Sort of nestled in between doodles & notes on binary search trees. The idea is that you have this grid with the tutorial sequence in the middle; each of the other gridspaces represent individual puzzles. Completing a puzzle unlocks any adjacent still-locked puzzles, with the more difficult puzzles being at the outside edge.
I like it, aesthetically, & it imposes a nice constraint on how many puzzles I need to make. In order for this system to work, with the tutorial sequence in the middle, there obviously needs to be a middle square. So if I want the grid itself to be a perfect square, that means that the length of its side needs to be an odd number. A 5x5 grid would only hold 25 puzzles, that seems a bit skimpy. 9x9, forget about it, I don't want to be making CockBlockaz puzzles for the rest of my life. 7x7 seems like a good size & it gives me an exact number of puzzles to shoot for; 48 plus the tutorial sequence. I'm probably like halfway there at the moment.
Aesthetics aside, I think it's important for a puzzle game like this to give players a chance to quit a puzzle that they're stuck on & try another one. The obvious option is to just make all of the puzzles available from the start, which I think is a good design decision for a puzzle game, but I also think that unlocking levels like this provides a nice sense of progression while leaving the player with lots of available puzzles at any given time.
I haven't decided exactly how I want to implement this system at code-level, but the overall project is small enough that I feel Ok about just cracking a beer, banging out some code, & seeing what happens. Here we go!
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