Yarnloaf is the first game I have built. It is a sort-and-reveal puzzle for iPhone: the kind of thing you play for ten minutes with a coffee, not the kind that asks for your evening. It is not released yet. The build is on TestFlight, the App Store listing is written, and the last few submission chores are being worked through. This post is the early announcement.
How it plays
- Tap a spool, then tap another. Yarn only pours onto the same colour.
- A level is solved when every spool holds a single colour.
- Every win stitches a few rows of a pixel picture. Small pictures take a handful of levels, big ones come together over dozens.
- Stuck? Undo a move, take a hint, add a spare spool or a few extra moves.
What is inside
- 1000 levels that grow from quick 8×8 patterns to 20-row pictures.
- Knots and locked spools that change how you plan a solve.
- A gallery of everything you have stitched, and a share card for finished pictures.
- A daily gift that grows over a 7-day streak. Miss a day and you keep it.
- Game Center achievements and leaderboards.
- A small kitten who keeps you company on the home screen.
- No timers, no lives. Play at your own pace.
How it is built
Yarnloaf is written in Godot 4 with GDScript, and the whole game is drawn with code rather than textures. That sounds like a stylistic choice, but it is a performance one: no texture loads, no shader compiles, no hitches on a four-year-old phone. Animations are tweens only, and nothing does per-frame work.
The levels are generated, not hand-made. Each level is a pattern times a set of parameters times the active mechanics, all derived from the level number. A solver proves every generated layout is solvable and records the shortest solution, which becomes the par shown in the game. Every block of ten levels mixes breathers, light, medium and hard levels in a seeded order, so the rhythm never becomes predictable.
The App Store listing lives in the repository as a JSON file and is pushed to App Store Connect by a script. The store is a projection of the repo, which means the copy can be diffed and restored like any other code. I will write that up separately, along with the bits Apple still makes you click through by hand.
Pricing
Free to play, with an interstitial between levels after the first thirty and opt-in rewarded videos. Yarnloaf Premium is a one-time purchase: no ads ever, free hints, undos, spare spools and extra moves, and doubled coin rewards. All progress stays on the device.
When
iOS first, Android later. The build is on TestFlight now. If you would like to try it before launch, send me a note and I will add you.