The hard part came after making a puzzle solvable

Connect matching pairs and fill every square. The rules of Pastel Link are simple. When I started, I had no idea that creating the puzzles would take so long.

The puzzle generator took the most time. Getting it to produce a solvable puzzle was only the beginning. I still had to check whether there was another solution and whether I had already made the same puzzle.

The tricky ones were puzzles that were different, but still felt similar. The endpoints might move a little, yet solving the puzzle could mean following much the same routes. I also wanted to reduce layouts where paths crowded one side of the board or the same shapes kept appearing.

I worked with Codex to bring the game to release. As we worked on the code, I kept coming back to the question that followed "Can this be solved?": "What would it feel like to solve it?"

I can measure things like how often a path turns and how far it takes you around the board. But those numbers alone still do not tell me exactly how difficult a puzzle will feel to a person. That is something I want to keep working on.

Pastel Link is now available on Android and iOS. Next, I want to explore what kinds of puzzles I can make on boards with shapes other than squares.