How I Built Arrow Puzzle: A Logic Game Where Order Matters
Arrow Puzzle is a calm logic game: every arrow on the board has to slide off the edge, and the only question is which one goes first. This is the story of how it was built, and why the first design had to be thrown away. The idea is simple. That was the problem. The arrow puzzle genre runs on one rule: tap an arrow, and it leaves the board if nothing is in its way. My first design used exactly that rule, with one-cell arrows on a small grid. Then I reviewed it properly and found two things. The first was embarrassing: both example levels in my own design document were unsolvable. Two arrows faced each other in the same row, each blocking the other forever. The second was worse. Once the levels were fixed, there were no decisions left in the game. Removing an arrow could never block another one, so any tap that worked was a safe tap. Order did not matter, and a dead end was impossible. The game was "find an arrow you can tap" repeated until the board was empty. So I ...