2024 in Review

Hexakai had an exciting and busy first year, quickly growing from its inception as a concept to a fully-fledged puzzle game played by thousands of individuals. In the sections below, I'll highlight Hexakai's major milestones month-by-month, then discuss the plans for 2025.

Hexakai in 2024

January - March

The original concept of Hexakai was born from a failed hexagon-based game idea I previously explored. Early this year, I picked up the old project and concluded that it wasn't viable, so I took some of the ideas from the game and discarded the rest. A creative brainstorming session led me to the core idea of Hexakai, and the rest is history.

April

After roughly three weeks of work, I successfully implemented a working proof-of-concept application that generated valid Hexakai boards in a reasonable amount of time for boards of size 10. Once that was in place, I cracked open the books, studying mathematical concepts to better understand the math that powers Hexakai, such as group theory, as well as computer science concepts, mainly constraint satisfaction. From my studies, I was able to implement heavy optimizations that enable the app to generate even boards of size 16 at ultra-difficult rating in two seconds or less on most devices while most other boards generate instantaneously, and to greatly increase the number of boards the app can generate in total.

May

Using the proof-of-concept as a reference, I created the fully-fledged app more-or-less as you see it today. I worked with a UI/UX (user interface / user experience) expert to design the visuals for everything other than the Hexakai board itself, including color schemes, fonts, the nav menu, and game control elements like buttons and their positioning. I made a preview / introductory version of Hexakai and announced it on my author website's blog during this time.

June

Hexakai officially launched late June!

July

I published the official Hexakai book featuring 150+ puzzles, a chapter on strategies, and a chapter on the mathematics of Hexakai. I also launched the daily puzzles feature, a feature which has proven to be a core component of Hexakai. Since then, we've had roughly a half year's worth of puzzles. 12/31 marks the day of the 175th puzzle. Before the holiday season, I recorded a daily puzzle playthrough once a week on my YouTube channel, and during the holiday season, I recorded them on a nearly daily basis.

August

I added themes to the game's interface. Prior to this, Hexakai offered light and dark themes, but with this feature came aqua, jungle, and royal themes, then eventually pumpkin and festive themes.

September

I launched Hexakai's blog and published the first three blog posts. There are now a total of eleven posts including this. The third posts is an announcement that Hexakai crossed an major threshold: players have solved more than 1,000 boards by the end of September.

October

After considering ways of expanding the playing experience, I created and published Hexakai's advanced board generator features. Now, players can choose to create boards with specific patterns, such as alternating stripes of empty and filled cells, checker board style boards, and top heavy boards. During this time, Hexakai crossed 2,500 boards completed by players. On a personal note, I solved Hexakai's most difficult puzzle, a board of size 16 rated as ultra-difficult, or "the behemoth," an experience I wrote about in my blog.

November

I published the official Hexakai strategies guide on my blog. These strategies are based on the initial strategies I published in my Hexakai book combined with strategies I've subsequently discovered, particularly during my experience playing through the behemoth board. I also launched an interactive tutorial mode to guide new players through the app and playing experience, and I launched a streak feature, showing players how many days-in-a-row they've completed Hexakai boards.

December

For the holiday season, I decided to publish a slew of playthroughs, 15 in total, including special Christmas and New Year's editions. Hexakai saw a surge in app downloads and playthroughs, breezing quickly bast the 5k, 6k, and even 7k board completed thresholds!

Plans for 2025

Guided Playthrough

From the data and personal anecdotes I've received from players, I learned in October that new players were having some trouble with Hexakai's learning curve. To help resolve this, I implemented a rudimentary hint feature and an introductory tutorial. In 2025, I plan to enhance the hint feature to provide more guided instructions that reference particular strategies as outlined in my strategies post. In cases where an incorrect assignment has been made, I want this new feature to help the user correct the error instead of just pointing it out. I also need to update my strategies post to include strategies created specifically for error correction.

Timed Modes and Competitive Play

Currently, Hexakai is purely a solitary game. I'd like to explore ways to bring a competitive or multi-player aspect to the game. I'll start with an assessment of timed modes, where users compete to solve boards of similar sizes, difficulties, and generator patterns and potentially appear on leaderboards, and with an assessment of races, where two or more players take on the same exact boards and race to complete it first.

Statistics Sharing

Back in late September and early October, I implemented a more advanced data logging framework for the game. Hexakai doesn't log any personal information, only data pertaining to events such as the beginning and ending of a game, the size and difficulty of the game, and other info pertinent to the game itself. From this data, I've learned what kinds of boards players generally gravitate to, the ratio of completed boards to started boards, the average number of wrong submissions, and so on. Additionally, some achievements, board sizes, difficulties, and generator types are incredibly rare, and I'd like to share that information automatically as a means of invitation to play those rarer types of boards.

Blog Posts

In early 2025, I'll be writing a few blog posts. The first post will dive into some of the mathematics that drive Hexakai, an exploration of concepts that I find pertinent to my own app and fascinating in their own right. I'll cover a sampling of topics with some depth, but I won't dive too deep or include too many topics. This will be taken from a chapter of the Hexakai book with some minor additions. Once this is published, I'll add posts to announce new major features, major milestone achievements, and perhaps occasional game analyses.

Conclusion

Hexakai's had a brilliant first year. Thank you to the players who've made all of this possible, and I look forward to seeing what major milestones we can accomplish in 2025!