> I hope the author is collecting juicy analytics.

I hope they're not. Can't we have a few things in this world that are just fun without going and sticking surveillance on them?

'analytics' and 'surveillance' are not the same thing

trying to understand player behavior in the context of a board or video game (though there is some overlap!) is not the same as trying to understand user behavior in the context of social media or purchasing behavior - the data of both of which derive their value from being sold to THIRD PARTIES as a commodity.

being able to tune a fun little video game is not the same thing at all

Does your opinion change if they use it to train a commercial program to do a similar task?

For me at least, no. Making money by training a model from user data on such a game seems like a perfectly fine thing to do.

Collecting analytics like this is effectively the same as play-testing physical board games in-development. People play a game, information is gathered, and the game is tuned in response to that. If zero information were ever gathered, games could not be balanced or tuned for other things like unforeseen problems.

Please, show me a piece of software, or game, that is perfect the first time it is made.

It's effectively the same, except people volunteer or are paid to play test.

This whole industry really needs a lesson on consent.

So long as personal information is not collected, consent is not morally necessary.

If I collect information on how often a coin-op Street Fighter II game is played in an arcade, while collecting no personal information, consent is not needed.

Because using someone else's hardware in a public space is clearly equivalent to using your own hardware in the privacy of your own home.

You are not entitled to play the game, which is hosted on their server which requires bandwidth and other resources. In the same way that you are free to make demands about how software runs on your machine, the author is free to make demands about the use of their software.

This is software coming from a server, not hardware. It doesn't matter which device it's run on, or whether it's in your home or not.

If the data gathered is only on gameplay, and not something that can be used as PII like IP addresses or device information, then it should be fine. Gathering things like the score and time spent completing the level, isn't a problem. This could be used to rank the levels, without gathering any user information.

If gathering the data should be fine, then asking for permission should also be fine.

Indie games don’t have a budget for playtesting, but they can probably swing a GA account.

There are games that let you opt-out, hell even ones that ask you when you first open the game. There are bad apples, but there are plenty of good ones too.

I think the argument is that they shouldn't be opt-out, but opt-in.

If I want to play a game and provide my feedback, the default should be that that doesn't happen unless I explicitly say it should.

Opt-out means that, by default, you're collecting metrics from my plays, until I find the means to opt-out.

If the game asks you when you first open it, does it matter if the question is to "opt out" or "opt in"?

If it asks you then it's neither opt-in nor opt-out. Then it depends on how it asks you. If it's a simple yes/no, it's fine. If it's typical tech bullshit where your options are a big "I want to make the world a better place and save the whales by sending my data" or a tiny button in the corner labeled "maybe later" that takes you to another screen saying "please confirm you want to opt out of data collection and kill a bunch of kittens" then not so good.

if the analytics lead to an actual game on steam im down

You could just package an arbitrary 100 levels, let the player play them in any order, then give rewards for 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. levels completed/mastered.

This would still benefit from a difficulty rating system or order

Or go full on kaizo Mario and make it a random room out of the 100

naw im looking to have fun, not cry

something in me loves progressively harder levels

> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air.

I agree! It feels off compared to the overall aesthetic of the game.

Awesome game though! Loved it.

There is definitely a turn-based minigame here - get the most "distance" travelled by the horse, every turn the horse moves one block towards it's closest escape and you can drop walls to cause it to find a new path - in this one you actually lose when the horse can't get out but the goal is to get the horse to move as many blocks as possible using your limited number of walls (or apples which can attract it).

That reminds me of Paquerette Down the Bunburrows [1] which is a very fun pathfinding game where the bunnies will pathfind to try to run away from you. It's not exactly what you described, but it is very fun and surprisingly deep and challenging.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1628610/Paquerette_Down_t...

I was initially expecting the horse to move after each turn. As it is, this is a logic game, similar to what I'd expect to see in the NYT Games app. Quite entertaining, but something that you could look at and reason about to solve.

But, you absolutely could make this a turn based game where the horse is trying to escape and you (playing as the farmer), work to fence it in as it meanders towards a gate.

> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. It’s subconsciously confusing to see a gate I place in one cell move to occupy pixels in the cell “above” it.

I interpreted it as standard "top-down" RPG graphics, where the Y axis always doubles as the Z axis. As such, I didn't find it visually confusing - but it did made playing on mobile annoying, because you often end up targeting the wrong field.

> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air.

I think it should go up, otherwise it doesn't look like a wall. It would look like something the horse can step on and run over. For the water it makes sense to be flat flat and that the horse doesn't want to touch it: it is water-shy.

To me the current design doesn't look like anything at all. I don't see a gate or a wall, just two rectangles.

+1 to this. It's also visually confusing, the gate looks like it's covering two cells.

Great game! Feature request: add a button that shows my submitted solution. I'd like to be able to compare it with the optimal solution (so it'd be nice if a single tap could toggle between my submission and the optimal).

It would be nice if the “optimal” view visualized both my solution and the optimal one at the same time, like a Venn diagram.

Just added this, check out "Optimal as overlay" in the settings.

It also conceals the cherries when it’s on the field below them.

Sometimes simple things are best. I really like the game as-is.

This is a rather simple game to program. IMO, if you can program, take a few weekends to make your own game based on your ideas. If you can't program, your ideas will lead you to a wonderful learning project.

Thanks for the feedback!

I would have responded earlier, but I wanted to actually implement something you suggested: different walls. Alternative wall sprites, which don't occlude other tiles so much, are now live and can be adjusted in the settings.

Re: analytics, the only serious plans I had were to use the daily level histograms to adjust difficulty. The idea of taking some levels and releasing them as a standalone game is tempting, but I wonder if doing this type of puzzle over and over again might get tedious? That's one of the reasons I thought it would work better as a daily game. Let's see how it's doing in a few months.

I love the mechanic ideas. I think there are two big constraints on what kind of cool new features/gimmicks can be implemented though. First: if this is going to be a daily game, the new mechanics have to be intuitive enough to where somebody could figure them out their first time playing. I like the idea of cherries being misleading, and it's a fun troll-ish idea for a single player game, but it would be a mean trick if it were someone's first daily. (Then again, there's someone who's first Wordle game was probably MYRRH.) The other constraint is I have a solver that can guarantee the optimal solution is actually optimal. Some game mechanics might make this a lot harder, or even impossible.

Great game. I've been having fun with it every day, but today there is no puzzle! Be careful about this. I intuit that not having a puzzle on a day is enough to lose some players, with the number only increasing the more days you don't have puzzles. Not sure how you're doing it now, but you should easily be able to generate thousands of levels and have them all ready in the page like wordle.

Another thing to try could be to rank people in realtime instead of the one-off submission approach. I do this in https://spaceword.org (create tight crosswords using 21 letters), and I think it's quite motivating to see how you compare to others as you improve your solution. On the other hand, its a bit more taxing on the server, and then you also could not show the optimal solution.

I would prefer not being distracted by that, and not having information on possible solutions before submitting. Trying to find the best solution with added hints like that is a different game. So it should be opt-in.

Cool game! One minor feature request. It would be helpful to have some way to move the entire block of placed tiles around at once to give myself more room in a particular direction.

Thank you! :) If you click the three dots on the left top side of the letters area, you can shift all tiles in a direction.

IMO, the game is great to keep simple, but I’d like to play more levels than just daily, so could see people paying for the ability to play more, like NYT games, and could be part of a suite of game if curated daily by expert vs social curation. The blocks are small though for a small phone with big fingers.

I also wonder if making it GPL and submitting to various *NIX distros would be best. Then it may need to be standalone with random maps created by ML or similar.

It has a very pleasant editor to make + share custom maps, e.g. https://enclose.horse/play/a3OGcW

You can play the previous days and hundreds of user contributed maps! Check out the menu. Enjoy :)

Ah I did not see the menu at all

The turn-based version sounds interesting, but I think it falls on its face in practice. The game then becomes:

1. lure the horse to an optimal point on the map.

2. trap it in a small circle of fences.

3. build part of your final wall with the remaining fences.

4. one by one, move the fences trapping the horse in place into position.

Great game, I returned back to play next day.

> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit.

I also feel it would make more sense either for everything to be 2.5D or pure top down. Having appear / disappear animation is nice feedback to user though.

Other thing is that maybe the hitbox should change when the wall comes up. Now to remove it you need to press the grid, essentially the root of the wall. Unintuitive to me.

Thanks for the game, looking forward to when there is multiple horses or sheep to enclose.

And of course: Buy additional walls using in-game purchases!

(jk)