This just dropped in the submission box (Thanks, Jeff!) and I scrambled to get it up just as fast as I could.
I/O is a brain-teaser of a puzzle game along the lines of the fabulous Click Drag Type series that comes with no instructions. In fact, this puzzle was also designed by Simple Andy, the creative force behind Click Drag Type.
Use your skills of discovery, intuition and creative problem solving to figure out what must be done to arrive at a solution. You will have to click-drag the puzzle around since it will not all fit within the game window.
Hints and tips may be necessary, but please use spoiler tags when posting spoilers in the comments.
This game looks pretty cool but i can't figure it out... im not really good at these games.
I am very confused
nvm, I beat it.
Was fun, but a bit easy once you got it. I did it in 11 minutes, would have been much faster, but I accidentally misclicked on the last number and had to do it over again.
Wow! Did it. Took me 15 minutes but I did it! Fairly easy once you figure it out
Basically, this game is awesome.
If you're having trouble figuring it out, just click on more things.
If you're still having trouble figuring it out...
There's only two verbs in this game: provide, and accept.
Fun, but not hard once you figure it out. I completed it on my first try in 9 minutes.
Solved in 9 minutes.
The dragging served no purpose other than player annoyance, as everything could have easily fit in the visible area with a more compact layout.
21 minutes.
Don't think of it as a circuit, because you'll lose your mind trying to figure out one single flow direction.
The 'out' buttons (right hand side) *always* set your center register to the value of the bucket you're clicking.
The 'in' buttons set the bucket's value either to the bucket to which it is connected by a pink terminal, or to the center register-- I think.
Be careful not to lose your '1' and '0' values. You can make 3 and 5 and 8 again by adding combinations of 1 together: (1+1)+1, ((1+1) x 2) + 1, (1+1)x2x2
But you cannot make 0 and 1.
Here is how to beat this:
take the one in one orange and an 8 in another.
Then take the 9 and put it in the 1 orange one. Put the 17 in the zero green and then put it into the blue one. Then take your seventeen and put it into 1 orange. Then take an 8 and put it into the other orange. Take the 25 and put it into the 17 spot. Then Put the 33 into the 17 green and then into the green slot. Now take a green 5 and put it into an orange. Do the same with the 3. Take the 8 and put it into the 3 green and then into the red slot. Last, take a five, put it into the 3 orange. Take the ten and put it into an orange. Take an 8 and put it into the other orange. Take 18 and put it into the 5 orange. You win!
Awesome cool game! Figured it out and solved it in 20 minutes.
If you really need help.....
The object is to match up the color coded numbers next to the big number in the middle into the matching color coded slots at the lower right.
Need more help???
You manipulate the numbers by switching numbers around inputting or outputting them (by clicking on the symbols -- they only go in or out of the big center spot) and storing them in the various temporary slots around the edges. Then try to add them up in the little adding machine at the bottom (it only takes numbers from or sends to the big center one), and try to get the equivalent number equal to a color coded one so you can figure out how to send to the correct color coded slot at the right. If you get all four of them correct, you win! :o)
Quite nice, once you figure out what the buttons do it's very straightforward. But I must admit I liked better the ClickDragType series. Numbers aren't my thing :)
I found an easy way to complete the game:
Are you THAT desperate???
C'mon, you don't need this.
All right, go on. But you've been warned.
BOOOO!!! HAHA, scared ya! Now, seriously, go on.
Assuming you already know what to do and how to do it (I'm not giving that away), put the number 1 in one of the sub-main (is that a word?) boxes and the number 8 in the other. After you did your job with the 8, just use the box down there to put a 9 in the big main box. Substitute the 8 by the 9. Do the transfer again. Substitute the 9 by the 10. Noticed the pattern? sure, it will take a little long, and probably it won't make a high-score time, but this is a possibility.
Oh, and I/O probably means
IN / OUT
This was a nice and short puzzle, but the
1
made the puzzle far too easy once you figured out what to do.
Finished it in a mere eight minutes. As stated, it was quite short, but a fun and somewhat taxing puzzle.
Thanks again for sharing.
I liked that one.
It took me quite a while to realize that you had to drag the board to get to all parts of it though.
I guess some people don't bother reading what we write about the games, eh? (Might save you some time next time.) ;)
Oh man.
I've been trying this one for some minutes now and the only thing I can clearly see that it's either gonna be a five-star rating or a one-star one :DDDD
I was actually a little disappointed once I figured it out. Maybe it would be more interesting if the high scores were based on the number of moves, rather than on time.
