Show HN: Kuboble.com – Minimalistic sliding pieces puzzle game

I wanted to share a simple game I wrote.

It's a sliding pieces puzzle like many others. I have focused a lot on making the experience smooth and minimalistic and the levels being challenging in a way a sudoku or chess puzzles could be.

I had no prior knowledge of game development and while it feels like someone competent could build this game in a week I spent over two years and hundreds of hours to bring this game to life.

My journey went through:

    - thinking it will be a PC game
    - being overwhelmed by the amount of different game frameworks
    - hiring an indie dev to bootstrap the game in Unity for me
    - realize the small levels are actually cool and it might fit on a phone
    - generating levels and playing through thousands of them myself to curate a smaller list
    - realizing the Unity wasn't a good choice
    - rewriting the game in html + js drawing on canvas + React
    - hiring a bunch of fiverr artists and testers to polish it up

If you're a fan of minimalist sliding pieces puzzles I'd be happy if you give it a try!

the game has: - no ads - no tracking of any kind - fully offline after first load

Show HN: Kuboble.com – Minimalistic sliding pieces puzzle game
kuboble.com

Some nits and comments if I may.

* Don't count moving stones as an actual move until the stone is released. I am on a PC and if I click-and-hold a stone and then move it back and forth, each move is counted even though I haven't released the mouse button yet. This is somewhat counter-intuitive and unexpected.

* Put the light source at the top. You have it at the bottom and this results in a drop shadow above the stones, which looks more like an unintended blur or ghosting. Also shadows/highlights are a bit inconsistent - base tiles imply that the light source is at the bottom-bottom-left, but the stones are shaded as if it's at the bottom-right.

* Perhaps reduce the size of stones a bit to add some breathing space around them when idle and when moving.

* Add a keyboard nav? There are two stones, so something as literal as awsd for one and arrows for another would work. Or just the arrows with a 'space' to toggle the focus.

* Starring criteria is unclear. Got one level with "optimal" rating, yet it gave 3 stars. This was the one where I had to undo several moves because I was mindlessly moving the stone back and forth without releasing it.

Eventually I realised that the stones need to be placed on different coloured squares - I'm colour blind (red/green), and can't tell any difference at all between the stones. For the squares, I can tell one is a bit darker than the other. You might want to consider using more contrast, or a more colour-blind friendly colour palette.

Reminds me of Sokoban, which I first played more than 30 years ago!