I like small puzzle games to play on my mobile, (because you can put them away easily as well). But I got really annoyed that a lot of them force feed you advertisements.
To counter this I made my own puzzle game, as a progressive web app. This means you can install it on your mobile or desktop as an application, and play offline.
After the game is offline ready, no requests should be outgoing except checking for updates of the game. So there is no tracking/reporting going on. This also means I rely on old fashion email to get feedback!
The game is build in React + Typescript + Vite, and is open-source at: https://github.com/matthijsgroen/block-sort
Challenges:
- I wanted to make the game using open web standards such as HTML + CSS. The game actually features one image, the rest is done in pure CSS (the cubes, buffers and placement stacks);
- All animation is done through CSS animations;
- All levels are randomly generated, and then proven playable by a solver before a player gets the level on screen. To remove loading times for the high difficulty levels, a process was made to generate these levels offline, and the game only contains the random seeds to reproduce them (and then they are still solved by the game first before offering)
- The entire game is statically hosted, so there is no backend involved. This proved challenging for data transfer capabilities. The game now generates a QR Code image containing all encrypted/compressed game data, that can be loaded into another instance of the game.
I really enjoyed this.
Working flawlessly in Berry Browser on Android. Animation is great, music is pleasant.
My only nitpick would be that the button to start the level is labeled as level number, so it is not entirely clear is it a button or is it an indicator. Just adding a word "START" as a second row would solve that.
Thanks.
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