Cute little puzzle. Was rather simple after cracking the code, which was somewhat disappointing, but it never claimed to be some impossible or mind-blowing experience. Props for being a decent coffee-break time waster!
8 minutes for me, by the way. =P
Does this require math? I'm lousy at math & find math puzzles to be pure torture, I don't do them. Thanks!
Took me longer than i thought, 8 minutes.
I liked that a lot! Took me 12 mins, and was a great deal of fun once I knew what to do. Caya, it requires basic addition, but it's a great little diversion.
Caya if this math is not to high for you, the games math level is not too complicated for you.
1 + 1 = 2
2 + 1 = 3
3 + 1 = 4
4 + 1 = 5
5 + 1 = 6
6 + 1 = 7
7 + 1 = 8
8 + 1 = 9
9 + 1 = 10
and so on.
cando?
i'm not even kidding you, i seriously had a dream last night where there was a computer with "click drag type 4.0" on it... i knew it had to be some sort of bizarre omen...
cheers to andy! while it was a really short puzzle, it fulfilled something i was obviously subconsciously craving! thank you andy! (cough! make cdt4! cough! pleeease!)
great game. I love simple andy's games. I think this one could have been a bit better with randomly generated numbers though. or at least a few different sets, for higher replay value.
Hey everyone! I am glad to see it made it on JayIsGames.com! Smart-kit asked me a while back if I had any puzzles that I should let them know so I did some brainstorming here and there. I had a couple of great ideas written down, but some of them are going to take a lot of time (maybe future cdt4), but I knew this one I could do in a night... so i did, published it, and here it is on the net a month later! WooHoo! Thanks to everyone who plays it! And thanks to Smart-kit for sponsorship and Jay because his website is magical!! Seriously, I wouldn't be nearly as successful without this place! I went from CDT2 and 3, to the game competition on this site, which got me offers to make games for NFL Rush Zone and Urbaniacs, which filled up my resume, now I am working on the South Dakota State University (where i am at now) EE/CSC department website and just today got a internship at IBM for the summer! Jay and everyone who works/plays/comments on this site is amazing! THANKS everyone!!!
And all that just from making the CDT series? Wow, maybe I should start actually working on my idea for the CGDC5 seriously.
This game was a cool little puzzle, however, once I played around with it, I found it very familiar:
As a EE/CSC type myself, I quickly realized I was looking at registers and an adder. From there, I just had to think back to my time sleeping through lectures as an undergrad.
7 minutes. Kind of simple. Could've been spiced up by changing the nature of the numbers (so players had to figure out what symbol meant what number).
yeah the
1
made the game way too easy. To make it more challenging, it should have
more operations (subtract/divide/multiply at a minimum) and you should only be able to load the value out of nodes that are connected, instead of being able to load anything into the center one and put what was in the center one in any of the others. This way, you'd need to plan out what values to fill up first. also, if the goal nodes had some sort of feedback into the rest of the system it would add a new level of complexity.
10 minutes :D
beat it! 4 minutes
I must be amazingly stupid... i can't figure out this I/O game, even with all the spoilers.
Now that I've beat it (9 minutes), I wonder what the optimal solution would be.
What are the LEAST number of moves needed to solve this puzzle?
Nice little game, simple once you've got it started, as well as short, but still a nice brainteaser to occupy you for a bit.
(I got it in 10 minutes)
Very nice. 11 minutes for me. I kept getting the buttons mixed up on the memory registers.
Don't worry about it Hand-E-Food, I did as well. I figured out the basics fairly fast, but I messed up many times by clicking the wrong button. The game is neither long nor difficult, so it wasn't too much of an annoyance, but I imagine many had this problem.
That was pretty cool. Solved it in 18 minutes. Kept messing up on which button did what until I got the labels straight in my mind.
I kind of took the easy way out on one or two of the numbers:
If you put a 1 in one of the modules below the big module (i.e. in one of the two modules that get added together at the very bottom), then you can just keep "uploading" the sum back into the big module and downloading it into the module below that isn't a one. You end up incrementing the sum by 1 each time the two modules are added up.
I kept getting the buttons mixed up, and had to restart a few times. Eventually, I just looked at the boxes on the bottom right (the colored ones) to figure out what was what.
I must agree with Kero on the fact that it should have randomly generated numbers, however, I didn't think to use the methods others have pointed out.
Still though, I figured I would waste a half hour, but 6 minutes? Seems like just one of the Click-Drag-Type puzzles (rather than the whole set of puzzles).
pretty easy, didn't have to use the one button with 5 on it lol
That's a very good question, and it made me curious.
I can't claim that I found the minimal solution, but I found a very minimal one, and interestingly it doesn't use 1 at all. It takes 23 IOs.
