CranKen – A Math Puzzle Game for the Play.date
Exploits Playdate's crank beautifully for KenKen, but audience is tiny.

Math puzzle meets rolling-ball navigation with adaptive performance for older phones.
Mobile puzzle gamers, parents seeking educational games
Balance - Number Harmony · Junior Logician · AA Blocks
The idea was to make math genuinely fun by combining it with navigation. You roll a sphere through maze-like levels, collecting numbered and operator cubes that must add up to exact values to unlock doors and reach the exit.
I also wanted the game to feel like a nice place to be, so I built it around a nature scene with trees, mountains and a waterfall. That came with a cost though, performance on older/weaker phones was an issue during my first release. I ended up building an adaptive performance system that auto-selects a quality setting (low/medium/high/ultra) based on the device's RAM. It helped a lot, though I'm still fine-tuning it.
The other big lesson was around controls. I originally used physics for the rolling sphere, which meant the ball would decelerate before changing direction which players found unresponsive and slow. Removing the physics and making movement instant transformed how the game felt.
Unity UI is not my strength and players have mentioned that it could use some work. The UI is usable but I may end up changing it.
Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/SGbQa3-ORhI
Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.JabGames.P...
Any feedback or thoughts on the game is appreciated.
Exploits Playdate's crank beautifully for KenKen, but audience is tiny.
The project grafts hexadecimal arithmetic onto a tiled crossword mechanic — you pick squares or shapes that represent a target hex number, with difficulty toggles, a timer, and an on-demand hint (press H). The UI is clean and immediately playable, but the core idea is a clever niche twist rather than a broad innovation; it could use better onboarding, scoring explanation, and shareable hooks to make it stick.
Clever tessellation math puzzles—hexagon and triangle variants add genuine cognitive depth.
Wordle-for-math with rare-solution hunting, but Nerdle and Countdown already solved this.
Offline RNG with rollback and hex verification—bingo without cages or printed cards.
15 years of bespoke math mechanics, but playable demos remain behind 'Preamble' link.