Puzzle Generator and Daily Puzzle Improvements

Over the last few weeks, I've been working on improving Hexakai's game generation capabilities and selection of daily puzzles. As of today, these updates are complete and rolled out. The sections below dive into each category of improvement.

Puzzle Difficulty

After I implemented the advanced generator options last year, I began noticing that some puzzles generated with advanced options felt a difficulty above their rating - some mediums felt like difficults, and some difficults felt like ultra-difficults. To resolve this, I analyzed some of the mathematics regarding distribution of information within puzzle boards and created a means of measuring a puzzle's uncertainty that strongly correlates to its perceived difficulty. This allows the app to fine tune the puzzles it creates to the requested difficulty regardless of the generator pattern in use. As a result, the playing experience is much more consistent in terms of perceived difficulty.

Range of Puzzles

Hexakai can now generate more puzzles within each difficulty level. Most notably, the upper limit of difficulty in the ultra-difficult level has significantly increased. With certain generator patterns, you can now expect to see up to ~80% of the cells removed, greatly improving their difficulty, though the frequency of occurrence of such puzzles will be somewhat low.

Daily Puzzles

As of writing this, we're on the eve of Hexakai's 200th daily puzzle. Over time, I've realized that the daily puzzles occasionally exhibit repetition - three or more days might see the same puzzle size or difficulty. Additionally, I haven't been including daily puzzles of size 10, the canonical game size, as frequently as I'd like to. Moving forward, both of these will be resolved: puzzles will better alternate from day to day and the canonical size of the game will be better represented. In addition, ultra difficult puzzles will occur slightly less frequently. These changes will be fully in place within the next few days.

Conclusion

I'm always open to receiving feedback on how I can improve Hexakai. If you have any thoughts on these changes, or on Hexakai in general, please feel free to contact me. I've already received and acted on useful feedback from players over the last few months and look forward to doing so again in the future.