As someone who's had some amount of professional work on games/toys I have bad news: I hate this (it's okay, I hate lots of perfectly good things!) from a UI/UX standpoint.
"Nobody has changed the layout of Sodoku..." there might be a reason for that. When you're trying to create organized lists/sequences, a messy visual is going to be frustrating. The geometry/symmetry of a Sodoku is part of the appeal. Think of a crossword: does the shape affect the fun? You might see circles vs squares, or some people building shapes by arranging the word lengths creatively, but nobody is trying to have the across words in one column and the down words floating in a nebulous space nearby, because that's not a crossword.
What value does this change bring? Why do you think there's more fun in the difficult to parse shapes over the clean rows/lines of standard sodoku? The changes seem to make it much harder to gronk how the game works and provide little added "fun" value. Think of it this way: you can play sudoku blindfolded and have someone fill the grid in for you. This would make it much more challenging (with essentially a UI change like your change) but not necessarily more fun for most people because the challenge isn't what the game is about. It would be similar to playing baseball in ankle deep water, or Halo using a DDR pad: novel and quirky, but missing what makes the game compelling in the first place.
I think this is a cool thought experiment and a great way to illustrate some concepts of game design (sadly, as a way of what NOT to do) and for that you should be really proud! Hope you're able to take something productive from my post.
I think it has two things going for it: it's visually striking, and the sudoku sphere is already full of alternate designs and layouts, and this will fit right in, in that sense!
As someone who's had some amount of professional work on games/toys I have bad news: I hate this (it's okay, I hate lots of perfectly good things!) from a UI/UX standpoint.
"Nobody has changed the layout of Sodoku..." there might be a reason for that. When you're trying to create organized lists/sequences, a messy visual is going to be frustrating. The geometry/symmetry of a Sodoku is part of the appeal. Think of a crossword: does the shape affect the fun? You might see circles vs squares, or some people building shapes by arranging the word lengths creatively, but nobody is trying to have the across words in one column and the down words floating in a nebulous space nearby, because that's not a crossword.
What value does this change bring? Why do you think there's more fun in the difficult to parse shapes over the clean rows/lines of standard sodoku? The changes seem to make it much harder to gronk how the game works and provide little added "fun" value. Think of it this way: you can play sudoku blindfolded and have someone fill the grid in for you. This would make it much more challenging (with essentially a UI change like your change) but not necessarily more fun for most people because the challenge isn't what the game is about. It would be similar to playing baseball in ankle deep water, or Halo using a DDR pad: novel and quirky, but missing what makes the game compelling in the first place.
I think this is a cool thought experiment and a great way to illustrate some concepts of game design (sadly, as a way of what NOT to do) and for that you should be really proud! Hope you're able to take something productive from my post.