My game is a scientific Paper

[svero]

Someone wrote a scientific paper about Aargon.

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~dkempe/publications/reflections.pdf

With regards to the rule-set.. so far as I know it was original when we conceived it.

Mirror games prior to Aargon used different rules and were more arcade-y and less pure logic games. I dont know what the Laser! game he quotes is. Never seen that. Reflections though, was basically a rip off of Aargon in flash. Someone just copied all the one color levels from the demo and reproduced them as a flash version. Afterwords I contacted them and they agreed to link to Twilight which led to some sales although I see a lot of versions floating around nowdays that have no links to us.

[lexaloffle]

I like this bit: "Empirical observations lead us to believe that for a puzzle game to be entertaining in the long run, NP-hardness is a desirable property, since it means that likely, no simple (or boring) strategy exists for solving the game."

One of my players used a similar technique to prove NP-completeness:

http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=75

[Raptisoft]

I don't understand... this scientific paper is about a game called "Reflections," not "Aargon." Is that the game you cloned Aargon from?

Anyway, you're both stealing the game "Laser Chess" from Compute Magazine back in the 80's.

[GBGames]

See? This is why taking multivariable calculus and graduate-level algorithms classes while in college was important. The degree is a piece of paper, but knowing what NP-hard means made it all worthwhile. B-)

I'm amazed that fans actually wrote papers about games in this manner, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Was the game designed with the idea of making it NP-hard, or did it just happen to work out that way?

[svero]

There wasn't any thought about making it NP-Hard during the design phase. I doubt I even knew what that meant at the time.

Aargon is a very very difficult game at it's hardest. But here's a bit of trivia you may not know. When we first came up with the original rule set our biggest worry was that we could make real puzzling puzzles out of it. We felt that maybe it would all just be too obvious where to lign up the beams. I still remember my partner calling me up saying.. hey! I think i made something hard to solve! And it was! We figured we had something then. (back in the day when making a puzzle game hard was a virtue for us :-))

Course that "hard" level was the simplest of Aargon levels compared to some of the really nasty ones in the sci fi level pack.

[electronicStar]

Laser and mirror games have existed for a LOOOOong time. I remember there was one for the C64 at least. I also remember a totally puzzle-oriented version in the early 90s.

[svero]

I've played a lot of the old ones and I've yet to find a game with Aargon's rules. To the best of my knowledge Aargon was original and unique when released. Comaparing the old c64 games or laser chess to Aargon is like comparing chess to checkers. Yeah they look kinda the same in some ways but at the end of the day they play very differently.