Cross Slide

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  Fun puzzles to solve!

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  How fast, and how many, puzzles can you solve?!

Inspiration

With the recent viral hit Wordle taking my Twitter feed by storm, I was interested to see if I could come up with a unique, fun, word game myself. The combination of that along with this challenge being brought to my attention is what lead me to create Cross Slide.

What it does

Cross Slide combines the concepts of a cross word puzzle and a slide puzzle into a new, interesting, game. Players are presented with a crossword clue and a jumbled slide puzzle of letters. Using the clue, the player must first figure out what word they need to build and then solve the slide puzzle to position the letters into the correct spot within the game board.

There are multiple puzzles to solve, with increasing difficulty as you level up.

How we built it

Using Flutter documentation primarily around the AnimatedPositioned widget, I built the game engine and logic for this from scratch.

Challenges we ran into

Because I wanted to use AnimatedPositioned widgets, there was some complexity in figuring out how to move boxes around the game board (and still track their location and reference to the other boxes). I was able to eventually solve for this by adding in the concept of a second two-dimensional array. This way, one controlled the animation of boxes and the other was used for location reference throughout the game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Initially I found the constraints of having to work within the slide puzzle concept difficult to come up with a fun, unique, or engaging idea. So I'm especially proud of the concept of the game that I was able to come up with (even the easy levels are a bit addictive)...and I think there is a lot of potential for building out an even more engaging game from this base.

I'm also proud of the fact that, while I did look through and study the sample code provided for this challenge, I ended up creating this version from a completely new/different code approach from scratch.

What we learned

I had not worked with AnimatedPositioned widgets before (or any animated packages within Flutter outside of Flame), so that was the primary learning for me throughout this challenge.

What's next for Cross Slide

I'm going to publish a more in-depth code walk through on my youtube channel (I couldn't fit it into the 3 minute demo video constraints here)...and I'm going to consider adding some features/polish to perhaps publish a more advanced version into the various mobile app stores.

Update on the progress for the evolution of Cross Slide (demo of new app it's evolved into called Tap Crazy): https://youtu.be/KRaURU7wLZ0

Built With

• dart
• flutter