Solar Puzzles 1.4: the Sun starts moving
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Solar Puzzles 1.4 is live on Google Play and in review for the App Store. It is a Planet Blocks release: the endless mode, which had played the same way from the first block to the ten-thousandth point, now teaches new rules as you climb.
What's new
- A difficulty ladder. Score now climbs levels in cycles of three. The first is calm and plays exactly as before. On the second the Sun moves to one side, so burned lines tumble sideways instead of down. On the third it roams, hopping to the next edge every few moves.
- Comet ice. From level 4 meteors start bringing frozen blocks. Ice never moves — gravity flows the other blocks around it — and a burn only cracks it, so its line has to burn twice. Every cycle sends comets more often.
- A comet in your tray. From level 7 a refill can hand you a comet instead of a piece. It cannot be refused, only placed: the choice is where the trouble goes.
- The rocket shows its blast. Holding a rocket over the board lights the row and column it would take and fades the blocks that would go with them.
- Quieter hands. Lifting a piece is silent now, confirmed by a firmer buzz, and the card that announces a new rule arrives with a rising vibration instead of a chime.
- Plus: 44 avatars in a strip that scrolls sideways, a rebuilt planet-discovery card, and only one mystery treasure on a board at a time.
Teaching a new rule to someone who cannot read the patch notes
The player we build for is six. She will not read a tooltip, and she will not connect a change in behaviour to something she did twenty moves ago. So every rung of the ladder that changes a rule stops the game with a card, in one sentence, in words she knows: "The Sun moved! Everything falls left now."
Two details make the cards work. The card blocks input while it is up — and if a piece was already in her hand when it appeared, the piece goes back to the tray rather than being stranded under a finger that can no longer drop it. And the first comet after the comet card is guaranteed: the rule she has just read is proven on the very next meteor instead of being a promise for some later run.
Difficulty that arrives as a surprise is just unfairness with a delay. If a game changes its own rules, it owes the player a sentence — and then a demonstration, immediately.
Gravity that never touches what you built
Moving the Sun sounds like it should re-settle the whole board sideways. We tried it, and it was awful: a pile the player had spent two minutes shaping slid into a heap she had never planned, for reasons she had no way to anticipate.
So gravity in Planet Blocks only ever decides which way the next burn falls. The board you have built stays exactly where it is; the change applies to what happens after the next line burns. The same principle governs comet ice: it is anchored, and other blocks flow around it, so a comet never drags your structure with it when everything else tumbles.
A queued move is worse than a refused one
A smaller fix, and the most instructive one. Dropping a piece while lines were still burning used to queue the move and play it once the board settled — on the theory that swallowing a move the player had already committed to would feel unfair.
It was the wrong call, and it took a bug report to see it. By the time the queued piece landed, gravity had moved the cells underneath it, so the piece appeared somewhere the player had never agreed to. It looked exactly like a bug, because functionally it was one.
A board that is still resolving now refuses the drop outright, and the placement ghost turns invalid while it is busy, so the refusal is visible before the finger lifts. The piece can still be picked up and hovered; the moment the board settles, the ghost goes green under the finger. Being told "not yet" beats being obeyed later.
The photo that stretched its own card
The "New planet discovered!" card had been quietly broken on both platforms, in the same way, for different reasons. The card is sized by its content and wears the NASA photograph as a backdrop — but on iOS scaledToFill reports a size that overflows whatever it is offered, and on Android a fillMaxSize backdrop fills the incoming constraints. Both meant the photo decided how big the card was. With Mercury, whose portrait is nearly square, the iOS card stretched past the screen edges and took its rounded corners and rim with it; on Android the card simply filled the entire window and clipped its own title.
The fix on both is the same idea: a backdrop must never vote on layout. The image now lives inside a container of the card's own size and is cropped there. While we were in it, the card got room to breathe and a rim bright enough to be seen over a photograph that is nearly black at its edges.
Get Solar Puzzles — free, works fully offline, no ads and nothing collected. On both stores.
