SLIDOKU

After what has been a quiet year for Clueless Games, we are cock-a-hoop to be able to announce what we've been doing.

In recent months we've been forming a team, on a global scale, with programmers in China and elsewhere who have been working on a collaborative project that we call SLIDOKU.

SLIDOKU as you've probably guessed already, is a relative of Sudoku. A distant relative, as Sudoku only provides the clue format. The fun aspect of the app is that it involves a set of nine 3x3 sliding puzzles that form a grid. Each nonet (group of nine clues) is a separate puzzle and all nine must be solved to complete the whole grid.

For many of us, a sliding puzzle is something we haven't seen for years, possibly since our youth.  We would find them in crackers, or buy them with our pocket money and have fun solving the number grid, in a simple 1-8 sequence, until they became too easy. Likewise Sudoku was a fantastic success, and still is, but there is a race to enhance or expand on the original puzzle concept in order to maintain the following that it has developed.

The ground breaking step that we have made is to take these two elements and make them part of one puzzle.

The player is first confronted with a simple grid to solve, by which we mean a grid in which all of the clues are provided, in the background.
At any time, the player can hit the REVEAL button and see all of the clues before returning to the sliding puzzle grids to manually move the play pieces into the correct pattern.

There is a feeling of achievement when the player completes a nonet, with this causing the ninth tile to magically appear and so prevent further accidental movement. This challenge is truly engaging and the desire to carry on and solve the remaining nonets is almost addictive.

Once the player finds this element of play coming naturally, the real challenge can begin. By selecting the tricky level, the player suddenly finds the number of clues reduced, as the clue grid reverts to a sudoku clue format. In this guise, the puzzle becomes much trickier as the player now needs all the skill of sudoku solving before they can move the sliding pieces into the correct place.

Of course, for some players even this challenge will eventually feel relatively straight forward, so for the really skilled we have added a third layer of difficulty. The Pro level has minimal clues and requires a very high level of memory as well as the logic skills required for solving the sliding piece element.

For the future, we have several derivative versions in development, and welcome approaches from any manufacturer or retailer wishing to pre-load the Slidoku app in new phones. At present we are launching on the Android platform, and in future we shall be launching the app for iphone/ipad and windows 7 formats. If you have a specific requirement for another platform, we are happy to consider this also.

One other option available, we can customise the app as a branding or marketing tool, changing the numeric grid for one containing either symbols or a product name. The only restriction, or rather preference, is that the name to be used has no repeating letters and comprises nine letters, or eight letters and a symbol or logo.

We welcome feedback, suggestions and requests.

Please note, SLIDOKU is a trademark of Clueless games, and the rules of Slidoku have been lodged with the UKCS and is copyright Clueless Games. A patent for the physical rendition of the puzzle was filed in 2007 and design rights have been applied for.