The inevitable

You can hardly have a Japanese puzzle site without Sudoku, so we have have created a player and are making three puzzles available each day, one easy, medium and hard.

I am not a huge fan of this puzzle, preferring those with a spatial aspect such as Filomino, Slitherlink and Bridges, but creating the client was fun as we are just starting to use our latest set of tools. At the moment there is only a Java version available, but, as with Edel, a Canvas version will be made sometime over the next week. We also hope to make Flash versions of all our games and puzzles too.

Any developer would worry about maintaining three separate versions of every client, it would be tedious at best, which is why we have created a platform where we can publish all three versions (maybe even more in the future) from the same code. Flash is programmed in ActionScript, which is very similar to JavaScript which is used to drive the Canvas version. It would be very simple to develop these two versions using the same code, but Java is very different, so in order to target all three platforms we develop in a different language entirely. This language has been designed to be easily implemented, and we have a Java interpreter for it and a program for translating it to JavaScript.

Hel is currently porting the SET client over (it was previously written in Jython), and I am bringing the JavaScript version up to date with the Java version so Sudoku will run using the Canvas. SET on the Canvas poses some unique problems because of the required networking, but we have a potential solution for that too.