Lights Out Advance! GBA

Lights Out Advance!
Lights Out Advance!
General
Author	Jeff Katz (Kuja)
Type	Puzzle
Version	0.9b
License	Mixed
Last Updated	2003/03/17
Links
	Download
	Website

Lights out game on the Game Boy Advance.

It was a contest entry to the in the GBAX 2003 Coding Competition.

User guide

Gameplay

You are holding in your hands the most addictive, brain boggling puzzle ever created. The object of the puzzle is simple - turn the LIGHTS OUT.

It seems so easy...at first. The problem is that every toggle of a light has an effect on the puzzle. Lights that are on will shut off, and lights that were off will turn on.

Moreover, when you toggle a light, it not only changes that light, but it also changes the adjacent lights (those that are directly above, below, or next to the toggled light).

Every puzzle in the game has a solution. Your goal is to solve each puzzle in the fewest number of moves, or steps.

The first puzzles are simple, to help you get a feel for the game, and get the basic logic of LIGHTS OUT. Later puzzles get progressively more challenging, requiring a little more brain power to solve.

Once you start to solve some of the 50 puzzles in MODE 1, you can try your hand at MODE 2, which features over 1000 puzzles.

Sound option

In the main menu, the sound option is a quad state, represented by four colors, which are as follows:

Red - Sounds and Music enabled.
Blue - Music, but no Sounds are enabled.
Yellow - Sounds and Music are disabled.
Green - Sounds, but no Music are enabled.

MODE 1 and 2

MODE 1 enables you to solve 50 pre-programmed puzzles, each one more difficult from the last.

Solving a beginning puzzle can be as few as 6 steps, while the more advanced puzzles could require up to 15 steps.

PUZZLE and MINIMUM REQ'd STEPS:

Puzzles 1-5 6 steps.
Puzzles 6-10 7 steps.
Puzzles 11-15 8 steps.
Puzzles 16-20 9 steps.
Puzzles 21-25 10 steps.
Puzzles 26-30 11 steps.
Puzzles 31-35 12 steps.
Puzzles 36-40 13 steps.
Puzzles 41-45 14 steps.
Puzzles 46-50 15 steps.

The challenge of Lights Out is to solve a puzzle in the minimum number of moves required. When you solve a puzzle in the minimum number of moves, you will be rewarded with a blinking light show.

Lights Out will then automatically display the next puzzle. If you go over the minimum number of moves, the number of moves you exceed by will flash on your display, but you can still proceed to the next puzzle as long as you do not exceed 10 moves.

If you solve a puzzle in more than 10 steps over the minimum number of moves, a lighted “X” will appear on screen and you will have to try again before advancing to the next puzzle.

MODE 2 is similar to MODE 1, except that all the puzzles were randomly generated by a computer.

Game tips

If you are so completely stuck on a puzzle, and you just want to get it over with, there is an algorithm by which you can solve any puzzle - albiet not with the minimum number of moves.

To begin, you turn out all the lights on the top row, by toggling the lights on the second row that are directly underneath any lit lights on the top row. The top row will then have all it's lights off.

Repeat this step for the second, third and fourth row. (i.e. chase the lights all the way down to the bottom row). This may have solved the puzzle already, but is more likely that there will now be some lights left on in the bottom row. If so, there are only 7 possible configurations.

Depending on which configuration you are left with, you need to toggle some lights in the top row. You can determine which lights you need to toggle from the following table.

  BOTTOM   |    TOP
-----------+-----------
X 0 0 0 X  |  X X 0 0 0
0 X 0 X 0  |  X 0 0 X 0
X X X 0 0  |  0 X 0 0 0
0 0 X X X  |  0 0 0 X 0
X 0 X X 0  |  0 0 0 0 X
0 X X 0 X  |  X 0 0 0 0
X X 0 X X  |  0 0 X 0 0

After you have pressed the buttons in the top row, you now apply the Light Chasing algorithm again (i.e. turn the lights out row by row). This time the puzzle will definitely be solved when you reach the bottom row.