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Building a Sudoku game

Recently I was craving to play a video game. I have... hundreds of thousands of games at my disposal. And none of them are what I want.

So I went seeking a new game to play. I ended up on Thinky Games. They are actually a neat organization imo. I browsed through their games and discovered Sudokuvania.

Holy crud was that the hardest collection of connected Sudoku games I have ever played. I didn't even get all the way through it.

I learned a lot. Primarily I learned that there are many variant rules that can be stacked on top of Sudoku and make it more fun. That's neat. Somehow I never went investigating that before despite being loosely aware of Sudoku variants with added stuff.

Sudokuvania uses Sudokupad to function. It is a profane mess of JS. The game didn't exactly play well for me UX-wise.

I'm a huge stickler for quality UX as you may know, so I then went down a rabbit hole of having AI analyze sudokupad to learn how the level format works, with my goal being to extract the level map and build my own implementation that is better and sucks less.

After AI analyzed and produced a clean version of the level config, I was struck by just how much of a pile of mess it is. I was not inclined then to continue trying to get anything out of it.

What I then wanted instead was just my own Sudoku game that support "sudokuvania-like overlapped grids" as well as all the various variants of sudoku that were contained in it.

So off I went learning about all things Sudoku. And oh-boy what a rabbit hole this is going to be.

I now know way more than I wanted to know about Sudoku, and will likely continue to learn disgusting amounts of crap about Sudoku.

And I've now begun constructing my own Sudoku video game. Because of course I have.

If you are particularly unlucky I will complete it and release it to Steam then you too will be infected by my newfound interest in Sudoku. You'd best flee while you still can.