I made A (Hopefully) Comprehensive Guide to Lumines Puzzle Mode for a few reasons, which I do mention in the guide,
but in case you didn't see them:
1. I really like this mode.
I think it's a cool idea to go against the grain of the typical Lumines gameplay flow to create what is essentially rudimentary
pixel art; it's kinda like when Tetris players create pixel art using the seven different colors provided by the pieces.
Reading previous discussions with people who've played various Lumines games, through the
official Enhance or the
Lumines community Discord servers, I've grown to learn that liking this mode
is not a common sentiment at all.
2. I hadn't seen a good visual guide for Puzzle Mode made anywhere.
The only guides I saw for Lumines Puzzle Mode were videos, and that, to me, was quite frustrating; while some people might find
video guides helpful, I find that they never go at a pace that I like. I've seen some people also make written guides to
puzzles, but it gets really wordy without actually helping the reader internalize what the puzzle looks like. The alternative
is using ASCII or emoji to illustrate the blocks, which, in my humble opinion, looks disgustingly busy and bad.
3. The difficulty that came with making this guide was low enough to warrant doing.
I already used a spreadsheet to help plan out and solve the puzzles for Puzzle Mode, so just making a new sheet in the
document every time I needed to plan out another puzzle was simple enough.
Through the changelog, you can see that I spent almost an entire month working on this. All throughout October, I was basically
doing nothing but working on this thing, constantly booting up Lumines II and Lumines Remastered to verify my
visuals and write-ups; in fact, I hadn't even completed Puzzle Mode on the former, so testing my guide using that game helped
me finally make some progress towards finally completing it.
I think the absolute most tedious thing was actually getting the spreadsheet script set up. I made the original spreadsheet in
Excel, since I just use my parents' subscription to it, so I had initially planned to release this using OneDrive's online
document sharing. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just program a macro into the spreadsheet and share that."
Turns out, modern Excel really hates it when you use macros, especially if you want to upload and share it to OneDrive.
The alternative choice was to use Office Script, which is basically a modified JavaScript; doesn't sound too bad, right?
First off, it's a modern Microsoft development tool, which means they're constantly shoving their dogshit Copilot AI slop
down your throat, so that was totally not an annoying thing to deal with.
Second, any scripts you make aren't actually tied to the spreadsheet you're actively working on. If you want to use a script
with your spreadsheet, you have to link the script and the spreadsheet, share the script on OneDrive, and make sure there's a
button for the script on spreadsheet.
Despite all that, it still didn't work, because Microsoft's programs are becoming less and less function with the passage
of time. During this whole Excel session, I think I spent a total of 10% of the time actually making the script and the remaining
90% on dealing with Microslop's bullshit trying to just make the goddamn script work with the sheet. As you can tell, I gave up
on trying to run this through Excel, then learned that Google Drive has a similar function with Apps Script.
Apps Script was its own can of worms to deal with. First off, it doesn't support any imported .xlsx files, which meant I had to
basically recreate the entire spreadsheet from scratch. It's not as simple as just copying/pasting from one sheet to another; I
had to also reformat everything to make it look the same. It doesn't help that Google Sheets functions differently from normal
Excel; getting the formatting througout the entire spreadsheet was so extremely frustrating.
Once I finally got the spreadsheet formatted like the original, I now had to deal with another stupid hurdle: Google Account
nonsense. Because only one of my Google accounts had access to the spreadsheet, Google Drive had to throw a tantrum and not let
me access Apps Script normally; I had to use an entirely separate computer just to write the goddamn code.
Speaking of the code, I need to talk about Apps Script. It also uses a modified JavaScript; however, because it's Google, it
has to be different. That means I not only have to refactor the script I made in Office, but I have to do it in exactly
the way Google wants me to do it. I kept trying to look at the documentation, but half of the time the website redirected to the
goddamn Gemini homepage, telling me to use AI to make this script. I feel like I don't need to narrate the frustrations I had at
this point.
After all of that, I finally got the damn script working again. Trying to make this script (which, mind you, is basically
nothing but a simple recursive function) really just solidified my hatred towards modern technology. The script works with
the use of a keyboard shortcut. I initally wanted the script to run with the click of a button on the sheet itself, but I settled
on just the keyboard shortcut after dealing with the obnoxious bullshit both Google and Microsoft gave me. Maybe I'll
implement it in the future.
Speaking of potential implementations, as of writing this, there's some things I'm still thinking of adding to the guide;
primarily a page dedicated to the fixed piece queue, as well as some sort of indicator for any puzzles that overlap with ones
seen in Puzzle Fusion or Lumines PLUS. Whether or not they get added is still up in the air.
I was also thinking about adding some sort of video component to the guide, whether in the form of a companion video or just
some GIFs I put in the actual written guide; I know I said I had some qualms with video guides, but given that it's not the
main method of digesting the guide's content, I think having it as a companion piece would be better.
I wanted to add a section of the guide dedicated to weird quirks in the earlier implementations of Puzzle Mode, but I realized
it's probably a bit too out-of-scope for this project. Maybe if I run out of things to work on for this guide, I'll finally
work on that.
That's just about everything I wanted to share regarding A (Hopefully) Comprehensive Guide to Lumines Puzzle Mode. I'm still
tweaking and editing the guide to make it as presentable as possible as of writing this, but eventually there won't be anything
to add. I'm always welcoming feedback on the guide, so if you're reading this and something seems off (or if you just want to
comment on something), feel free to add a comment to the document; it should be accessible to anyone.