The second project for my mobile app development course was to create a single view interactive Anroid app using Android Studio and written in Kotlin.

The project requirements were as follows:

• Think of a creative idea or concept
• Focus on how the design and interactivity flows for the user
• The scope of your project should be larger than that of a lab
• Your app should use a constraint layout for an adaptive layout for different device sizes including portrait and landscape orientations
• Your app should be complete with a custom theme and launcher icons
• Your app should use string resources for text in the user interface

App description

For this project, I created a picross (nonogram) puzzle game. A nonogram puzzle is a picture logic puzzles in which cells in a grid must be colored or left blank according to numbers at the side of the grid to reveal a hidden picture.

The user will be faced with a blank puzzle they will be asked to solve. When the puzzle is completed, another puzzle will be generated.

MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

The minimum functionality I want to be able to accomplish is as follows:

• To write a random picross puzzle generator to make the game replayable without hard coding lots of picross puzzles.
• Users will be able to choose the difficulty by utilizing the slider to increase/decrease the puzzle size (from 3 to 8, subject to change).
• Users will be able to scrub their current game at any time and restart.

Prototype

Process

• I created a grid of buttons that the user can click on to fill in the squares of the puzzle.
• I created a random puzzle generator that generates a random puzzle.
• I calculated the numbers that should be displayed on the sides of the grid.
• I created a function that checks if the user has completed the puzzle.
• I created a button that allows the user to scrub the puzzle and start over.

Challenges

• Kotlin is a new language for me, so I had to learn the syntax and how to use it.
• Making the app look good and be user-friendly was a challenge as Android Studio’s design tools are not as intuitive as Figma.
• I had to learn how to use the ConstraintLayout to make the app responsive to different screen sizes and orientations.
• Due to time constraints, I was not able to implement all the features I wanted to, such as a resize feature that allows the user to resize the grid.

Screenshots