If you want to train novices up to solve very difficult puzzles of this style (or whatever style), start with very simple puzzles and build your way up in a sequence of steadily increasing difficulty, introducing only about one new trick at a time.
The tricky part of this puzzle is getting the rabbits down from house to tree. In order to move anyone from the top area to bottom area, you need to have someone in the bottom area shuffling back and forth, and also someone else in the top area.
Specifically, you need to get one rabbit to the bone (dog must be at carrot) then move the dog back to the flower so the other rabbit can go down to the tree. Once one rabbit is in the bottom area the dog can move to the top area to help get the other rabbit down.
Took me about 2 minutes to figure out what to do, and then another few minutes of dragging stuff around to execute. But again, I have been doing a lot of puzzles with my kid recently, so this kind of thing is top of mind.
I never said this isn’t a fun tricky-but-not-too-tricky one-off puzzle for out-of-practice adult puzzle solvers. (It has one key trick that someone who doesn’t do very many puzzles might take a while to figure out.) I only said it was pretty easy for me personally.
I further claimed that if you want to train complete novices (I am thinking of my 6 year old here, or his less experienced 6-year-old friends) to solve very hard variants of this puzzle, you should start with easy puzzles and introduce one new trick at a time. If your goal is not to train novices to solve hard puzzles, then feel free to disregard this advice.
There are some fun harder tricks that you can throw into this genre of puzzle (not included in this particular example) that if you tried presenting to my 6 year old would completely stump him. But after working his way up methodically he could be taught to notice and solve them.
I don’t know too much about puzzle video games (web or otherwise), but we have this week been playing the recently released game Railbound which is pretty fun and has some quite tricky puzzles.
I solved it in under 15 minutes or so (multitasling and I didn't time myself) .. and at no point did I even attempt to have two characters on the same space or pass through each other .. other than the final goal of two bunnies on the carrot.
Clearly:
* I'm to dumb to have tried !!
* It can be solved with with a "only ever one character on an intermediate non goal tile" .. although that is probably a slighty longer fiddlyier way of doing things.
Re: 2, it seems intentional when two occupy the same space, 1 of them gets priority and has to be moved first? Ideally, you could pick which 1 of the 2 you could move, but removing this choice makes the puzzle harder.
Re: 3, I don't like the flashing lights/colors at all. Putting a "You win" or "Congrats" <div> somewhere prominent on the page is probably enough. Flashing colors is very painful on the eyes.
1. It was good enough that I finished. This is success! Good job!
2. It took me too long to realize characters could occupy the same space, and the game doesn't draw characters occupying the same space very well.
3. The flashing lights at the end are too fast, slow them way down and it will still look good. You'll probably only have to change a number in your code.