O3
IBL
IBR
O6
IBL
O9
IBL
O8
I1
IR
IBR
O17
I0
IB
IBR
O26
I3
IY
O8
IBL
O25
IBR
O33
I17
IG
It's written as one letter for the method and the rest to signify the block. BL meaning the left orange block, BR the right orange block, R, Y, G, B meaning the coloured blocks, and the numbered ones simply the blocks that contain that number at the current time.
I'm gonna try to see if I can make a more minimal sequence.
Oops, the question I mentioned is the one Phoenix asked, IF anybody should be in doubt.
Jay, sorry for triple-posting.
But I just tried a solution using the 1, and it takes one less steps to make a 9 in one of the orange blocks. So my solution is down to 22 steps, by replacing the first 4 steps in my above solution with:
O8
IBR
O1
It is very hard to find a nice balance of puzzle difficulty. One player might take 10 times longer than another, but I don't want those players to give up due to difficulty. I played with the numbers and 'registers' or 'nodes' for a while to make sure that the player would most likely make a mistake the first time through, like overwriting a necessary number. I did want to, and should have, implemented a move-counter to promote a challenge of 'who can get the lease amount of moves'. I learned about the basic components of a processor in Digital Systems, which is what the puzzle is based around. Maybe next time around I'll take what I know from Compiler Construction and Lexical Analyzers to make your brain hurt! :)
Took me only seven minutes. My programmer nature at work.
Excellent puzzle. I'd like to see more of these.
Bit too easy for my liking, and I guess I would have preferred an intuitive interface... but I suppose that figuring it out is the main part of the puzzle.
All of your comments have proved that I am an absolute idiot. I can't figure this game out for the life of me, even after following all the solutions provided. Thanks for showing how worthless and retarded I am.
Six minutes! Then again, I /am/ a programmer...
And the icons make it pretty obvious that the center display is an accumulator.
wooo hooo 7 minutes!!!!!
Did I miss something in this game?
I mean, it's like it's not a puzzle at all. I beat it by
brainlessly adding one until I reached all the numbers. I didn't even use any of the other preset numbers.
It seems like a bit of waste of such a nice, clean interface. Perhaps a tweak should be made where the number cruncher had limited "crunches"? Because otherwise I see no other incentive to do things the hard way, when the easy way is so obvious and, well, easy.
Very clever, though once you know what you're doing it's not too tough. I like these sorts of things and am always glad to see one show up.
sure, you can do it that way, but IT'S NO FUN!!!!
the whole POINT of all games is so you have FUN while playing IT! anyway,
i like to think of this game as a sort of data thingamabob, the middle one is your computer, the colored ones are your clients, the other ones are your databases, and the orange & dark green ones are your data getter thingies! you have to give the clients the data they want, you use the green ones to store data, and the other ones to make the data!
4 min.
I finished it in 12 minutes. It was actually pretty easy once I figured out what I was supposed to do, but man, that was the fun part. AND I WANT MORE.
I finished in three minutes, first try, with no help at all!
Does anyone know the fastest time?
I'm the guy who finished in three minutes. I wanted to know what is the least number of mouse clicks needed to solve the puzzle. I did it with 25 clicks.
beat it in 2 mins
Personal opinion: I hate it. Even after reading through all the above comments, including spoilers, clicking pointlessly for what seemed like around half an hour, I completely fail to understand how this works. It must just be my learning ability, seeing as how everyone else seems to greatly enjoy it after they figure it out. Well, I can't figure it out, nor do I even want to try anymore. This should have been called "How To Completely Frustrate Someone With A Simple Task That Everyone But You Can Comprehend." I hate to sound so bitter, but I just don't get it.
...One player might take 10 times longer than another...I'm a slow one. For me the best games are ones that you can take your time at and in which the play is the point, not finishing.
I also hate going all the way back to the beginning if I mess up. Can you imagine Life, if whenever you made a mistake you had to be a baby again?
SimpleAndy, I don't know if you're still reading this, but you know, you could release an updated version with a move counter instead of a timer. It's not like making a game on a CD where once it's out you can't change it. It's not too late.
didnt know you could move the screen!!!
couldnt figuere it out cause i was missing half the boxes!!!!!!!!!
still only 18 mins
Lovely! Took me 18 minutes, but as many of you have said, once you figure it out, it's fairly easy. A great diversion, though, and don't know why, but I suddenly feel smarter. Thanks, Jay! ^_^
6 mins with a mistake half way through. nice game.
have no idea what to do
That's why it's labeled a "puzzle". ;)
Update