Cog 'n Claw
Inspiration
I wanted a puzzle that feels mechanical. You get a jointed arm bolted, and you swing and fold its joints to sweep up stars. The catch is steam. every joint has a limited tank, and when it runs dry the joint locks. A simple reach becomes something you have to plan.
How I built it
It runs as an interactive post on Reddit's Developer Platform, built with Devvit, Phaser, React, and TypeScript. The game rules live in one small pure engine with no physics library, just trigonometry. The same engine runs on the client and the server, so a solve is validated the exact same way in both places.
What I learned
Making the engine deterministic solved a lot of problems at once: the server can trust a solve by replaying it, the daily puzzle is just a function of the date, and the first sixty seconds matter more than anything, which is why the tutorial levels exist.
Challenges
Keeping all the rules in the engine and out of the renderer took discipline, but it is what lets the server trust the client. Every puzzle is checked by a solver that plays it through the real engine, so anything I could not prove solvable got cut.
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