Squared Straight
These puzzles look like Rubik's cubes, but the stickers slide around instead of the normal twist movement, which changes how you approach the solves. 🤔 Plus, the puzzles can be all different dimensions, and you can create and save mosaic designs in them! 🖌️😎🎨
Squared Straight's puzzles look like Rubik's cubes, but their movement is totally different. The stickers slide around the cube (or rectangular prism), which creates a unique puzzle-solving challenge!
The animation below shows the classic Rubik's movement (left) vs the Squared Straight movement (right).
Due to this new movement style:
The twisty 3³ has 26 blocks, while the same-size Squared Straight cube has 54 tiles, allowing orders of magnitude more possibilities!
The twisty cube is limited to 90° turns, so the corner blocks are always at the corners, edges at the edges, and centers at the centers. But a Squared Straight puzzle can move in one-tile increments (1/12 rotation on a 3³), so any tile can go anywhere for ultimate chaos!
While the tiles on top move with the rotation on the twisty cube, they remain fixed on the Squared Straight cube, with the upper band of tiles moving independently. So, twisty cube algorithms won't work here. This calls for new solving methods...🤔
Beaded Puzzles
There are puzzles with tiles that have beads marking their respective positions and angles. For example, in the image below, the indicated tile must be on the orange face at the green and white corner, oriented so that its green bead is adjacent to the green side and its white bead is adjacent to the white side.
Unmarked Puzzles
There are also unmarked puzzles, whose same-color tiles are interchangeable. You can generate these to unlimited dimensions. I used multithreading to generate the puzzles faster, made the reset function preserve the generated tiles, and made the camera rotate instead of the puzzles, so they run smoothly even at huge sizes!
You can save your place on any puzzle, no matter how large it is. So, you can revert back after a mistake, solve a giant puzzle in multiple sessions at your leisure, and even create and save fun mosaic designs!
May your tiles always glow!
The clip above also shows that, as you progress in your solve, the game finds the largest portion of tiles that could be part of a solved puzzle, and tallies them on the left. In beaded puzzles, these solved tiles all glow. In unmarked puzzles, tiles of a given color glow when more than half of them are on a side with the right number of tiles. For example, if there are 10 blue tiles, then they have to go to a face with 10 tiles to count towards the solution. If this sounds confusing, don't worry; the counting and glow effect are just there for visual flair and to help track your progress. 😅
Innovative Navigation
Squared Straight uses a unique system to look around the cube that allows full freedom of movement, while feeling as natural as holding the puzzle in your hand (I hope!) and avoiding gimbal lock and other issues that plague many other puzzle cube programs. Right-click and drag rotates the puzzle on two axes, which covers most movement, but leaves the same two faces (yellow and white, blue and green, or red and orange) on top and bottom. Click the arrows or icon cube on the right to change which two faces are on top and bottom.
Endgame
Squared Straight isn't just about geometric brain teasers. The info page includes, among other things, a backstory for how you ended up floating in space and solving these strange puzzles. Maybe there's a way out of this celestial purgatory. Unlock the ending and find out...
