Solar Puzzles 1.6.2: the games that teach themselves
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Solar Puzzles 1.6.2 is out on the App Store and Google Play. Nothing in it is a new game; nearly all of it is about the first minute of every game that was already there — the minute in which a player either understands what the board wants or puts the phone down.
What’s new
- Planet Trails is free to start. Its first eight charts — Mercury out to Neptune — need no pass, on iOS and Android as they already did on the web. The rest of the sky still comes with the Space Pass.
- Every game plays its first board for you. Planet Blocks deals a hand and places all three pieces; Planet Rescue drops the one bar that frees Pluto; Planet Portals pushes every block on its first level through a matching gate; Planet Trails flies its first chart to the last sector. Then a card hands the board back, and none of it costs a heart, a point or a level.
- A hand that offers a move. After that, a board nobody has touched for three seconds shows one move being made — and makes none of it.
- Cosmic Marbles opens one piece at a time. Level 1 is written marble by marble, aims itself and fires on any tap. Training has three more levels and grows one thing at a time; the superpowers wait until level 3 and lend you three to start with.
- A word between sections. Finishing Training no longer drops you into Beginner in silence; a card says which section is next and its own button opens it.
- Six ships in Cosmic Marbles. The Scout stays free; five more come with the pass. A hull changes nothing about the marble it carries.
- Venus is cream and Jupiter is amber, so a six-colour chain can be read at speed — and Venus really is a white-cream planet.
- Smoother everywhere. Every Android board draws in a layer of its own, and on iOS a sound effect no longer costs the picture a frame.
A rules sheet is where rules go to be skipped
Every game had a “How to play” sheet, and it opened by itself the first time a board did. That is a reasonable thing for a game to do and it did not work: watching people play, the sheet was closed the way a cookie banner is closed, and the board underneath was met cold. A six-year-old does not read three steps of prose. Neither, it turns out, does anyone else.
So each game now plays its own first board. Not a video and not a diagram — the actual board, with a hand that presses a piece, carries it and lets go, and the real engine doing the real thing underneath: the row burns, the planet flies out, the gate takes the block, the chart fills to its corners. Each lesson is the shortest sequence that says the whole rule. Planet Rescue needs one drop; Planet Portals needs three pushes, because the second push says the gate must match and the third says what emptying the board is for.
The part that took the most care is what the lesson costs: nothing. It spends no heart, awards no points, clears no level and hides no artifact, and its closing card hands back the board exactly as it was dealt. A lesson that pays would be a level the game plays for you, and a lesson that charges would be a heart lost to a board you never touched. Both are wrong in the same way, and one flag in the engine rules out both.
After the lesson, a board left untouched for three seconds shows a move. On Planet Portals what travels is a translucent copy of the block, while the real one stays in its cell. The first version moved the block itself, and a board that rearranges under nobody’s finger reads as a bug, not as help.
A level written marble by marble
Cosmic Marbles could not be taught with a hand, because the thing to learn is a moving chain and a shot. Its first level is now the one board in the game scripted outright: eight marbles instead of twenty-five, laid in pairs of a colour, the ship loaded with the colour of the first pair and then the second. The aim ray locks onto the head of the chain and rides it as it rolls, and while the level is aiming itself, a tap anywhere fires along that line — a child who taps the corner of the screen still bursts the three the ray was pointing at. Two shots are the lesson; after them the aim goes back to the finger and what is left is an ordinary board.
The level does not even open as a board. For two seconds there is only the track and the chain crawling toward the black hole, so the first thing anybody sees is what the game is about; then the header drops in, the ship flies in from under the edge, and the ray shoots out of its nose. Every beat is counted in seconds the board has actually been played, so a pause holds the lesson rather than running it behind the menu.
Two more things fell out of writing the level down. The superpower bar is gone from it entirely — three icons nobody has explained are three questions in the way of the lesson — and returns at level 3, which lends three of each to try. And Training no longer pays star points, not for a clear and not for a burst: the small trickle every burst paid meant the gentlest boards in the app were quietly unlocking planets, and the museum shelf behind them, before the game proper had begun. Practice is recorded, not rewarded. Planet Trails’ Training got the same rule the next day.
A list that stops early must not count what is missing
Planet Trails shipped in 1.6 locked whole: the card on the home screen opened the store and nowhere else, which asked a parent to pay for a game nobody in the house had tried. The card opens the game now, and the eight Training charts are free.
The level list needed a decision of its own. A list of forty charts of which eight are yours could show “8 of 40”, and every free-to-play game you have ever seen does. We chose not to: a list that stops early should not measure what is missing, because a total on the screen turns the free part into a fraction. The free list is one flat grid with no sections and no total, and it ends with a card that says where the rest of the sky is. The number of free charts is derived from the difficulty ladder rather than written down, so if the ladder moves, the line between free and paid moves with it and nothing in the copy has to be found and fixed.
Forty milliseconds inside play()
One fix is worth writing down because it looked like something else. On a real iPhone, the end of a Planet Trails chart stalled: the trail stopped one sector short of the planet, then jumped onto it. It read as an animation bug, and it was a sound.
Starting an effect went through AVAudioPlayer.play() on the main thread, and on a device that call spins up the audio hardware — 20 to 40 milliseconds, measured on an iPhone 15 Pro, which is three or four dropped frames at exactly the moment the game did something worth a sound. Arriving at a planet plays two effects at once, so that screen paid twice; every other game paid once on every drop, clear and match, quietly enough that nobody had a name for it. Effects now start on a serial queue of their own, and no frame waits for them. Android never had the problem: SoundPool was asynchronous all along.
Android got its own smoothness pass in the same release. There was no single cause — the same handful of Compose habits in every board: a full-screen recomposition per pixel of a drag, a track rebuilt per frame, a pulse that kept re-rendering the blur under the pause menu. Every board now draws in a graphics layer of its own, so a frame of the chain re-records the chain and not the starfield around it.
Get Solar Puzzles — free to play, no ads, nothing collected, every puzzle offline. On both stores.
