Introduction

Some experiments showed that landscape mode for this puzzle game is successful.   If I had to redo this, I would have change the aspect ratio to support a better fit, but it doesn't look too bad.

Now keyboard is not needed.  All colors can be selected with mouse or touch.  And I was able to easily select the small polygons with my finger on a cell phone without accidentally selecting a neighbor polygon.  So I consider this a great success.

About this project

First, I had created the basic elements of this project at least two years ago.  I really just wanted to understand how hard coloring a randomly generated map would be.  I made it into a semi-workable game although by itself, there was no score or specific levels.

After discovering the Pygbag project, I decided this would be a good candidate to try publishing this game to the web.  I was surprised at how easy this turned out to be.  Following some experiments, I updated the game to be a completely playable game.

Some may be wondering about my choice of game development tools etc.  Because I have had significant background developing applications in Python, I had always chosen Python based libraries for any game or demo game development.  Pygame is a popular game development library in Python and I found this tool to usually support whatever I wanted to work on.  The only thing missing was the web publishing part which the Pygbag project solved recently.

Polygon Generation

The random polygons were generated using the Voronoi methods found in the scipy.spatial library.   For a description of the mathematical background of this, see the Wikipedia page on this topic.  I found these tools to be very easy ways to implement a lot of different levels and enabled me to do lots of experiments quickly.  It is noted that while I used these tools to generate the maps, once generated, I saved the results to a file which is preloaded at the game start.  So unfortunately this game does not support new random levels.  Currently Pygbag doesn't support this library.

Level 6

Level 6 is obviously not generated randomly.  The source of this level has an interesting background and you can read about it here.  In short, this level was created intentionally to be hard to solve with four colors.

Lessons Learned

With this being the first game I have released, I learned a few things.  First, I would not have released the prototype broadly.  If I could redo this project, I would have collected a bunch of feedback from beta testers first.  The reason is that the initial unfinished nature of the game did not show any polish that makes the game seem complete.   I would much rather get feedback on its current state than having wasted the limited play time I would get from the initial many users that were available to play it.  Now those players are not coming back, having played the initial version once already.

Also, I did not realize that mobile play of the game was really a possibility in the beginning.  Now I see that it is definitely possible.  I would have spent time testing out that aspect of the game to make sure it was playable.

Conclusion

I really appreciate the feedback received from all who provided some input.   I'm now off to try to get a new game published as soon as I can.