We tested over 1000 designs for the game and only included 141 of the “best” designs. What makes a design better than another? Let’s look at a few examples. Here is a good level:
The design might look familiar if you’ve looked at our featured design.
For another perspective, here’s the same level with the opposite dots connected:
What we like about this level:
- Lines that cross lots of shadow tiles look really cool – the pale green line crosses 12, the pink line crosses 5.
- The lines form cool looking patterns – for example, the nested “U” turns in the bottom left and right.
- There aren’t that many dots for the size of the board – 9 pairs of dots with a board size of 216 tiles = 24 tiles per line.
- Correlated to the above, none of the lines are what we call “filler” lines – short and obvious lines that mainly fill space left by the other lines.
- The two pairs of dots that cover 70% of the board also happen to be the closest of all the pairs of dots .
Here’s a level that we don’t like:
This screenshot is from the desktop program we wrote to create levels for the game which is why it looks a bit different.
This level has none of the features we liked about the other one. There are tons of dots for the size of the board – 17 pairs of dots for 96 squares. Maybe even worse – the design itself is flawed. The central white sector is disconnected from the other sectors.
The design didn’t make it into the game, but it’s based off one that did. Here’s the first design in Wide Jags:
The dimensions are the same – 12 tiles wide by 8 tiles tall. The center sector is also the same as the above.
The only difference is that in this design, the top left and right corners are gone with corner shadows replacing them.
As a result the center sector is connected to the other sectors – and the levels are far more interesting than the other design.
Here’s another level we like from a different design:
The reason we like this one is really simple: The largest sector of the board is completely empty! Of course, to solve the puzzle you will have to fill it in with lines as usual, but we just thought it looked really cool when we saw that.
Here’s one last level that we’ll show – generated from the same design as the first:
This is also a great level.
The first level has one super long line that crosses 12 shadows – but the next longest “only” crosses 5. Here the purple and green lines cross 11 and 10 shadows respectively.
Every shadow tile from the 2nd column to the 13th column is crossed by one of these two lines.
The problem with the level? The rest of the dots are pretty much all filler. We especially don’t like the 3×6 rectangle in the center (where the orange and brown dots are) is all filler.
Still, when evaluating levels, the positives almost always outweigh the negatives. All it takes is one really cool thing to make a level good no matter how bad the rest of the level might be.