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FuseCells

2,500 handcrafted levels logic puzzle game with leaderboard

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Hi everyone, I built FuseCells, a minimalistic logic puzzle game where every level is handcrafted (no procedural generation). It started as a personal challenge: design a clean rule-set and scale it to thousands of puzzles without losing difficulty balance.What’s unique: - 2,500 handcrafted levels across multiple grid sizes - Deterministic logic, no guessing required - A rule system inspired by constraint-solving and path-finding concepts - Daily Challenge + leaderboards (I added these to give the game a “reason to come back” without turning it into a grind) - Built end-to-end as a solo dev projectA small data point: after adding Daily Challenge + leaderboards, the game quickly reached ~400 active players (depending on how you define active), and I’m trying to understand what makes them return: competition, habit, or simply puzzle pacing.Technical notes (if you’re curious): - My internal tools validate solvability using a custom constraint solver - Difficulty is approximated via solver step count - Optimized to run smoothly on low-end devices - Designed for iOS, fully adapted for iPadI’d love feedback from puzzle lovers, game designers, and anyone into handcrafted logic design - especially on difficulty curve, onboarding clarity, and whether daily + leaderboards add value or feel distracting.

HN · launched Dec 31, 2025 · 6 upvotes (top 73%) · 0 views

Niche: browser puzzle games · 310 launches, 26 in the last 7 days ▼ -7% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Partial While the 2D grid puzzle interface and leaderboard can be built with AI, handcrafting and balancing 2,500 solvable, engaging logic puzzles requires dedicated game design, custom validation solvers, or bespoke level authoring tooling.

What it would actually take: The stack uses HTML5 Canvas or React with Supabase/Firebase for authentication and leaderboards. The difficult component is developing a puzzle verification engine (e.g., a SAT solver or backtracking algorithm in Rust/WASM) to validate unique solutions and difficulty metrics across thousands of discrete level configurations.

Discussion

3 comments analyzed.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 450 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #415 of 451 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 63 days after the earliest competitor.

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