New Puzzle Game: CluGrid

[timns]

Hello again folks,

Puzzle game number two uploaded and awaiting your brain cells:

[attach]

[mouser]

Playing it now
One day you'll have to tell us the story of how you came to make these games..

[timns]

It's always the same with me - I blame the coffee. About every six months or so I cast around for a nice little puzzle game to play over my lunchtime latte. I usually find something, but for some reason I end up wanting to have a go at something similar myself (which explains why my next upload will be a Sudoku generator  )

I don't know if it's a good place to start, but I begin by writing the easy bit - something to create a puzzle in its solved state. After that I find that it's not too bad to code up a solver which looks backward - find how to get to the original puzzle from the solution by removing information one piece at a time, while retaining a path to the final answer.

And after THAT of course, it's not too bad to write the clue generator which tells the solver what to do.

And after THAT comes the hardest part of all... thinking of a stupid name and a stupid splash screen 

[timns]

By the way, when I wrote the game I used xml files for the data so as we go along I'll pad out the game with more people, names, events etc. to keep it fresh, and you can just download updated data files.

Anyone got any ideas?

The sort of thing that would be useful might be: "plays different types of game" or "has a favourite soft drink" or "owns a dog that answers to the name ..." or whatever. (Actually I think I'll add that one right now)

timns