Difficulty

While generating KenKen-style puzzles for my site, I’ve come head-to-head with a somewhat surprising axiom: It’s pretty simple to make an easy game harder, but pretty difficult to make a hard game easier.

Puzzles

Many years ago, I read an article from a game designer (sadly, I’ve forgotten who it was, and can’t find out via Google), which laid out the following proposition:

If you’ve built a game, and you find that it is too easy, it’s usually a simple matter to make it harder. You can add more monsters, give them more hit points, reduce the time limit, etc. There are a lot of things that you can do that will make the game reliably and incrementally harder, and they’re mostly trivial changes.

On the other hand, if your game is too hard, you’ve got a real problem on your hands. Excessive difficultly is often rooted in core game mechanics, and it’s commonly the case that you can’t take out the difficulty in an incremental way, or without destroying the concept underlying the game.

I’ve run into a related problem with KenKen.

9×9

I generate puzzles algorithmically. I’ve found that my particular approach works well for puzzles up to 7×7, and acceptably for 8×8 puzzles, but at 9×9 it starts to generate puzzles that are just way too hard. Like this guy:

I’ve tweaked the approach, and gotten it to work to the point that it can generate a few, quasi-reasonable puzzles, such as these, but it’s definitely an on-going project.

Quality Score Update

My keyword quality scores seems to have stabilized around 4-6, with one 3. (By way of complaint: The lowest-scored keyword has the highest clickthrough, at 1.37% – funny, that.) This is just under the threshold that will allow me to bid $0.05 per-click.

With much irritation, I’ve decided to raise my per-click bid to $0.30. This is a ridiculous amount to pay for traffic, especially since my monetization plans are hazy. However, this is first and foremost an experiment, so let’s try it and see what happens.

Future Work

At the moment, I can think of five major directions for further development of the project:

• More puzzles (Solve the 9×9 problem, crank out another thousand or so puzzles)
• Better UI (Support for keyboard-based, arrow-key puzzle navigation)
• Widgets (Package the puzzles for inclusion into various platforms: Facebook, Google, etc.)
• Server-side features (Load/save, puzzle ranking, forums, etc.)
• Marketing (Listing my site in puzzle forums, etc.)

I’ll be thinking more about which avenue to pursue this weekend, but I’m leaning towards widgets at the moment.

Today’s Stats

Well, that’s depressing. At least the time-on-site number is up.

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