There are many things you have to consider when you design levels for a mobile application. You need to start off with easier levels and then increase difficulty along the way so that the player does not realize it too much, but still feels challenged.

We do not want the solution to be simply a result of brute force. That is why we tried to put a little trick into every puzzle. This way the player can always just start walking or think one moment about our intentions and solve the level much faster. The first thing should always be the thought about where the star should end up. Sometimes you have to think backwards to find the right path.

Another important thing for us was the uniqueness of the solution. If a puzzle is ambiguous it is more difficult to find the solution because there is no clear argument why you should take that path. But that also made it harder for us to design. Most of the levels had to be solved several times, many small changes had to be made again and again until we finally liked them.

When we are finished designing a level, we use the editor “Tiled” to insert it into the game. In this editor we got the tileset with the most recent design. We can specify the size of each puzzle, where which tile goes and also the starting position. This is a very easy process, that just needs some concentration and time. On the left you can see what this looks like.