Ticoban

About the game

You are a little character in a walled room with some round boulders on the floor and a few holes in the ground. Your goal is to push every boulder into a hole. You can only push, never pull, and you can only push one at a time, so the order matters: a boulder that ends up in a corner is stuck for good, and the level has to be restarted. It is the old box-pushing idea (a Sokoban-style game), here with a green meadow around the walls and brick tiles for the rooms.

The official collection has twenty levels written by the author, from a couple of moves to rooms that take real thought. The game counts your moves and your time and keeps the best result for each level, and you can see them on the level list. You choose a level from the menu, and you can restart the one you are in at any time. The pause menu also has a Save option, which saves your position so you can load it later from the main menu.

Ticoban is a small free-software game by Son Link, written for the Pyxel engine, and it was designed to run on small Linux handhelds as well as on computers, with the same few buttons: a d-pad, A and B, Start and Select.

Playing it here

The first time you click Play the page downloads Pyxel and the Python runtime (about 15 MB), which takes a few seconds; after that the game shows a "click to start" prompt, and one more click starts it with sound. Nothing is loaded from other sites. Your best moves and times for each level, and the position you save from the pause menu, are saved in this browser and kept when you close the tab. They are not shared between browsers or devices, and clearing the site's data erases them.

On the web we took out the Exit options of the main menu and the pause menu, and turned off the Esc key, because on a web page quitting would only freeze the screen. "Save" in the pause menu still saves, and the game goes on.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Look at the whole room first. Work out where each boulder has to end before you push any of them.

Corners are traps. A boulder against a wall can only slide along the wall, and in a corner it cannot move at all. Keep them in the open until they are on their way to a hole.

Restart without shame. Space puts the level back as it was, and a better solution is the point of the counters.

Frequently asked questions

How many levels are there? Twenty in the official collection.

Can I load my own levels? The desktop game reads extra level files from a folder next to it; this web version only has the official collection.

Does it work on a phone? The game was made for a keyboard or a game pad. The page offers an on-screen pad on touch devices, but we have not tested the game with it.

Why does it say "click to start"? Browsers only allow sound after you interact with the page, so the Pyxel launcher asks for one click before it starts the game.

Is it free? Yes: Ticoban is free software under the GNU GPL (version 3 or later), and the source code of this build is available from this page.

Credits and licence

Ticoban was made by Son Link (Alfonso Saavedra), the only author of the repository: the code, the levels, the pixel art and the sounds, under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. The build served here changes a few things (it has no Exit options, "Save" keeps the game going, and the saves are kept in the browser), all published as a patch with the complete source code of the build. It runs on the Pyxel engine (MIT) and the Pyodide runtime (MPL-2.0), whose licences and source are linked from the Licenses page.