I like playing puzzle games and I always wondered what it would take to make one…so I had a go.

Click here to play History of the Velsokomagnet!

My goal was to try to find something interesting in some fairly arbitrary simple rules. The core of the game is “normal” crate-pushing sokoban but with two twists: the player repels crates at any distance when moving in their row or column…unless they’re adjacent in which case they stick to the player forever.

This actually turned out fairly annoying to work with, but I figured that’s the whole point of designing puzzles and tried to persevere. I’m pretty happy with the result, the game as published has 12 levels that hopefully each achieve something interesting arising from these mechanics without resorting to just being complex. I have no idea if this is really successful though, or if it’s fun. Let me know if you feel inspired either way.

I wrote the game using PuzzleScript, which is a delightful little html5 game engine for making grid-based puzzles. Its smart design makes it easy to throw together many kinds of puzzle rules and just get on with designing levels. The gallery is very inspiring, there are some absolutely genius puzzles in there teasing out amazing complexity from incredibly simple rules.

The source is available on github, or from the play link above you can click “hack” to directly start editing in the PuzzleScript editor.