Adding your own puzzles

[OTrain13]

Hey everyone! After seeing that some people were making their own puzzles, we realized we could quickly add some basic functionality to the game so that you can make your own puzzles and play them in Sidewords.

We didn't have time to add a nice new UI for all this, so it's a bit of an undocumented/unsupported feature. But if you grab the latest build on Steam, you can give it a go. There's a text file with instructions where the EXE installs. But I'm also posting the instructions here below, for reference.

We'd love to for you to share any good puzzle pack files you create! :)

Owen


Sidewords Custom Puzzle Instructions
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Limitations:
You can have 6 puzzle packs with 6 custom puzzles each, for a total of 36 puzzles loaded into the game at one time.

Instructions:
- Update to the latest version of the game in Steam
- Run Sidewords and quit, this will create a new folder in the game's data folder called "mypuzzles"
- Open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\LocalLow\Milkbag Games\Sidewords\mypuzzles (you might have to show hidden folders)
- Create a text file and give it a name that ends in ".txt" (e.g. "Cats.txt")
- Open the text file and enter up to 6 puzzles, one per line
- Each line should consist of two words, separated by a comma (no spaces)

Example: Cats.txt
SHORT,HAIR
TABBY,CAT

- The puzzles can be a maximum size of 7x8 or 8x7
- Save and close the file
- Run Sidewords and select Play from the Main Menu
- You should see a new puzzle collection called "My Puzzles", click on it
- You should see a puzzle pack with the name of your file (in our example above: "Cats"), click on it
- The game will attempt to solve each puzzle to generate hints for each one (the puzzles will be playable even if the game can't solve them)
- Open a puzzle, click the menu button in the top right, and click the Hints button. If there are no available hint words, then the game was unable to find a solution using common English words.
- If you want to create additional puzzle packs (up to 6 in total), create new text files and place them in the same "mypuzzles" folder as above
- Enjoy!

Note:
If you want to create more than the allowed 36 puzzles, copy your puzzle pack files somewhere else to store them, and replace them in the "mypuzzles" folder with new files.

[Robson]

Thank you for adding this functionality!

Very happy to present my puzzles, which have the theme of England!

http://iceyboard.no-ip.org/files/SidewordsEngland.zip

Instructions:

• Ensure you are updated to the latest version of Sidewords
  
• Run and close the game
  
• Press the Windows Key + R
  
• Paste in %userprofile%\appdata\locallow\Milkbag Games\Sidewords
  
• Press OK
  
• You may need to create a folder called mypuzzles
  
• Go into the mypuzzles folder
  
• Unzip the files from the link above directly into the mypuzzles folder
  
• Run the game and you will see a My Puzzles section on the Puzzles screen

Enjoy!

[artzpiip]

After a while, I got it working. Note that 8X8 words have some...glitches if you want to type a very large word. I tried with column being AGRICULT and row being URALISTS and messy outcomes happened.

[OTrain13]

Originally posted by Robson:

Very happy to present my puzzles, which have the theme of England!

Thanks for sharing your puzzles, Robson!

Originally posted by artzpiip:

After a while, I got it working. Note that 8X8 words have some...glitches if you want to type a very large word. I tried with column being AGRICULT and row being URALISTS and messy outcomes happened.

Good catch artzpiip! An 8x8 puzzle breaks the math we use to represent the play area and the words on the board. I just pushed a quick fix that will not allow 8x8 puzzles. You can create puzzles up to 8x7 or 7x8 now.

Owen

[artzpiip]

Will larger puzzles be allowed in the future? Such as 10X10?

[OTrain13]

I don't want to say that larger puzzles would never be allowed, but it's unlikely. :) It would mean rewriting how a lot of the game works. Big puzzles can get a little overwhelming, so we had chosen early in development to stick with our own puzzles being 7x7 and smaller, because we found them more fun to play. That decision also allowed us to make a lot of decisions during implementation to make stuff faster and easier. The puzzle generator, the puzzle solver, the UI, and the save system all assume puzzles won't be bigger than 8x7. It would be a big change. :)

[JaffaCaffa]

Hey that's awesome, thanks for adding this! Have thoroughly enjoyed this game, nice to have some added content.

[OTrain13]

Thanks, JaffaCaffa! We're glad to hear you have been enjoying the game. :)

[Bridges]

I only started playing this game yesterday and it is a terrific game. Thank you for adding a feature where we can create our own puzzles. You folks seem like good people. Future grind is the only other game I saw connected to you. Is that the only other game you guys have? I encourage you to make more games :-) Thanks again for this feature and of course the game itself. I will write a glowing review as well :-)

[OTrain13]

Glad you've been enjoying the game, Hyperion! Sidewords and (the upcoming) FutureGrind are our only games on Steam so far, but we have released other games. You can find more info on our site: http://milkbag.me/

[Bridges]

Thanks for the reply and the link, I'll be sure to check it out tomorrow.