Post-launch plans

Hi folks,

I've been pleased to see the initial interest in Pentomancy. I hadn't yet decided whether I wanted to continue working on this project or whether to move on to something new, but after seeing people's initial reactions, I think there are a couple of relatively easy improvements that would greatly benefit the game:

1. The game could really use some gentler onboarding -- right now it sort of throws players in the deep end starting from the first puzzle. I'm sure that works for some people, but I'm sure many people also find it frustrating. I'd like to create a few gentler introductory puzzles that can be purpose-designed to slowly introduce some of the deductive patterns that are useful in the main body of puzzles. (These puzzles might be smaller, say 5x5, in order to make it easier to focus on identifying the relevant deductive pattern).
2. The notetaking interface could probably be improved somewhat. There are a lot of possible improvements that could be made, some more complex than others, but a relatively simple idea for improvement is to add a bit more automation. I think some moderation is required here to avoid automating away the whole game, but it would probably not impact the game too much if your notes were automatically updated to remove numbers that have become obviously impossible due to the noted tile having either a neighbor or a tile in the same room that is now confirmed to have the given number. This feels like a reasonable middle ground that would remove some of the tedium of updating notes without automating away the more interesting high-level reasoning that the puzzles often require.

This game is just a hobby project for me, so I can't promise a firm timeline on these features, but I expect that I should be able to deliver them by the beginning of next week.

If there is sustained interest in this game, I may also write some posts about some of the mathematics behind this game. There is some very nontrivial math that goes into the puzzle generation for this game, and I'd be happy to talk about it if there is interest. Feel free to leave a comment if that's something you'd like to learn more about!