739: How to Build a Great Puzzle Game with Josh Collinsworth
Triple (or maybe even quadruple?) threat Josh Collinsworth is back on the show to talk about his new game, Tupo. They cover how the puzzles are generated and kept fair, why the usual Sudoku pencil marks don't help, and what Josh's player data shows about hints and checks. They also get into the tech stack, why Josh skipped the app stores, and how daily puzzle games took off after Wordle.
Time Jump Links
- 00:00:21 Upgrade from Triple to Quadruple Threat?
- 00:01:27 What's Josh's current Balatro play method
- 00:03:11 What is Tupo?
- 00:06:54 Puzzle design and setting difficulty levels
- 00:11:17 Where did the idea for Tupo come from?
- 00:19:20 Puzzles games and PWAs
- 00:21:38 How did you figure out time to solve?
- 00:27:27 The problem of being too similair to Sudoku
- 00:31:02 Does building a game make it less fun to play Tupo?
- 00:31:49 Sponsor: AI and Design Systems
- 00:34:18 What's the tech stack behind Tupo?
- 00:39:04 How do you validate puzzles before they go out?
- 00:41:06 How do you release and process the success of a game?
- 00:43:47 Why not take Tupo to the next level?
- 00:47:38 Hints vs checks by users
Links
- Josh Collinsworth
- Tupo · A daily sudoku-style logic puzzle with a twist
- Clues By Sam
- Balatro: Deck-Building Roguelite
- Wordle — The New York Times
- Cracking The Cryptic - YouTube
- Svelte • Web development for the rest of us
- Tailwind CSS - Rapidly build modern websites without ever leaving your HTML.
- Push your ideas to the web | Netlify
- PocketBase - Open Source backend in 1 file
- Quina - Menu
- Hondo - a word game in 100 words or less
Episode Sponsors 🧡
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