Do Something To Make a Move

My Flutter Puzzle Hack Hackathon experience

This winter I ran into a new online hackathon. I thought that would be nice to try taking part in it.

That was Flutter Puzzle Hack from Google. I found it interesting as it offered to create something in Flutter, and this “something” was a game.

The goal was to create a Sliding puzzle game variation. The hosts also prepared a code example with a standard puzzle implementation which was a good place to start.

Thinking about possible game variations, I decided to create a game where you need to “do something” to move each puzzle part. The examples I’ve seen were games/apps where you have to scream (yes, just scream) or look at the screen in order to make something happen. You can check these examples:

https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-a-game-you-control-by-screaming/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ketchapp.screamhero&hl=en_US&gl=US

But instead of doing just one thing, I thought it would be more fun to ask gamer to do more: sometimes click on element with a right mouse button instead of left one, answer a question or two, click on a button in confirmation modal, and even solve a captcha.

The game turned out to be pretty irritating, as in order to solve the puzzle, you need to move elements a lot. That’s why I called it (Irritating) Slide Puzzle, and I guess it pretty much reflects the player feelings regarding the game. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to add some voice commands, but this looks like a nice possible addition.

The idea of asking player to do something in order to make next move looks very promising to me. Maybe we can ask player to walk some distance, or take an interesting photo, or get a kudos from her friends in a social network. I hope we will have some fun examples of such approach somewhere in the future.

While waiting, feel free to try the game here: https://irritating-slide-puzzle.web.app, and also I recommend you to check different puzzle implementations created for the hackathon. There are many original ideas: https://flutterhack.devpost.com/project-gallery.