🧠 puzzle_engine

A modular Rust engine for building and solving puzzles.

✨ Overview

puzzle_engine is a general-purpose puzzle library written in Rust. It's designed with extensibility and clarity in mind — ideal for games, educational tools, or AI challenges.

This crate currently includes support for the following:

Mazes

• Grid Mazes, a 2 dimensional maze generated using randomized DFS.
• Network Mazes, a type of maze that consists of a randomly generated network of nodes.

Ciphers

• Caesar, A simple cipher where each letter is shifted by a fixed number of positions in the alphabet.
• Vigenere, A simple cipher where each character is encrypted using a corresponding shift from the keyword.

🚀 Features

✅ Procedural maze generation using randomized DFS
✅ Minimal API to move through and solve mazes
✅ Fully connected mazes — no isolated areas
✅ Built-in test coverage and examples
✅ Easy to extend with other puzzles in the future
✅ Simple ciphers

🧩 Example: Grid Maze

use puzzle_engine::grid_maze::{Maze, Direction};

fn main() {
    let mut maze = Maze::new(5, 5);

    println!("Starting at: {:?}", maze.player);

    if maze.try_move(Direction::East) {
        println!("Moved to: {:?}", maze.player);
    }

    if maze.is_at_end() {
        println!("Maze solved!");
    }
}

🧩 Example: Network Maze

use puzzle_engine::network_maze::Maze;

fn main() {
    let mut maze = Maze::new(10).unwrap();
    let path = maze.find_path();
    let path = path.unwrap();
    for next_node in path.iter().skip(1){
        maze.traverse(next_node.clone()).unwrap();
    }
    if maze.is_at_end() {
        println!("Maze solved!");
    }
}

🧩 Example: Vigenere Cipher

use puzzle_engine::cipher::vigenere_cipher::Vigenere;
use puzzle_engine::cipher::prelude::*;

fn main() {
    let v = Vigenere::new("KEY");
    let plain = "Attack at dawn!";
    let encrypted = v.encrypt(plain);
    let decrypted = v.decrypt(&encrypted);
     println!("plain: {}, encrypted: {}", plain, encrypted);
}

🔮 Roadmap

Planned puzzle modules:

• Grid Maze (DFS-based)
• Network Maze
• More Ciphers
• Nonograms
• Word search / Crossword generator
• Sokoban-style logic puzzles
• Puzzle trait abstraction for polymorphic puzzle engines

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or PRs for new puzzle types, algorithm improvements, tests, or docs.

📄 License

Licensed under either of:

• Apache License, Version 2.0
• MIT License

See LICENSE for details.

🔗 Links

• Documentation
• Crate on crates.io
• GitHub Repo

Built with 🧩 and 💛 by Andrew Sims