Ode to a Tank Crossing the Road

Ode to a Tank Crossing the Road

Level set	Chip's Challenge 2 Level Pack 1
Level number	162
Designer	David Stolp Miika Toukola
Password
Password notes
Hint	{{{hint}}}
Chips	13 required / 13 available
Chips notes
Time limit	628
MS (Scores)
Melinda time
Bold time
Public time
Casual difficulty	*****
Bold execution difficulty	*****
Bold routing difficulty	*****
Bold luck difficulty	*****
Mouse Required	Note: This level's bold route requires use of the mouse.
Lynx (Scores)
Melinda time
Bold time
Public time
Casual difficulty	*****
Bold execution difficulty	*****
Bold routing difficulty	*****
Bold luck difficulty	*****
Steam (Scores)
Bold time	570
Bold time	570
Public time
Public time
Casual difficulty	*****
Bold execution difficulty	*****
Bold routing difficulty	*****
Bold luck difficulty	*****
Bold score	91950
Public score
Casual difficulty	*****
Bold execution difficulty	*****
Bold routing difficulty	*****
Bold luck difficulty	*****

Ode to a Tank Crossing the Road is the 162nd level in Chip's Challenge 2 Level Pack 1. It was created by David Stolp and Miika Toukola, adapted by Miika from one of the rooms in Avalanche.

Full level map

Design History

Pieguy created both the basic concept and design as a room for Avalanche but you only encounter it in the long solution. The player must arrange blocks in a tight space yet leave room for a tank to pass through them. The only way this can be done is to juggle both the blocks and the tank together. Miika noticed that this was a fun and novel puzzle that is not getting enough attention and decided to port it into a single level, first built for CC1. In the original context, Chip must bring in 14 blocks into the room before triggering the tank button, then fetch the fireboots, and finally remove all the blocks from the room.

Miika wanted to focus on the tank interaction, so the blocks start in the room and afterwards are left on trap buttons, which assures that the player still had access to all the blocks. When porting this to CC2, the wire connections were impractical to implement, so instead of trap buttons the blocks must be pushed into bombs instead. The blocks may not be stored on the sides of the room. In Avalanche, these tiles are normal floor since storing a block there would waste it. For the adapted version, this could be communicated to the player by using some other tile, plus for the CC2 version it made placing the extra bombs simpler. The natural tile to use was ice, as there already were a few ice tiles in the room.

Adding a Bonus

The block maneuvering itself interacted nicely with the ice as well. In the original puzzle there is an interesting aspect of not quite being able to restore the block arrangement once it is disturbed. However, with a trick in the ported version it is actually possible to complete the task even with an extra block! This was clearly a place to add a bonus flag for CC2, which rewards the player if they choose to attack the more cluttered version.

Busts Sneak In

The version that was submitted for voting as CC2LP1 was being compiled contained a bust for getting the blue key (which is used to reach the bonus). The ability in CC2 to block slap from standing still allowed the bust, and Miika was unaware of this difference compared to Lynx. This should have been an easy fix but trying to solve it elegantly brought in another failure. In the final version there should be a pop-up wall under the blue key. Without this, Chip is able to avoid the existing pop-up wall and store a block in the starting alcove until it is needed, completely negating the bonus puzzle. A reason for this mistake was the addition of new ideas with the bonus flags too late in the process.

As the deadline for CC2LP1 was just days away, Miika decided to experiment with more bonus flags under the blocks and adding a thief by the fireboots. This would reward the player if more elaborate block juggling was used that left some blocks untouched until the end. After many approaches were attempted, the resulting flag arrangement seemed interesting and one that should not allow for the theoretical maximum score for bonuses to be achieved. Alas, yet again Miika overlooked the possibility of a block slap from a standing position, and now all the bonuses are possible to be saved for after the thief. Admittedly, some busts of this type might not even be addressable when they appear amidst tight block pushing, but this one is particularly heartbreaking as it also could have been fixed had it been discovered in time.

A small consolation overall is that the original puzzle is still intact and the busts only relate to the bonus flags. Additionally, if you as a player wish to explore the original intent for the bonus flags, you can just choose to not store a block in the starting alcove and not to use any block slaps from a standing position, and see how many points you can still score. Good luck!

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