Apologies, Bob, for dragging other designers' 4D games onto your page. But 4D variants are an interesting topic, with little available information, and both Ben R. and I are interested in 4D variants and we've each done at least one. Grin, I see that unlike me, you were not aiming for extreme playability.
No apologies necessary; it's a valid topic here.
The difference between this variant and other 4DVs is (as Fergus pointed out) that this one doesn't use 4D movement; it's the usual 2D movement, on the surface of the tesseract. That affects the playability to an extent, though as I've been arranging things I'm starting to see that it might actually be playable after all, if one doesn't mind using a 3D setup (which I think some 4D games do anyway).
Still, it's easier to lay out 256 squares for a 4x4x4x4 game than 504 squares (not counting the corners) for a 24x5x5 game, and that's not even considering the complex relationships of each side to its neighbors. I've tried to simplify the latter aspect, and I'm in the process of doing so further until it's easy enough for neurotypicals* to understand.
Even forcing it to slide 2+1 or 1+2 without the leap still means the knight has 2 paths to its target square.
If you change the move to [W-F] (one orthogonal followed by one diagonal) that would reduce it further.
*My apologies if that comes across as condescending.
No apologies necessary; it's a valid topic here.
The difference between this variant and other 4DVs is (as Fergus pointed out) that this one doesn't use 4D movement; it's the usual 2D movement, on the surface of the tesseract. That affects the playability to an extent, though as I've been arranging things I'm starting to see that it might actually be playable after all, if one doesn't mind using a 3D setup (which I think some 4D games do anyway).
Still, it's easier to lay out 256 squares for a 4x4x4x4 game than 504 squares (not counting the corners) for a 24x5x5 game, and that's not even considering the complex relationships of each side to its neighbors. I've tried to simplify the latter aspect, and I'm in the process of doing so further until it's easy enough for neurotypicals* to understand.
If you change the move to [W-F] (one orthogonal followed by one diagonal) that would reduce it further.
*My apologies if that comes across as condescending.