Numzzle Devlog: part 2

Numzzle Development Journal 2 – Honor Student NPC and Dynamic Teal

1. The Basic Structure of Numzzle

Numzzle had five number cards and four operator cards: plus, minus, multiply, and divide. You could also create two-digit numbers by combining two number cards. The scoring system rewarded you for creating a formula that gets as close as possible to the target number, and when you scrolled down, there was an error review notebook to show how the points were calculated.

2. The Birth of the Honor Student NPC

Then I thought, “Let’s not study alone.” So instead of a top student classmate, I brought in an NPC as your rival.
Anyway, there were just so many possible formulas you could make with the cards, so making the NPC smart was a brutal task. To be honest, I feel bad saying this—because I don’t know how to code, I kept pestering Claude with things like: “The NPC needs to be smarter,” “It has to use two-digit numbers,” “We need to use all the cards, not just five,” “Let’s round to two decimal places only.” Thanks to all that nagging, the Numzzle NPC became super smart.

3. Practice Mode and Battle Mode

Since the NPC always finds the best answer, it scores a perfect 100 over 10 rounds—10 points per round. Meanwhile, the user gets points deducted whenever their answer is worse than the NPC’s.
So, to give the player a fighting chance, I created a battle mode where the user and NPC each get different cards—introducing some luck into the game.
So now, Numzzle includes two game modes: a practice mode where the user and NPC get the same cards, and a battle mode where they get different ones. In the battle mode, scoring depends on how close your answer is to the target number. If both players are equally close, they each get 10 points. If one is closer, only that player scores.
∙ 2025-06-05: The day I uploaded the first playable prototype to the /numzzle repository.

4. The Numzzle Series – Jam, Cho, and Up

Even though I majored in architectural engineering, I found it hard to get a perfect 100 in Numzzle. So I made an easier version—Numzzle Jam—by removing division and reducing the number of cards to match my level.
Then I thought, “Let’s make it playable even for lower-grade elementary students.” So I created Numzzle Cho—a version with pictures and only addition and subtraction. At first, I tried putting one apple on the 1-card, two peaches on the 2-card, and so on… Numzzle Cho uses numbers from 1 to 20, and you can’t create two-digit numbers by combining cards. But by the time I got to 20, I realized I’d need to draw 20 monkeys! So instead, I added fingers to the cards. ☝️✌️🤟✋ The smart-student NPC’s cards don’t have fingers—just the player’s do.
Later I got greedy and made Numzzle Up, a version so hard you can’t solve it without a calculator with π and √ keys. As you can guess, making the NPC smart enough for this version was incredibly hard. Well, not for me—for poor Claude.
So now, the Numzzle repository contains all versions: the original Numzzle, Numzzle Jam, Numzzle Cho, and Numzzle Up.

5. Transformative Teal – Finding a Design Identity

I wanted people to instantly tell it was my game just by looking at it—not because the games are the same, but because they share a consistent identity. Since the games themselves are different, I decided to unify the design—fonts, buttons, overall style.
I watched an idol music video and was inspired by the night sky, school uniforms, and neon signs in the city. I wanted to decorate the game with those colors, but the vibe didn’t come out right. I looked on ColorHunt for popular color palettes, but I kept changing my mind. Then I checked Pantone’s Color of the Year—it was chocolate brown. Meh. But I discovered that trend forecasters WGSN and Coloro had predicted “Transformative Teal” for 2026. I figured, “Even if I get fickle, I can live with teal for a year.” So teal it was.
∙ 2025-07-05: The day I fully redesigned Numzzle with the teal theme and overwrote the original repository. The original version was responsive, but this new teal design was not, so the UI broke on mobile devices.

6. The Repository Swap – Earlier Game, Later Repo

To restore the responsive version, I created a new repo called /math and re-uploaded the version from June 5. The name isn’t the actual game name—just a placeholder repo title. Please forgive the lack of creativity.
So in the end, the earlier game is in the later repo, and the later game is in the earlier repo. If you visit Numzzle (http://soosoohan.github.io/numzzle/) on your phone, you’ll be quietly kidnapped and redirected to /math without even realizing it.

7. What’s Next – Numzzle Mate

Technically, I could endlessly generate Numzzle series games just by mixing up the cards. But I don’t feel the need for that yet. Instead, I’m planning to create Numzzle Mate—a version that skips practice mode and jumps straight into battle mode.

🪄 Dev log originally written in Korean | Translated with ChatGPT

**[Numzzle Devlog: part 1 ]**
- English(영어): https://soosooland2025.blogspot.com/2025/08/numzzle-devlog-episode-1-1.html
- Korean(한글): https://soosooland2025.blogspot.com/2025/08/1_4.html

Fun puzzles, Soosooland : https://soosooland.com/

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