Building a puzzle that never rolls a die: in SilkWard every move produces the same outcome

Turn-based puzzles filled a gap Hitman GO left for me: few rules, zero luck, the feeling of building an outcome by thinking it through. I built SilkWard into that gap — a puzzle that moves across a node-and-edge graph, told mostly without words.

No luck, no reflexes, no surprise rule

These three principles sum up the game’s design philosophy. Every move you make on the node-and-edge graph also triggers the enemies’ next step, and that step follows the same deterministic rule. Lose a level and the reason is never a bad roll — it is the move itself. 36 levels + 6 hidden levels span three acts.

One core, two platforms

The rules engine was written with zero dependencies: it knows neither the DOM nor React Native, only plain TypeScript. That purity lets the web client (a Next.js-based PWA) and the mobile client (Expo) share one behavior instead of two — the rules engine and the solver live in one shared core package, level data lives in a separate data package, and interface text lives in its own language package; only the interface layer is platform-specific.

How a level gets calibrated

A new level is not done once a single file is written: it is designed with an editor tool first, then exported into the data package as a level definition. The level’s minimum move count is never guessed by hand — it is the number a BFS-based solver tool finds, and level design is then calibrated against that number. A validation command re-checks that this number is still correct on every change, so the “par” value never quietly drifts out of date.

The rules engine itself is held to the same discipline: the core package bans access to a random number generator or the system clock — determinism is enforced by a build-chain constraint, not a code comment. An optional AI art pipeline also sits outside the core code, confined to a separate development-tools directory; it was tried, but its output never passed review, so it never shipped — the art in the playable build is fully procedural, and the game’s runtime carries no AI client at all.

A game that almost never touches the network

The first load caches SilkWard’s shell (interface, code, art); from then on play makes no network request. The one exception is sound: the 26 audio files are not preloaded — each one is downloaded once the first time it plays and cached permanently, so the airplane-mode guarantee only holds from the second session onward; with no network on the very first session, the game just plays silently instead of crashing. That is not an “offline mode” bolted on afterward; it was a constraint set from the start: fetch is banned by lint rules in the core and app layers, and XMLHttpRequest use is caught by a separate source-scanning test — the constraint lives in the code rather than being an honor-system promise.

The record sits here as halted: the game is playable today at silkward.com, but no further development is happening on it.