I’ve just set up the first basic implementation of slightly smarter maze selection. Instead of being purely random, mazes are now being selected based on how quickly others solved them and how quickly you solved previous ones. It will take a while for the system to learn this information. There are still a lot of mazes that have had very few attempts so it’s hard for the system to know their difficulty. I may change it so that instead of there being a 50-50 chance of either designing or solving a maze it would be 90-10 in favour of solving.

I’ve also changed it so that new players only get asked to solve mazes initially so that they can get used to the idea behind the game.

I expect to be tweaking this as more data starts to come through of how accurate my difficulty measurements are.

Just a few minor bug fixes here. Next version should have more in terms of features. Get it from the Android Market or here.

I have changed the method by which mazes are chosen to be solved. Instead of only being presented with mazes that have yet to be attempted, the total pool of mazes is available to be played. This is the start of a move toward mazes being presented to you based on how difficult others have found them and how good your history for solving them is.

I’ll also release an update version of the client soon with just a few minor bug fixes.

I’m in the process of releasing the first alpha version of a new game. Daedalus was an idea I got from Inception. After taking considerably longer than I was expecting to finish this first release it’s finally done.

As I said this is an alpha release so don’t expect great things. Over the next few weeks I hope to collect data on how challenging it is to play and where it needs to be tweaked. As well as fix the undoubtedly present bugs. As always leave me feedback here or in the comments or on Twitter or wherever, unfortunately the Android Market gives me no way to respond to comments left there.

Here’s a rough overview of what the game is about:

Daedalus is an Android game with the simple premise of designing and solving mazes. When you start it decides randomly whether you need to design a maze or solve a maze.

If you are tasked with designing a maze, the start (green) and end (red) points of the maze are picked for you, and you have to design a maze around them, using the provided tools, in under two minutes.

Alternatively if you have to solve a maze, you are given one minute to draw the path from the start to the end.

I’m currently in the process of putting it on the Android Market and it is also available for download here