I have been playing a 576-piece PuzzleBuddy puzzle on my iPad.
This is technically product testing…..
It is also a very convenient excuse to sit on the couch with an audiobook and do a giant jigsaw puzzle. 😊
If you read my last post about PuzzleBuddy, you already know that I love big puzzles. The bigger ones are really why I wanted to make PuzzleBuddy in the first place.
And while I have been working on the next update, I have realized something:
Making a digital puzzle look like a jigsaw puzzle is relatively easy. Making it actually feel like one is much harder.
A puzzle piece should actually be a puzzle piece
When Alex helped me with the original puzzle-piece design, one thing that mattered was that PuzzleBuddy’s pieces weren’t just square tiles with a jigsaw shape drawn over them.
The edges are actually generated as matching pairs.
If one piece has a tab, the neighboring piece has the corresponding opening. Those two edges belong together because they were created together.
The cuts are also generated consistently, which is important for something that sounds very boring until it goes wrong: saving your puzzle.
If you close PuzzleBuddy in the middle of a 400-piece puzzle and come back tomorrow, I don’t want the app to sort of recreate something close to what you were doing. It needs to reconstruct your actual puzzle, with the same pieces and the same cuts.
That becomes even more important as the puzzles get bigger.
Big puzzles change everything
PuzzleBuddy currently goes up to 400 pieces, but I have been working on a new 576-piece Legendary size for PuzzleBuddy 1.2.
That is a 24 × 24 puzzle.
And 576 pieces is a LOT of tiny puzzle pieces!
At that size, the puzzle engine isn’t really the only challenge anymore.
Organization becomes part of the puzzle.
With a physical puzzle, you might have piles on the table. You might put all the blue pieces in one area, pull out the edges, build a little section of a building off to the side, and eventually connect it to everything else.
I want PuzzleBuddy to let you work in that same kind of way.
That’s why it has a piece tray, edge and inside sorting, Sweep, connected sections, Image Guide and Assist.
If you connect several pieces on the board, that section should behave like a section. You should be able to pick it up and move it together. You can even put completed sections into the tray and bring them back out later.
The tray has gradually become less like a menu of unused pieces and more like an actual workspace.
That wasn’t something I completely appreciated when I started making the app. Once you put hundreds of pieces on an iPad screen, though, you appreciate it VERY quickly.
The tools should help you solve the puzzle, not solve it for you
This has become one of my little rules while working on PuzzleBuddy.
I recently found a funny example while testing Sweep.
Sweep is meant to help when your board gets completely covered in loose pieces. It sends those loose pieces back to the tray so you can get some breathing room.
While testing it with a huge batch of pieces, we noticed that the pieces arriving in the tray were ending up suspiciously organized.
(Too organized.)
Because puzzle pieces have identities that correspond to where they belong in the puzzle, the app was accidentally putting a lot of them into the tray in something close to solution order.
Well…that’s helpful. A little TOO helpful. 😂 So I changed it.
Sweep now mixes the landing order so that cleaning up your board doesn’t quietly give away how the puzzle fits together.
That sounds like a tiny detail, but I think those tiny details are what determine whether a digital jigsaw still feels like solving a puzzle.
I want the tools to remove the annoying parts of doing a giant puzzle on a screen.
I don’t want them to remove the puzzle.
I am actually testing it by playing it
We obviously have automated tests for PuzzleBuddy, but there are some things a test can’t tell me.
Does moving a big connected section feel natural?
Can I actually find the piece I want?
Does the tray become annoying after an hour?
Can I leave a 576-piece puzzle, come back to it, and trust that everything is exactly where I left it?
Does something that technically works still feel weird?
The best way I have found to answer those questions is pretty simple:
I play PuzzleBuddy. A lot. (Every day)
That’s how I have found some of the strangest small problems.
I don’t think there is a computer test that can adequately reproduce, “I’ve been doing this puzzle for two hours and this particular thing is starting to annoy me.”
And because I genuinely like doing the puzzles, I notice those things.
Also – YAY – PuzzleBuddy 1.2 is coming
The next PuzzleBuddy update is getting some things I am really excited about.
The biggest is the new 576-piece Legendary size.
I am also adding Search, which has become increasingly necessary now that PuzzleBuddy has 516 included puzzles across 14 collections.
You will be able to search for things like dogs, castles, flowers, beaches and other subjects instead of digging through every collection trying to remember where you saw something.
I’m also continuing to refine the tray, Sweep, large-puzzle behavior and all the little interactions that matter more when you’re working on hundreds of pieces.
And yes, I am testing the 576-piece puzzles myself.
Someone has to make the sacrifice. 😂
The app should disappear a little
I think this is probably the bigger idea behind PuzzleBuddy.
When I’m doing a jigsaw puzzle, I don’t want to think about the puzzle app.
I want to think:
Where is that one blue piece?
I KNOW this piece goes somewhere in this roof.
Why can I find every edge piece except one?
And eventually:
OH! THERE IT IS.
That’s the fun part.
I don’t need coins for finding it. I don’t need XP. I don’t need a streak for coming back tomorrow. I definitely don’t need an advertisement interrupting me while I’m looking for it.
PuzzleBuddy still has no ads, no subscriptions and no in-app purchases.
It’s just a jigsaw puzzle app.
The more I work on it, the more I think the best thing the technology can do is quietly get out of the way and let you solve the puzzle.
The puzzle should be the interesting part.
And now I have 576 pieces waiting for me. 😊
— Samantha Dobbs
PuzzleBuddy is available free for iPhone and iPad on the App Store.
Learn more about PuzzleBuddy →
Download PuzzleBuddy on the App Store →
***Update — October 3 2026: PuzzleBuddy 1.2 is now available, with puzzle search and a new 576-piece Legendary size.
Leave a Reply