
- uzem core
- Genre: puzzle
Extra notes
For some reason the cursor has a small amount of inertia. This does make cursor movement a little tricky but nothing that can't be worked with.
Generally, the last piece placed was usually the ones that need to be placed at the top of the screen away from the lower piece bin. This isn't always the case since at the start of every puzzle the cursor sits on top of the top left piece. Sometimes this piece is one that needs to be placed at the top of the screen which means sometimes the last piece needs to be the second closest to the top of the screen.
Some set circuit pieces can be rotated but not moved. These are usually rotated while returning from placing a circuit piece onto the main board. There's a couple of puzzles where the rotation of some set circuit pieces is done after placing the remaining pieces due to no convenient route to get them along the way.
Possible improvements
I did this TAS all by hand so there's a good chance that I might miss some small movement optimizations. I do think on a macro level that there might be faster circuit piece placement orders to consider but I didn't write a script to figure out that since the extra requirement of needing to rotate set circuit pieces makes the routing tricky to begin with.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: When I saw this submission, the title brought me back to days of obtaining my degree in Electrical Engineering. So obviously, I had to grab it. :) At first, I thought that I had found things to optimize, but I quickly realized that the board had a starting point that prevents moving pieces lower on the board...thus potential time savings. Too bad these starting points weren't a bit lower on the board. So...this is a very interesting puzzle game, and everything looks good and optimized. Great job Darkman425!
Also, performed a sync test on this movie; however, the provided links are no longer working for some reason. The developers site is the only place to obtain the rom currently.
Accepting to Standard.
despoa: Processing...