…or, how we made a puzzle game where players manipulate a 9-dimensional hypercube.
Hello World. We are Spinpossible, or rather the developers who made Spinpossible.
What is Spinpossible? It’s a new puzzle game we invented, and you can play it online at www.spinpossible.com, or on your phone from the Google Play or Apple iTunes appstores.
Spinpossible is a puzzle game played by spinning rectangular groups of numbered tiles. To win, you must arrange the tiles in order, 1 through 9, using the minimum possible number of spins. Below is an example of a Spinpossible board: this puzzle can be solved by rotate the rectangle that contains the 2 and 3 tiles 180 degrees. In principle a Spinpossible board could be any size, but we found that the 3x3 board had interesting puzzles without being overwhelmingly complex.
The complexity of the puzzles is something we’ve thought a lot about. When we originally tested the concept we found that it was pretty easy to solve a board if you were allowed an unlimited number of spins. We thought it would be more interesting if instead you had to solve the puzzle in the minimum number of moves. A simple modification, but it completely changed the puzzles. Finding the minimum length solution can extremely tricky.
We did mathematical analysis on finding minimum Spinpossible solutions. Going into all the details is really the subject of another post, but the short summary is that there are around 185 million Spinpossible boards and all of them can be solved in 9 moves or less. That’s where the 9-dimensional hypercube comes in – each Spinpossible board is like an particular orientation of the hypercube, and players can move rotate and flip the hypercube by doing spins on the board. If you’re interested in reading more about the mathematics of the game, you can check out this paper here.
Maybe you’re wondering ... did we think it would be easy to make a massively popular game where players manipulate objects in 9-dimensional space? Well ... no. We first invented a cool new puzzle involving spinning things, and then we analysed the mathematics of the puzzle (with help from friends and family). The result was that we were designed better puzzles once we understood more about the puzzle space. That was important for us personally, but many people love the game without ever even thinking about the math behind it. Still doubtful? Consider the case of one of the most successful toys ever invented, the Rubik’s cube, which has sold more than 350 million copies. All 3x3 Spinpossible boards can be solved in 9 moves, whereas for the Rubik’s cube the longest solution is 20 moves. Spinpossible is much simpler, so finding the minimum solution is actually possible for anyone, and can even be intuitive with enough practice. So we are optimistic about bringing Spinpossible to a wider audience.
That said, Spinpossible is still one of the hardest puzzle games we’ve ever played, which is saying a lot since all of us are fans of difficult, thought-provoking puzzles games. Nowadays we are spending our time making Spinpossible more fun and approachable for new players by iteratively improving the instructions, training levels, user interface etc. Check back on this blog to hear about what we've been doing to make the game better.
Hello World. We are Spinpossible, or rather the developers who made Spinpossible.
What is Spinpossible? It’s a new puzzle game we invented, and you can play it online at www.spinpossible.com, or on your phone from the Google Play or Apple iTunes appstores.
Spinpossible is a puzzle game played by spinning rectangular groups of numbered tiles. To win, you must arrange the tiles in order, 1 through 9, using the minimum possible number of spins. Below is an example of a Spinpossible board: this puzzle can be solved by rotate the rectangle that contains the 2 and 3 tiles 180 degrees. In principle a Spinpossible board could be any size, but we found that the 3x3 board had interesting puzzles without being overwhelmingly complex.
The complexity of the puzzles is something we’ve thought a lot about. When we originally tested the concept we found that it was pretty easy to solve a board if you were allowed an unlimited number of spins. We thought it would be more interesting if instead you had to solve the puzzle in the minimum number of moves. A simple modification, but it completely changed the puzzles. Finding the minimum length solution can extremely tricky.
We did mathematical analysis on finding minimum Spinpossible solutions. Going into all the details is really the subject of another post, but the short summary is that there are around 185 million Spinpossible boards and all of them can be solved in 9 moves or less. That’s where the 9-dimensional hypercube comes in – each Spinpossible board is like an particular orientation of the hypercube, and players can move rotate and flip the hypercube by doing spins on the board. If you’re interested in reading more about the mathematics of the game, you can check out this paper here.
Maybe you’re wondering ... did we think it would be easy to make a massively popular game where players manipulate objects in 9-dimensional space? Well ... no. We first invented a cool new puzzle involving spinning things, and then we analysed the mathematics of the puzzle (with help from friends and family). The result was that we were designed better puzzles once we understood more about the puzzle space. That was important for us personally, but many people love the game without ever even thinking about the math behind it. Still doubtful? Consider the case of one of the most successful toys ever invented, the Rubik’s cube, which has sold more than 350 million copies. All 3x3 Spinpossible boards can be solved in 9 moves, whereas for the Rubik’s cube the longest solution is 20 moves. Spinpossible is much simpler, so finding the minimum solution is actually possible for anyone, and can even be intuitive with enough practice. So we are optimistic about bringing Spinpossible to a wider audience.
That said, Spinpossible is still one of the hardest puzzle games we’ve ever played, which is saying a lot since all of us are fans of difficult, thought-provoking puzzles games. Nowadays we are spending our time making Spinpossible more fun and approachable for new players by iteratively improving the instructions, training levels, user interface etc. Check back on this blog to hear about what we've been doing to make the game better.
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