Totally Sweet Sudoku Beta

[Bachus]

EDIT: This is currently the #1 result for "Totally Sweet Sudoku" on Google. The full version has now been released, and you can find it here: Totally Sweet Sudoku (http://www.killerrobots.com/games/sudoku)

I was ranting in the chat room a couple nights ago, but here's the gist.

I've been working a sudoku game for the Mac. I started working on it about 3-4 months ago (god, has it really been that long?) back when there weren't many sudoku clones on the Mac. I figured I'd spend six weeks or so making a game, and I'd fill a need, and maybe I'd make a couple bucks. Well, I kept getting side-tracked and had other things to work on, and now it's months later, and I'm still not finished, and several other sudoku games have been released. So I've become disillusioned with the whole project, and I'm basically shipping it as-is. If anyone actually likes it, great, I'll continue working on it. If nobody likes it, then at least I didn't waste anymore time on it. And at least I can use it as a learning experience for registration schemes and services and what not.

Here's the link to the beta (http://www.killerrobots.com/games/sudoku/totallysweetsudoku.dmg).

I'm basically just looking for if it runs or not. If you can test it on a X.2.8 or Intel machine I definitely want to hear from you. If there's any bugs I'd like to hear about them too. I don't really care about the art/sound/missing features/etc, but if you mention them I'm not gonna scream at you or anything.

[OneSadCookie]

Seems to work on Intel...

[Malarkey]

Well, I haven't checked out any of the other sudoku games but yours looks pretty cool. I'll try it out a little more when I have more time. Anyway, I would check out how what you have compares to the others, make yours better, finish it up, and release it. When I released my version of Minesweeper as donationware, people still sent me money for it despite the flood of Minesweeper games out there.

[kelvin]

The music (very annoying btw), has "Preview ShockwaveSound.com" playing repeatedly.

[Najdorf]

interesting... do you have a function that generates games with a single solution?

[Bachus]

Well, I haven't checked out any of the other sudoku games but yours looks pretty cool. I'll try it out a little more when I have more time. Anyway, I would check out how what you have compares to the others, make yours better, finish it up, and release it. When I released my version of Minesweeper as donationware, people still sent me money for it despite the flood of Minesweeper games out there.

The general idea is that after OMG Cup I didn't want to immediately get back to my previous project, nor did I immediately want to improve Illuminations. I wanted a nice, simple project I could do in a few weeks. So I did this instead, but I was too slow in making it. I still like the game, and have a lot of different ways to improve it, but I just don't want to spend the extra weeks on a project with so much competition. So basically I'm going to release it now, and improve it later (hopefully).

The music (very annoying btw), has "Preview ShockwaveSound.com" playing repeatedly.

Yea, the music isn't bought yet. I really can't decide what to do with the music. The original ideas was to have a Ninja + Guitars theme for the game (though as you can see there's no ninjas in there at the moment). I've gotten used to the music, so it doesn't distract me at all (I even tune out the previews completely), but I don't know about other people. I really like the title screen song, but I just can't decide what to do with the in-game music. I tried some more mellow guitar music, but I didn't really like it. Nor did I like any of the ambient non-guitar music I tried.

Anybody got any suggestions? And of course, you can always turn the music off.

interesting... do you have a function that generates games with a single solution?

It's very brute force. I've got a method that tests for puzzle correctness. So I randomly fill a full puzzle board using that method to ensure a correct puzzle. Then I randomly select 17-18 numbers (technically 9 numbers, and their symmetrical counterpart) to use as givens. 17 numbers is the fewest number of givens you can have and still only have one solution. Then I have a dancing links solver (look it up on Wikipedia) that I use to test the number of solutions. Then I keep adding numbers until there's only one solution.

There's some more stuff in there, but that's basically how it's done. Not necessarily the best way, but it was easy to code and is fast enough. What I need to do is write a solver that uses human logic so that I can figure out the difficulty of puzzles. That'll take time and is one of the things I cut in order to release this.

[Najdorf]

It's very brute force. I've got a method that tests for puzzle correctness. So I randomly fill a full puzzle board using that method to ensure a correct puzzle. Then I randomly select 17-18 numbers (technically 9 numbers, and their symmetrical counterpart) to use as givens. 17 numbers is the fewest number of givens you can have and still only have one solution. Then I have a dancing links solver (look it up on Wikipedia) that I use to test the number of solutions. Then I keep adding numbers until there's only one solution.


Ah, that was the way I was thinking to go too. Well congrats for making a generator and a solving function, it must have been an cool programming challenge :)