Determining Difficulty While Generating

[erthium]

The first thing comes to mind is always the solver algorithm step count for deciding general difficulty of a puzzle.

From years of personal experience with Hashi, there are other options for determining the difficulty of the puzzle before creating it.

Which are:

1. Having the island count (1-8) lower as possible: Higher island counts create ease for user since 8 has directly gives itself away, 7 cannot have any other bridge be on its way etc.
2. Having the bridge lengths as short as possible: Longer bridges cut of the way of other islands and give them shorter direction options. Therefore lower bridges help the user way less and makes the puzzle more difficult.

To apply these, We need to create a scale for difficulty, add it as an input to the generator.

While creating random island counts and bridge lengths, according to the difficulty, longer bridges will have higher or lower percentage to be selected.

For island counts, as the difficulty is higher, generator algorithm will tend to create newer islands instead of extending the current ones.