Paths: Puzzle mobile game

Creating Paths, a puzzle game for mobile, was indeed a challenging but fulfilling endeavor. The concept was simple yet engaging – connect points of the same color on a grid without leaving any point gray.

The biggest challenge was generating random solvable levels of varying sizes. A brute force approach handled small levels well, but as the grid expanded, heuristics became essential to enhance the performance of the generation algorithms. Writing an heuristic for a problem that has never been solved before is quite difficult but I ended up finding a solution that was good enough to generate large levels.

It was the first game I published on the app store on Android. I had a lot of fun playing it and some of the puzzles were very challenging.

I experimented a lot with the menus to find an appealing and simple design.

Screenshots taken from the game menu prototypes

My design objective was to achieve a delicate balance: simplicity paired with beauty, all wrapped in responsiveness and complemented by seamless animations.

Screenshots taken from the game levels