Hey all, I’ve begun working on a general sudoku app mostly for practice and to build out my tools for future projects. So far I’ve got the board working just fine, I have close to 6 thousand sudoku’s generated and made a brute force program to solve em. That’ll be running on EC2 for a few days 
Here’s a quick look at the current status of the game.
Here are a few of the features I’m aiming at adding on top of the basic sudoku program. I want to include lots of different types of symbols to replace the numbers. I have known many people who have avoided sudoku because they mistakenly believe it to be a math game due to the numbers. A few of the different ideas we’ve had to replace the numbers are rudimentary shapes, barn animals, marine animals, aliens, fruit, and baby dinosaurs. We will be making sure that each individual symbol has a unique silhouette and if necessary contrasting colors. In this way, I’m hoping to prevent the board from being illegible.
On top of this, I am also wanting to throw in a Hardcore mode where the panels are swapped around in such a way that the solution remains the same, but disorients the player. I think this particular feature could be a hit or complete bust, but time will tell. Either way, it’s not all that much extra work on my end 
Thoughts on the additions on top of normal gameplay? If you’ve made a sudoku app in the past, is there anything I should know about before it comes up ;)? Suggestions on more categories of objects to replace the numbers?