Almost there...

After what seems like forever, my first game is almost ready to be played.  I'm hoping to have the last couple of little details ironed out sometime this weekend, and at that point I'll be posting a link to the game on this blog.  In the meantime, here are a few more details about the game:

• The name of the game is Picture Puzzle Revolution.
• It is a little bit like a cross between a Rubik's Cube and an n-puzzle - imagine trying to complete an n-puzzle by making its tiles revolve around one another, the way that the squares on one face of a Rubik's Cube revolve around the center square.
• I find it quite difficult to play, and I am very curious to know how other  people will find the difficulty.
• All of the pictures in the game are taken from the last two Nine Inch Nails albums (Ghosts I-IV and The Slip), which were both released under a Creative Commons license.
• The music in the game also comes from The Slip, and I have used the multi-tracks for those songs (which can be freely downloaded from remix.nin.com) to make the music somewhat interactive; namely, the more pieces of the puzzle that are in place, the more instruments can be heard.  I was actually debating whether to keep this feature in, but in the end I decided that I enjoyed the way that the songs can be built in layers (often starting with just drums, and being joined by bass, guitar, and other instruments as the puzzle becomes more complete); it is my hope that others will enjoy playing with the audio too.
• Two separate types of "high scores" are tracked: Time (i.e. how fast each level has been completed) and Efficiency (i.e. how many moves were taken compared to the optimal solution).

Most of all, I'm just really happy to have come to this point.  The game has been developed entirely in my spare time (of which there has often been precious little), so I feel like I've really accomplished something by seeing it through to (near) completion.  I hope that anyone who downloads it will enjoy playing it as much as I've enjoyed making it.

If any of this sounds interesting to you and you'd like to be among the first to know when the game is available, please subscribe to the site feed; if you're on Twitter, you can also follow me there, as I'll also be tweeting about the game as soon as it's available.  Thanks for reading!