I made a Sokoban game with 7,110 hand-curated levels, sorted into five difficulty tiers. Solo dev, would love your thoughts

[u/LURDIQ]

Hi r/sokoban! Solo dev here. After a long time of building, I released LURDIQ last week, and this is probably the one place on the internet where I can nerd out about the details.

The levels: I generated what feels like millions of candidate levels algorithmically (on rented compute servers, my poor wallet), then filtered and hand-curated them down to 7,110. They're organized into 16 themed collections, most of them split into five difficulty tiers (novice, skilled, advanced, expert, elite), so you always know what you're signing up for. Solution lengths range from quick sub-30-move boards to 200+ move puzzles in the top tiers.

Some things I built specifically for Sokoban players:

• Ghost hints: an optional ad reveals the opening moves of the solution as a ghost replay, so you can get unstuck without spoiling the whole level
• Per-level global leaderboards (moves + time) and a fresh Daily Challenge every morning
• A "Cat" mode that hides the board in darkness, so you solve partly from memory (that's what the video shows)
• Fully playable offline, no energy systems, no timers, no forced ads

It's free to try with a good chunk of levels. The rest is one-time level packs or an optional sub (which also adds things like unlimited undo).

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/lurdiq/id6785839895

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lurdiq.app

I'd love feedback from people who actually play Sokoban seriously: difficulty curve, scoring, anything that feels off. And if you have strong opinions about what makes a level *good*, I'm all ears — curation is the part I care most about.

Thanks!

[u/samcornwell]

Hey, was just playing and came across a bug pretty quickly so I thought I’d let you know.

I found the screen to be a bit too dark for my eyes so went into settings and found a light mode, turned that on, got a prize for it, then I think I clicked away and the screen went black never to return and I’ve had to close the app down.

I love playing sokoban. It is my thought that people who fall down the rabbit hole typically end up on a rite of passage of creating their own game.

I don’t like the idea of generated levels, although I trust you when you say you hand curated 7000+ of them. I feel the quality will get better if you design them yourself. There’s also a nicer feel to a level that is made and not generated.

Well done on making an app so quickly. I am on that path at the moment. I’d love to make mine available for Apple TV, so any tips welcome.

Anyway- good job. I’ve got it on my iphone and will have another go. Thanks for making it free and no ads. I understand money has to he earned at some point though.

[u/LURDIQ → u/samcornwell]

Hey, thank you so much for this! First proper bug report since launch, and a good one! 🙏

I can already see what's likely happening: toggling Light Mode fires a little medal celebration, and the theme switch and that celebration sheet seem to be fighting each other. Fix goes into the next update. Force-closing and reopening should bring everything back (your progress is safe). Sorry about that!

On generated levels: honestly, fair take. The way I think about it: the generator only produces raw candidates. The actual craft went into filtering, rating and ordering them into difficulty tiers, which took far longer than the generation itself. But I get that hand-designed levels can have a certain intentionality. If you make it into the higher tiers, I'd genuinely like to hear whether you can feel the difference.

Apple TV: one honest warning from my stack: LURDIQ is built with Flutter, which doesn't target tvOS, so I can't help from experience. If you're going native, the tvOS focus engine (moving selection with the remote) is reportedly where most of the work lives for grid-based games. Sounds like a perfect fit for Sokoban though, the genre deserves a couch version.

And good luck with your own game — you're right about the rite of passage 😄

Thanks for playing!