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

Looks good!

I would assume it's for mobile first and it feels a little clunky having to move the stone with a mouse if there's only one direction. Not sure if it would work to just slightly sling it into the direction instead of having to drag it all the way, if you know what I mean. Double-clicking to make it move would work if it's blocked in all but one direction, but that's a weird edge case. Also on a 27" it's a tad big.

I enjoyed this so much that I began sharing the link with friends. Well done.

Your journey is my journey, many times. I've tried so many different game engines and such. What I've learned that works for me and scratches my creator itch perfectly is:

- Make small games. And I mean SMALL. Like what you've done

- Write them for the web to trivialize sharing them with the world

- Use very basic HTML + JS/TS and maybe add React if you've got a lot of UI. And Canvas is great.

- Look into Pixi.js as an abstraction on the canvas API that gives you a ton of great features and huge performance for free (free WebGL if supported). I love Pixi because it just tries to be a renderer. It isn't a game loop or sounds or IO or physics.

- Explore the game you're developing, but don't succumb to scope creep. Know when to decide "that's a really cool idea, maybe I'll save it for my next game." I have too many games that are large in scope but totally incomplete.

- Never be deterred by "this is already been done" or "nobody will want to play this." The journey is the point. Sharing it with us is just a bonus.

Agree. Ideally then you would need a notion of "focus" — which piece is selected (bonus if there is a key to toggle between which piece has focus).

Plays quite well, and having the total moves displayed as a goal is super helpful to figure out roughly how complex the solution ought to be. Got to level 15 so far and it seems reasonably well balanced. Getting the level difficulty scaling right is often quite tricky, having made a fair few games so far that's always been a pain, so very good job on that. May be worth adding one even simpler first level since some people here are apparently having trouble figuring out the mechanics at the very start.

One other suggestion I'd make is regarding the art style, which seems a bit inconsistent. The space wallpaper doesn't really fit with the rest, I'd imagine a wooden table sort of texture might look better. Having the buttons in the same style as the game board tiles would tie the gui together more, etc.

I had the same experience with Level 1, except I'm not colorblind but I was using a grayscale filter on my phone for other reasons. Thank you for calling this out!