So the generator was fast now, and it was spitting out proper puzzles with one true answer each. Grand. Next job: difficulty. Because a daily puzzle app that only does one flavour of “medium-ish” gets old by Wednesday — people want to start gentle and work up to something that makes their brain sweat a bit.
And I knew exactly how to do difficulty. Everyone does. Harder means... bigger, right? Takes longer. Less help. You just turn the screws. How hard can it be.
You can probably see where this is going.
THE SCREW-TURNING THEORY OF DIFFICULTY
My first instinct was the obvious one: to make a puzzle harder, make it cost more. Take away the freebies. Make it take longer. If “Easy” hands you a few numbers to get started, then “Master” should hand you nothing and let you suffer. That's what hard means, surely — more grind, more time on the clock, more of your evening gone.
I built it roughly like that. And then I actually sat down and played the thing like a normal person, and it was horrible.
Not hard. Horrible. There's a difference, and that difference turned out to be the whole point.
THE BIT WHERE I MADE MYSELF FEEL STUPID
Two moments did it.
The first: I fired up a Killer Sudoku on a lower tier — the kind a brand-new player would hit in their first five minutes — and got a completely empty board with no way in. No starting numbers, no foothold, nothing to deduce from. Just a blank grid silently going “well? off you go then.” A beginner doesn't learn anything from that. They just feel thick and close the app. I'd built a “gentle” puzzle that was actually a locked door.
The second was worse, because it was about somebody else. We had the difficulty of the daily challenges riding too high, so a brand-new player — someone who'd opened the app ten minutes ago — was getting served Expert and Master puzzles. And the feeling that gives was summed up perfectly at the time: “if I have to do these and can't, I would feel stupid.”
That sentence has been stuck to the inside of my skull ever since. Because that's the actual failure. A good hard puzzle should make you feel clever when you crack it. A badly-aimed hard puzzle just makes you feel stupid — and nobody opens a relaxing puzzle app to be made to feel stupid. They close it and they don't come back, and they're right to.
HARD ISN'T SLOW. HARD ISN'T MEAN. HARD IS DEEP.
Here's the reframe that fixed it, and it's almost embarrassingly simple once it lands: difficulty isn't about how long a puzzle takes or how much it withholds. It's about how deep the logic goes — and it has to stay fair the whole way down.
An Easy puzzle asks for one obvious step at a time. A Master puzzle asks you to chain several careful deductions together before anything moves. That's the climb — not a stopwatch, not a blank wall, not “we hid the help to waste your time.” And the rule that runs underneath all five tiers, the one I'd already fought for in the generator: every single puzzle, Easy to Master, is solvable by pure logic. No guessing. Ever. Hard just means the logic is further in.
Once I believed that, the fixes basically wrote themselves:
- Stop lying about time. I'd hardcoded one time estimate for every difficulty — so a Master puzzle cheerfully promised “a few minutes” and then ate your lunch break. I made each tier tell you the truth about what it'll cost you. An honest “this one's a 20-minute sit-down” is respect; a Master pretending to be a quick one is a trap.
- Give beginners a foothold. The lower Killer tiers now start with a few numbers already placed — enough to teach you the mechanic and give you somewhere to push from. Scaffolding, not a free ride. You still solve it; you're just not staring at a locked door.
- Never throw someone in the deep end. The daily and weekly challenges are now capped to the level you've actually reached. A day-one player gets day-one puzzles. You climb into Expert and Master by playing — they don't ambush you on the way in.
FIVE HONEST TIERS
So that's what difficulty in GridJoy actually is now. Five tiers — Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert, Master — that ramp by how deep the reasoning goes, not by how much time they steal or how much they sandbag you. Every one solvable without a single guess. Every one honest about what it's going to ask of you. And none of them designed to make you feel stupid for picking it.
Turns out “make it harder” was never the brief. The brief was “make it a good hill” — steep enough to be worth climbing, fair enough that getting to the top is on you, never on luck. I just had to make myself feel stupid a few times first to work that out.
Pick your hill: today's daily is right here, and there are eighteen kinds of puzzle waiting, five tiers each.
— the fed-up (and now slightly humbler) dev behind GridJoy 👻