Make sure your speakers are turned on! Sokoban (Japanese for warehouse keeper), developed in the early 1980's, is a transport puzzle game where the player must successfully push boxes to designated areas of a warehouse [1]. Many variations of the rules of Sokoban exist, which results in many different ways to play the game. Generally speaking, the rules for a classical game of Sokoban are:
(2.) Boxes cannot be pulled.
(3.) The player cannot walk through boxes or walls.
(4.) A puzzle is solved when all the boxes have been placed in the appropriate locations.
Despite it being popularized as a video game, Sokoban is of practical and scientific concern, especially in the domains of artificial intelligence, motion planning problems, and theoretical computer science. Human beings are undoubtably great problem and puzzle solvers in comparison to our digital counterparts, that is, automatically solving Sokoban and its related problems can quickly become computationally intractable [2].
We loosely followed a tutorial found at [3] on using HTML5's canvas element for recreating a Sokoban clone. In our Sokoban clone you are a hero Tim who must safely secure water jugs by moving them to their designated pick up areas. Our aim was to cater this classic puzzle game to a disaster relief scenario. Our clone uses the following technologies, AJAX, HTML5, CSS style sheets, Javascript, jQuery, and browser cookies.
This page and game provide an account of my recreating a Sokoban clone over the course of a weekend (2/2/2013 - 2/3/2013). Currently there is a bug with caching the game's sprites in the web browser. This bug does not detract from being able to play the game, since it can easily be overcome, pressing F5 and then ENTER before starting each level. This effectively forces the browser to refresh the page and take an initial input from the keyboard. This was tested on google Chrome v. 24.0.1312.57 web browser on Windows 7 64-bit, and should also work on the latest Chrome browsers for Linux and Mac OSX, and the latest version of Firfox, yet, remains untested.