Rope Snip

Rope physics were the hardest part of building Rope Snip. Early builds used a simple spring model that looked fine until two ropes were cut in the same frame, at which point the remaining candy would do something physically impossible. The current build uses a verlet-integration rope solver with multiple constraint iterations per frame. It costs measurable CPU on older phones, but the physics never surprise us, which is the baseline any puzzle game depends on.

Level design followed a single rule across the four chapters: each chapter teaches exactly one new idea, and the final chapter combines all of them. Several levels got rejected during design because they required two new mechanics at once, which playtest after playtest showed was frustrating rather than interesting. The final count of fifteen levels is what it is because that was the number we could make genuinely good, not a target we were aiming for.

The three-star routes are a separate design layer from the one-star pass routes. A level can be cleared conservatively without understanding the mechanic deeply; collecting all three stars usually requires either specific timing or a less obvious route. Those placements are deliberately stingy because they give experienced players a reason to revisit early chapters after the later ones have taught them new tricks. Similar physics-first thinking shapes Gravity Rush.