This should not exclusively rely on an audio cue because there are situations where the game could be played without sound - like players who are deaf or listen to their own music while playing or are in a noisy environment where they cannot properly hear the sounds, just to name a few examples.
My first thought was mildly adjusting the base color of the end-of-screen box (green for success, red for failure) but that won't accommodate colorblind players.

I'd personally advocate for including a little graphic on the end-of-level screen, but it requires some thought:
- It shouldn't be too large, i.e. bloat the screen or hog the player's attention.
- Where to put it such that it still fits into the screen layout nicely?
- The significance of the graphic should be intuitively distinguishable without further explanation.
- Pros and cons of using a game-related graphic (e.g. Lix) vs. a universal one (e.g. checkmark, X)?

That's a really fun animation for the breaking jackhammer, but I must admit my first thought when seeing it was being worried that it could clutter the screen, especially with many diggers. Additionally, since the parts fly away at high velocity, they attract the player's eyes' attention very quickly, and I feel that *could* make it a bit annoying or exhausting long term when trying to focus on other things. I haven't seen it in real gameplay yet, so I might be too quick to judge.

Quote from: Simon on December 16, 2024, 11:41:23 PMYou are enlightened!

A koan is white iff it becomes a palindrome after forgetting the differences among the 25 non-I letters.

You provided the perfect black starting koan, the round looped back to it nicely.

We count the letters to the left of the leftmost I (which is 0) and we count the letters right of the rightmost I (which is 0)

II is white under my rule.

But I have a better formulation: A koan containing an I has the buddha nature if the positions of its "I"s are symmetric within the koan.

I also just realized your starting koan disproves the rule. Can't be far off though, most of the white non-chaff koans fit the bill 

Let's adjust it to: A koan does NOT have the buddha nature if it contains an I and there is a different amount of letters to the left of the leftmost I than to the right of the rightmost I.

A koan does NOT have the buddha nature if it contains an I and is not palindromic.

If this is the correct rule: Well, it should have been faster to figure it out. The hint was pretty good and "I" (see what "I" did there?) actually like the combination of how the inclusion of a specific letter made it tougher. I'd also pass the next master round on to kaywhyn.

KNOBLAUCH
IM
TOPF

Quote from: Simon on December 12, 2024, 10:13:10 PMYou can give the black counterexample ABCA.

I don't quite follow. Under my rule, that would still be white (ABA and ACA are both palindromic subsequences).

But I mainly posted to give kaywhyn the green light for the second rule!

I'm going to give you the enlightenment here, because shortly after the round started I realized that my intended rule could actually be massively simplified to a wholly different wording and it didn't actually produce very interesting white and black koans, making it substantially less fun to master.

I was thinking of: AKHTBN iff it contains a subsequence (minimum length 3) that is a palindrome.
Then too late I realized that is equivalent to something akin to your guess (it is sufficient for a koan to have the pattern ...x...y...x... anywhere in the koan), and while that is an okay rule, it strongly diverges from my original vision. Then I considered adjusting the rules to the effect that the letters of the subsequence each must be the same distance from each other, but that just feels like an arbitrary addition that could get frustrating.

But I did say I just wanted to make a quick one, so I'm not really bummed out

Slightly disappointed that WOLOLO didn't make it into your guess list!

White koans:
  CASHMERE
  MERE
  SILKS
* WOLO
* WOOLO
  WOOLW

Black koans:
  CASH
  CASHME
  SILK
  WOOL
  WOOLS
* WWOOL

White koans:
  CASHMERE
  MERE
  SILKS
* WOOLW

Black koans:
  CASH
* CASHME
  SILK
  WOOL
* WOOLS

WOOL does not have the buddha nature.

White koans:
  CASHMERE
  MERE
  SILKS

Black koans:
  CASH
  SILK
* WOOL

White koans:
  CASHMERE
* MERE
* SILKS

Black koans:
* CASH
  SILK

Let's go for a quick one then!

CASHMERE has the buddha nature.
SILK does not have the buddha nature.