What is open slide puzzle?
Open slide puzzle is a patience game where you have to rearrange the 15 tiles of a picture into the right order by sliding the single tiles to the right position. Therefore you will be able to move only one tile at once into the gap to get the puzzle solved. Although the idea of a slide puzzle is very simple, it can be challenging trying to put the right tiles together.
Open slide puzzle is built as a native application for Android driven mobile phones and tablets. A free version has been released into Google Play Store. This is my first approach to programming applications for Android devices. My intention was to learn some basics about developing applications with the Android framework by creating this simple game. To share this experience, I already forked a version (with slight modifications) with a General Public License.
How to play open slide puzzle
Open slide puzzle can be started with a standard image which shows a wooden path to the beach in Chipiona (a small town in Spain) from the launcher. If you know Chipiona you will recognize that place for sure. 😉 You can also use images from your own gallery by selecting them there and forward them to the open slide puzzle application as shown in the figure. You can move tiles next to the gap by touching them on the screen. When the application is being started the first time you have to shuffle the image by moving the tiles by yourself or by using the option shuffle (see figure) in the options menu of the application, which will shuffle the image random for you.
Note! The menu button has been replaced in honeycomb Android with the intention to get rid of hardware buttons on the device. Hence you may not find the mentioned menu button on your device. You should use in this case the icon next to the standard button set in the lower left corner as shown in the figure.
If you want to get a hint about how the picture should be rearranged, just select the option hint from the menu. You will get back to the slide puzzle by touching the picture again. There is no limitation for using the hint option. Just use it to find out whether you put the tiles into right position at any time.
If you leave the slide puzzle with the ‚back‘ button or due to a phone call, the application will save the position of the tiles. You can resume the game by starting it from the launcher whenever you want to.
Whenever you want to finish the game, just select finish from the menu. In this case the game will start next time with the picture of the beach side, again.
Enjoy the game! Enjoy coding! Enjoy Android!
Required permissions on the device
The free version which is being published into the Google Play Store implements the Google AdMob framework to place advertisements into the application. Therefore the application requires the permissions to use the resource ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE and INTERNET on the device where it is being installed.
The Open source version does not implement the Google AdMob framework and therefore no special permission is required on the device.