Grading our own games against the daily puzzle checklist
In the previous blog post, we listed the traits that we want our puzzle games to have and also listed features that we don’t want to introduce into our games ever. Now I would like to do the second part and to grade our own games against these standards one by one and to see whether they actually fit them. Let’s start with our first and most popular game, Smartle daily word puzzle.
Smartle
Fair difficulty: Smartle passes fairness in an interesting way. There is no single correct answer, one daily board has many correct solutions, sometimes dozens. So you are never stuck guessing what 5 words we had in mind. If your word works - you win the game. Still, I think Smartle is a difficult game on its own and has a steep learning curve. Some days there are a lot of common letters in the puzzle and it’s quite easy to form five different words. And sometimes there are a lot of rare letters (for example letters like “Z” and “X”) on the board, and I myself struggle to win for quite a long time. Basically, difficulty is not the same from day to day. Half a point.
Short sessions: Smartle daily puzzles take the players just a few minutes to complete on average. Some players can push it to under 20 seconds and if they are not sated with the daily puzzle, we also give them an option to play Sprint mode, which is more lengthy and challenging.
Respect for player’s time: Smartle is free and playable in browser, and the Archive lets you catch up on missed days, so nothing punishes you for skipping a day. For more competitive players we have streaks and leaderboards in the game, but these are just optional additional features that stay out of the player’s way. We have recently added an automatic pause on the timer when players are not engaged with the game (switched to another browser tab or application), so it’s even easier to take a break now.
Verdict: 2.5 points out of 3. Pretty good!
Hex Sense
Fair difficulty: Hex Sense is our proudest fairness story, because every level is solvable with pure logic and no guessing at all. But we have to be honest about two things. The Daily Level is not covered by the no-guessing rule. So far we decided not to enforce it there. And we also see that some players try it and don’t find it engaging enough to stay and return. We wrote before about the gameplay in how to play Hex Sense, how this game basically follows Minesweeper rules on hexagonal fields, and how the Link symbol works and adds fun to the logical solving of every level. We paced complexity of levels starting from level 1 so that even players unfamiliar with Minesweeper can easily onboard and enjoy the whole adventure.
Short sessions: Sessions are one level long and there is no timer and no pressure. In fact, you can leave the game mid level and return later to pick up from the same spot.
Respect for player’s time: Absolutely nothing will force you to play the game beside the fun and curiosity about what comes next in Mochi’s adventures.
Verdict: 3 out of 3. Great!
Clean!
Fair difficulty: The game is super fair in a way that there is 0 randomness involved. Levels are hand-crafted and we had several iterations adjusting them so that the learning curve is very smooth. Even the Spawners (skull tiles) actually always follow the same tile-spawning patterns when you restart the level, and they are bound to not put the player into a losing board state.
Short sessions: Levels take less than a minute to solve, and the saves happen after every move, so you can just close the game at any time and resume later from the same spot, just like in Hex Sense.
Respect for player’s time: Clean! is probably our best fit for the checklist. There is no timer because a timer feels like a penalty for thinking, and the Undo button takes you back to the last winnable state instead forcing you to replay the whole level from the very beginning. Its weak spot is a strange one: apparently not a lot of players know that the game has a Daily Challenge. So this might be an improvement on our side - to make it clear for players that the daily level exists and where they can find it.
Verdict: 3 out of 3. Awesome!
Catch’n’Merge
Fair difficulty: This game mostly defeats players during the Fall stage when there is a barrage of boulders to avoid. The boulders are paced and there is always a way to avoid them, but they can catch new players off guard pretty easily. I’d give Catch’n’Merge half a point in this category.
Short sessions: One catch-and-merge loop takes only a few minutes. You can drop the game at any time and return later. There’s also an in-game pause button if you need to catch a breath during an intense Fall stage or turn the cattle off.
Respect for player’s time: It is free and instant to play in the browser, but it has no daily mode, so nothing in the game helps you stop playing. But on the other hand the whole game can be completed in around 30 mins. Funny that it is also the game we ourselves play the longest. Also we have a daily reward feature in this game that is very player-friendly: if you miss a day you will not reset your reward progress, but continue from where you left off. Half a point for this section.
Verdict: 2 points out of 3. Has room for improvement.
Final thoughts
So that is our honest grads: none of our four games gets a perfect score, even from us, their creators. And honestly, we’re happy about that.
Putting together this checklist gave us something valuable: a clear picture of where we want to go. It’s easy to say you want to make “good games,” but much harder to define what that actually means. Now we have a benchmark we can use to evaluate every new puzzle game idea that comes to our minds, be glad about what works and identify what still needs improving.
Would you add anything to our checklist? Is there a quality you think every great daily puzzle game should have? And what’s the first thing that makes you close a daily game and never come back?
Come and tell us in our Discord server. We read every message and would genuinely love to hear your perspective!
Written by
Ana