Puzzle Bloom
Match-three for people who are tired of being nagged.
A botanical match-three with hand-authored boards, no lives system, and a hint that appears when you actually need one.
- Released
- June 2024
- Installs
- 1.1M installs
- Store rating
- 4.6 ★ / 18.1k ratings
- Built with
- Unity · C# · custom board editor
The build
Puzzle Bloom has 420 hand-authored boards rather than a generator, because generated match-three levels are reliably solvable and reliably boring. Each board is signed off by a designer who has beaten it in under the target move count.
We cut the lives meter entirely. Retention held, and the one-star reviews about energy timers — which we had read on every other match-three we shipped — never arrived. The board state is checkpointed locally so a lost connection never costs progress.
The hint system watches for 25 seconds of no valid input and highlights the lowest-value legal move, never the best one, so it unsticks players without solving the board for them.
What shipped
- 420 hand-authored boards, each verified under its target move count
- No lives meter and no energy timers
- Local checkpointing survives connection loss mid-board
- Hint surfaces the lowest-value legal move after 25 idle seconds
Credits
- Level design
- Noor Halabi
- Art direction
- Marta Kowal
- Tools & code
- Priya Raghunathan
