We’re a small team making our first game, Wyrd Hands, in Unreal Engine 5.8 with C++. The free demo is out for Windows, Linux and Android.
The core idea: every tile carries a hand pointing up, right, down or left. A tile on the edge pointing away from its side starts a route, and a chain of hands that each point at the next, reaching the far side, clears and scores. Routes that share tiles score extra.
A few dev notes: the whole UI is built in C++ (UMG), there is a bot player we use to balance the game, and phones run a lightweight scene capped at 30 fps, all from one project that builds for Windows, Linux and Android.
We’d love feedback on your first minute with it and how it feels. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGzqe-cff-Q
Some of the art and text was made with AI assistance.
Thanks, glad those two rules landed. The border doing design work is exactly how I think of it, and the shared-tile bonus is there for the reason you describe.
On the spawn odds: they’re even. Each piece’s hand direction is picked uniformly from the four, apart from the 3-block angle, where the directions are fixed by the shape so a route can run through the bend. I haven’t biased them using the bot. The bot is there for performance and regression checks, such as frame rate, spikes and heat on real phones, and to catch changes that make the game slower or harder to play. I haven’t used it yet to tune direction value.
Your question did make me look closer at the edge rule, though. With even odds, about 1 in 4 edge tiles points toward its own side and can’t start a route, and about 2 in 4 on corners. Once the bot’s games are seeded, I want to measure whether any direction ends up noticeably more or less valuable, and adjust the odds if it does.