Jigsaw puzzle

A few days ago I finished working on a jigsaw puzzle game. This game was a bit challenging to make as a lot of the methods I tried for generating the puzzle pieces came with their ups and downs, and even made some issues that I wasn’t able to solve altogether.

The game works using a shaderGraph to designate each puzzle piece a section of the complete image. I then wrote a script that takes existing splines and splices them into spriteShpapeControlers to give the pieces their custom shapes. With this customization, it takes a few seconds to change the amount of pieces in the puzzle and uses a tiny amount of processing power, which is ideal for running on websites.

This did however make it difficult for me to give the jigsaw pieces a highlight to give them a 3d look. I started trying to generate my own light maps for each piece through code but I quickly gave up on that. I also wanted to add a glossy edge to all of the pieces to fake some amount of light reflection, but I gave up quickly as I wasn’t able to get the shape of the puzzle pieces into a shaderGraph as a sort of mask. In the end I settled on faking a light shadow by increasing and decreasing the size of a see-through sprite.

Another thing I consider to be a failure with this game is the visual theming. The UI and border doesn’t fit with the background of the game. I wanted to go for a feeling of whimsy, but the artist ignored this theme altogether when making the UI assets and I couldn’t be bothered asking for changes.

The game does however have a bit going for it as it’s a simple game done well. The sound effects mixed with a generous snap to position feature makes it incredibly satisfying to complete parts of the puzzle. All the little things I’ve done to make the game feel good put in a lot of heavy lifting.

In saying all this, the game was made in a little over a week, so it’s not like there’s all that much to it.

7.5/10

The game is embedded below, but it takes a while to load. I’m not an expert in Unity WebGL builds so I don’t know how to fix this. The game is loading but It’s just going to take a while. Go make a coffee or something.