Zircean

perfect little angel

what i lack in brains i more than make up for in speed



brlka
@brlka asked:

i've always wanted to be able to play puyo but it seems dauntingly hard to gain even a baseline level of competency. do you have any suggestions for what skills to focus on initially, and how best to learn them?

full disclosure that i am in no way a "Good" puyo player but i guess some people might consider me "not altogether incompetent". with that in mind:

building simple/smallish chains is really all about...induction? when you are first learning your job is basically to figure out how to take an N-chain and turn it into an (N+1)-chain. generally this will come by making a group of three, then putting something else on top, then completing that original group. something like the reds in here:
blocking method 1
then you can add some more blues:
blocking method 2
then you work with the yellows, etc. i believe in the parlance this is known as the "blocking method". i wouldn't worry about forms yet, or anything other than just trying to push this as far as you can. take it as slow as you need to. you will encounter color conflicts. it will require a lot of experimentation. be prepared to spend some time with it!

once you can get to maybe 7-8 with this, you might get stuck, and it becomes difficult to extend further. you can start to look at things like stairs and sandwich, because as you have likely realized at this point you will be discarding a lot of puyo and playing very inefficiently with what you're given, if all you do is focus on one link at a time. but the interesting thing about forms isn't actually just the forms themselves—yes, ideally they are compact, and that's good, but you can always build those inefficiently as well. what we care about is starting from the transition. these forms generally run from one side of the board to another, and the transition is the point at which they hit a wall, and further extension requires "turning around". if you try to build from one wall to the other, and then build the transition and continue upwards from there, you will find it really difficult to avoid piling up a lot of stuff you don't want in adjacent columns. so what happens if we build it first? can we make use of what would be discards?

in this new world we are now no longer building our chain linearly from the end to the beginning, but from the middle out. this means we can work on the head and the tail at the same time, which allows us to use more of what we're given and discard less. the stairs and sandwich transitions, respectively, look like so:

stairs transition
sandwich transition

note that in the first (stairs) we can extend by adding stuff to the green head or the yellow tail; in the second we can extend by adding stuff to the yellow head or yellow tail. so if we dont like what we get for one side of the chain we can try it on the other.

once you get the hang of these and of making your chains more compact/wasting fewer puyo, then i would say you can actually go on ahead with the usual advice of "just learn GTR lol"/related builds like long GTR or sullen GTR because at that point you will have a much better understanding of how things work in general.

as you get better at it you will be able to envision more of the chain ahead of time by taking into account both next pieces, etc. and you will be able to optimize this further, waste even less, and have fewer color conflicts to lose your chain to. but that's something you get from playing and getting experience.

of course this is all the beginning of the long journey but i think once you get over this initial wall you will probably be able to figure out what to do next yourself.

i hope you found this useful. happy puyoing!


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in reply to @Zircean's post:

thank u for the thoughtful reply! it makes sense to focus on blocking up to 7-8 chains before tackling forms; i think part of my early discouragement was trying to wrap my head around the latter before i'd developed a solid baseline for chaining in general

its definitely also easier to see your progress/stay motivated if you're like "its real messy, but made it one link further this time" instead of like "damn i didn't put all my puyo according to this template"

and as you said having a good idea of how chaining works on its own will pay big, big dividends