Dwayne Saw: Same Forest, More Chainsaw

He's lanky. He's bearded. He's got trees to drop.

Dwayne Saw is a side-view puzzle game for iPhone and iPad about a tall, lanky lumberjack in a trucker cap who chainsaws trees down to get home to his cottage. If that sounds familiar, it should. It's built from the same rules and the same drawn-in-code style as Hairy Beaver, as a separate game with a different temperament.

The basics carry over. A tree falls away from you. Across a pit it's a bridge, against a cliff it's a ramp. Logs can be grabbed, pushed, pulled and cut in half. Dwayne doesn't swim either.

Then it adds a few things the beaver never had.

Big trees and monsters

Trees have a girth now. An ordinary tree takes three cuts, a big one takes five, and a monster takes eight and scowls at you while you do it. A falling tree knocks over any thinner tree it hits instead of getting hung up on it, and a monster's log is too heavy to drag. So the order you fell things in matters more, and you can't always tidy up afterwards.

Climbing

Stand beside a tree, press UP, and Dwayne straps himself to it and climbs. Saw from the harness and the tree is cut at that height: the stump stays standing and everything above it comes down from up there.

That one move opens up a lot. The top can sail over something on the ground that you don't want flattened. It can land as a bridge on top of the stump, or lean up to a ledge the whole tree couldn't reach.

Fall damage

The beaver could drop off anything. Dwayne survives a fall of two cells and no more, whether he walks off an edge, the ground goes out from under him, or the tree he's strapped to comes down. Being launched from a see-saw is the one exception.

This quietly turns a lot of old solutions into new puzzles. A drop you'd have taken without thinking now needs a log shoved over the edge first for a shorter landing.

The saw works on wolves

In Hairy Beaver, you get past a wolf by dropping something on it. Dwayne can also just walk up and saw: two cuts for a wolf, three for a hunter, one for a crow, with cartoon blood and a lot of yelping. An enemy he's facing gets the saw before a tree does.

Friends are never a target. Flatten a rabbit and you still lose the level.

It sounds like a chainsaw

Like its cousin, the game has no sound files for effects. The chainsaw is synthesised: the engine keeps revving after each cut and winds down over two seconds, and every cut throws sawdust.

And yes, the blades are back. They don't shave a beaver this time.

Taller levels, same toolchain

Levels can be taller than the screen now, and the camera follows Dwayne up the tree. Under the hood it's the same arrangement as the beaver's game: levels drawn as text, hand-built ones that each teach an idea, generated ones that a solver has proven can be finished, and three stars for getting home in the fewest moves. There's more on how that works in 100 Levels of Log-ic.

When

Dwayne Saw is still in the works, with 100 levels and no release date yet. Hairy Beaver goes first. I'll post here when there's something to download.