DevLog #010 — Forty Seconds Before the First Cell
The first Killer Cage board took about forty seconds to show up on my phone.
Killer Cage is one of the three new variants in v1.3, next to German and Dutch Whispers. Most of my time on this release didn’t go into the rules. It went into tuning the generator that builds the Expert boards.
I’m not going to walk through the algorithm here. It was a lot of runs, a lot of measuring, and a lot of small changes that each moved one number and pushed another the wrong way.
By the end, the boards were better. I still wasn’t completely happy with them.
The cost was what stopped me. On my phone, the generator already needed forty-odd seconds for a single Killer board. When it hit its time limit, it gave up and fell back to the older generator, and that happened more often than I liked — on some variants, more than one board in ten.
Another round of tuning would have made the boards a little better and the wait a little longer. I didn’t think anyone opening a puzzle would want to wait even longer for a difference they might never notice.
So I shipped this version of the generator and worked on the wait instead.
The board itself didn’t change. What changed is how and when it gets built.
The phone now tries several generations in parallel instead of doing them one by one. It also stopped waiting for me to tap New Game. While I’m playing, it quietly prepares the next board in the background.
On the same phone, the first Killer board now appears in under ten seconds. Every board after that is already there when I ask.
I kept an eye on battery use and dropped frames while it ran in the background, and didn’t notice any obvious impact.
Ten seconds is still ten seconds. But it happens once, and it isn’t forty.
The generator work isn’t done. I already know a few places where it can get better. I’ll go back for them in a later release, once I can make the generator better without making anyone wait longer.