Desk Knights

A daily puzzle game where you defeat the monsters by solving the grid! Each hero has a rule that must be met. Only one hero per row and column. If you beat the daily, why not challenge a friend!

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Inspiration

Desk Knights is a little puzzle game I invented when I started playing around with how to use "the Latin rule" in an RPG setting.

What it does

Each day, a regular and hard puzzle are available. The puzzle is a grid, filled with trees and monsters, and a list of heroes you have to deploy. Each hero has their own placement rules, and you can only place one hero per row and column. Players are encouraged to build up a daily streak, and share with their friends when they complete a daily. Players who have already completed the daily can try out RUSH mode! A competitive mode where you complete as many easy grids in a row as you can before the time runs out.

How we built it

Nice lightweight javascript, using emojis and CSS for visuals to avoid any heavy asset requirements.

Challenges we ran into

I was trying to avoid going full screen with the app to keep it as passive and unobtrusive as I can. This led to a lot of issue where buttons would fall out of view and I found myself stuck on a screen!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm happy with having come up with a novel puzzle, giving me the opportunity to offer communities something they genuinely haven't seen before. The puzzle generation took a lot of tuning, to ensure a single unique solution to every puzzle, and carefully tuning the levels of intuition required to find the correct combination through the number of monsters and trees used.

What we learned

I've enjoyed designing an app with the opportunities that are granted by having it embedded within a reddit community in mind. I look forward to seeing if the community sharing buttons gets used much!

What's next for Desktop Knights

I'm very excited to get Desk Knights out into the wild and see how people get on with the puzzle. Due to the nature of the single daily puzzle that is shared by everyone, I had to choose a specific level of difficulty to settle on. I am worried that a more gradual onboarding is probably necessary, allowing players to progress at their own rate. However for now, I'm just interested to see if anyone enjoys/understands the puzzle at all!

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