Show HN: FuseCells – a handcrafted logic puzzle game with 2,500 levels
Hi everyone, I built FuseCells, a minimalistic logic puzzle game where every level is handcrafted (no procedural generation). It started as a personal challenge to design a clean rule-set and scale it to thousands of puzzles without losing difficulty balance.What’s unique: • 2,500 handcrafted levels across multiple grid sizes • Deterministic logic — no guessing required • A rule system inspired by constraint-solving and path-finding concepts • Daily challenges and global progress tracking • Fully built as a solo dev projectTechnical notes for those curious: • Level generation tools I wrote validate solvability using a custom constraint solver • Difficulty is estimated via step-count of the solver • The game is optimized to run smoothly on low-end devices • Designed first for iOS, now fully adapted for iPad as wellI’d love feedback from puzzle lovers, game designers, and anyone interested in handcrafted logic design. Here’s the App Store link: [inserați linkul]Thanks for reading — happy to answer any technical questions!
29 points by keini - 15 comments
I wrote a custom solver to validate each puzzle and estimate difficulty. It works by applying deterministic constraints until the board reaches a stable state. If anyone is interested, I can share the logic flow or even open-source the validator.
Also curious: does anyone here have experience balancing handcrafted puzzle difficulty at scale?
One feedback I have is that the instant I get the combination correct and complete a challenge, it suddenly pops up a “congratulations” message with a button to go to the next level, I can’t see my final solution.
I really want to take a few seconds to see my final solution, study, understand and admire it.
I’ll adjust this behavior in the next release.
Thanks again! feedback like this really helps!
I think you really need to have 10-20 levels, not 2, before interrupting with the CTA for paying. I had only just learned the basic rules and had no clue if I liked the game or what hints would even be worth to me.
I was going to comment that the frame rate and responsiveness was oddly bad but when I went back to check a few things it was buttery smooth. Dunno if that was just a weird one-off or something that happens on first launch?
Let me hide the timer. I know, it’s silly. But it truly affects my enjoyment of nonogram games.
I like the simple little beeps it makes when toggling. Have you considered picking triads from different keys? This can break the monotony. You could pick a random key each game and different chords from that key!
Overall this is well done. You should feel proud of your accomplishment!
About the initial lag you noticed: that most likely comes from the first-time Game Center initialization. After that first launch, everything runs at full speed, but I’m looking into smoothing out that initial moment.
The timer toggle is a great suggestion and I’ll add an option to hide it. And the idea about using triads/chords for the sound feedback is surprisingly interesting — I’ll experiment with this.
Thanks again for taking the time to share this. Feedback like yours really helps me improve the experience.
Really glad to hear you enjoy logic puzzle games!
A Web version is definitely planned, and Android support is in development as well. Since the core engine is fully portable, both should come naturally once I’m done polishing the iOS launch.
Really appreciate your interest and willingness to support it on other platforms.
Sounds like something I would enjoy. Unfortunately I don't have iOS.
I hate to be the guy but your post text here doesn't exactly portray "handcrafted". Seems to be heavily AI with the sentence structure and the "[inserați linkul]" at the end (are you Romanian?). Quite a lot of em dashes and bullet points in the middle of sentences.
Any specific reason you used AI here?