Sokoban: Design gameplay hints

[wjt]

I have always found Sokoban puzzles very difficult and these are no exception. It might be nice at some point to provide the player with some hints if they're stuck.

XP Summary (total 300)

Subdomain	Skill	XP
Game Design: Progression & Motivation	Problem Solving	75
Game Design: Progression & Motivation	Creativity & Design Thinking	150
Game Design: Progression & Motivation	Technical Literacy	75

[manuq]

Adding hints would need game design. My alternative proposal is to offer a way to skip the puzzles: #691

[wjt]

I've repurposed this issue as a task to do that game design thinking: what is the right design for hints? Once we have a design for hints we can create follow-on tasks to bring them to fruition.

[wjt]

I was playing Robot Detour, a game whose creators I met at GodotCon last year, originally to look for inspiration for grappling-hook puzzle layout, but I noticed that it has a simple hint mechanic that we might take inspiration from here.

In this game you have to move the green robot around the board, trailing a power cable behind you in straight lines. But if it touches the red spiky enemies, you fail:

Hints are accessed from a menu in the pause screen – it's functional but could look better:

And the hints take the form of a dotted line on the map, indicating where one segment of the solution is: