Cute idea. The constraint that all letters must be used is what makes this interesting over just a free-form crossword builder since it turns it into a proper puzzle.
How do you handle validation? Specifically, are you checking connectivity with a union-find or just flood fill from an arbitrary starting tile?
we just check connectivity on the front-end kind of naively by ensuring each square is adjacent to another. is that union-find? I didn't do well in algorithms class..
So the lions share of the work was building a solver and then iterating through the solution space to come up with puzzles. All of them are solvable. It’s on my todo list to classify them based on difficulty and potentially add variable difficulty levels by the day.
Nice and simple. Might just be me but a way to move groups of tiles on the board could be helpful, I accidentally started building too low down and had to move everything at one point.
yeah i agree moving the tiles can be cumbersome. I started thinking through keyboard interactions but haven't figured out how best to implement it yet.