In my game I have a hint system, standard in puzzle games. But my system always gave the hints for a given puzzle in the same order, top down, left to right. I felt this was stale and uninteresting. So I decided to add a random element to the order in which the hints were given. So I tried a method I thought of, involving a nested while loop, several variables, and a random number generator. Everything looked fine… until I tried it out.

It would work for a few presses of the hint button, and then the entire application would freeze. Most frustrating of all however was that when it froze it would not display any of the debug commands I had put into the code. So it was very hard to figure out what was going on. Then I had a brain wave. My first method was selecting one of the hints to display at random, then finding that hint to see if it had already been chosen. In the new method, I chose a random square and checked if it had a hint to display. Basically getting the same result by doing the process “backwards”. In fact this new function was half the length of the failure attempt.

All that to say. Sometimes I get stuck on a solution that I assume must be “the best” and refuse to see other solutions. And often times I see this solution as “the best” because “It is so complex it must give a good result. When I really need to remember an anecdote I learned in High School. The K.I.S.S. principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.