Accelerometer based 16 Puzzle Game

Ah, another accelerometer game after the amazing “Panda Manda” yesterday. Of course this game is just a very simple one and definitely far away from being as complex as the panda title, but it’s worth to be posted here.

Probably you know the famous “n-puzzles” by Sam Loyd which is known in various versions, including the 8 puzzle, the 15 puzzle, and with various names. It is a sliding puzzle that consists of a grid of numbered squares with one square missing, and the labels on the squares jumbled up. If the grid is 3×3, the puzzle is called the 8-puzzle or 9-puzzle. If the grid is 4×4, the puzzle is called the 15-puzzle or 16-puzzle. The goal of the puzzle is to unjumble the squares by only making moves which slide squares into the empty space, in turn revealing another empty space in the position of the moved piece.

This very popular game concept has been ported into a Python script by Jouni Miettunen that you can play the game on your S60 device. Exceptional is that this version supports screen rotation as well as moving puzzle pieces by tilting the device.

The developer himself says that it’s not very logical to support both features at the same time, but that’s how it works now. In general the application is 90% ready, but he decided to release it anyway. It’s taken a long time to develop it.

I really love these kind of games and I enjoyed playing it. However, the accelerometer support is in this case not really useful honestly, I preferred to use the classic method with the direction keys to move the puzzle pieces.

But that doesn’t mean that the developer didn’t implemented accelerometer control well, actually it works pretty good to tilt your device in the direction you want to make a piece move to. However it takes very long to turn and turn your device and in my opinion it’s the more comfortable to use the keypad.

The game itself works also perfectly and offers a lot of different options and variants. You can not only play the classic 15 puzzle/16 puzzle variant with 4×4 tiles, but also with…

… 2×2 tiles:                                    … 3×3 tiles:

… 5×5 tiles:                                   … 6×6 tiles:

The game also offers a fullscreen mode and you can blind out the numbers written on the pieces.

And last but not least you can preview the picture you try to get.

You can download the script on the developer page plus the default teddy picture you can see in the screenshots.

You must have Python and the Python Script Shell installed, both can be downloaded here. The script and the picture must be copied into “C:\Python” and can be launched through the script shell by selecting “Options” -> “Run Script” -> “16_Puzzles”.

Also your own pictures with 320×240 pixels can be used as puzzle image. It’s definitely fun if you like such kind of puzzle games.