The source code for netwalkgame.com
I started this project as a way to learn about basic web development (HTML/CSS/Javascript) as well as Node, Firebase, website hosting and Google Cloud Functions. Unfortunately the commit history is quite bare as this project was originally done without version control in 2020.
The way the puzzle generation works is by starting with a completed board then rotating each tile a random number of times. The tiles and their connections are represented as a graph where each tile is a vertex and connections between tiles are edges. As a result, the final complete puzzle forms a spanning tree. A method inspired by Prim's Algorithm is used to generate random spanning trees:
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Initialise a graph G which contains all the tiles represented as vertices where each vertex connects to four other vertices (which represent the adjacent tiles).
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Initialise a tree T which contains a single vertex from G.
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Pick a random vertex, V1, from G which is also in T, then pick a random edge E from V1 that connects to another vertex, V2, in G.
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If V2 is not currently in T then add E and V2 to T. If T contains all the vertices from G then T is a spanning tree and we are done, otherwise go back to the previous step.
Currently, submissions to the leaderboard do not require any form of verification. This allows for players to spoof scores by simply writing to the public database. I've currently set up the database to automatically reset every week so that the leaderboard does not get filled with fake scores. One way to combat this is to generate the puzzles on the server and give each puzzle a unique id and creation timestamp. Once the user has completed the puzzle, the puzzle id and solution will be sent to the server to be verified before allowing the user to submit their name to the leaderboard. However, this is unlikely to be implemented as I am no longer actively working on this project.