DevLog #13: Intermediate Campaign & Quality of Life Update

Jan. 12, 2026 · Ace Zhu

New Campaigns

This update is packed with content, featuring two brand-new campaigns designed to take your skills to the next level!

Building on the previous Beginner Campaign where you mastered essentials like Naked/Hidden Sets and Intersections, we are thrilled to present the next steps in your journey.

Intermediate Campaign: Dive into advanced techniques including Fish (and Finned Fish), X-Chains (including Skyscrapers), and XYZ-Wings. These levels are crafted to guide you step-by-step, making complex logic intuitive and easy to grasp.

Practice Puzzles Campaign: Put your skills to the test with 7 levels featuring over 30 hand-picked puzzles ranging from Easy to Hard. Perfect for players looking to challenge their limits and feel a true sense of progression.

Feature Spotlight: Trim Path

We’re excited to introduce an innovative feature: Trim Path. We realized that many puzzles begin with a tedious grind of “Naked Singles” and “Hidden Singles”—often requiring dozens of steps before the real logic begins.

Trim Path intelligently identifies and pre-fills these basic steps, allowing you to skip the busywork and dive straight into the interesting, advanced techniques. This feature is now available in both the Sudoku Editor and Generator. Additionally, we’ve optimized our entire puzzle library to ensure you aren’t wasting time on repetitive opening moves.

Experience Overhaul

We’ve improved the game experience across the board:

Comprehensive Tooltips: Based on feedback that some features were hard to learn, we’ve added comprehensive tooltips and help buttons throughout the interface. Getting started has never been easier.

Difficulty Rebalancing: We heard you—our old difficulty ratings didn’t always match how the game felt. We’ve completely overhauled the difficulty grading system based on community feedback and real-world playtesting. The new system accurately reflects the complexity of the techniques required, giving you a clearer path for progression.

Candidate Highlighting: Additionally, when highlighting a number, the game now automatically highlights relevant candidates, making pattern recognition much smoother.

Happy Solving!

v1.1.0 Patch Notes

New Features

Intermediate Campaign: 4 new levels teaching X-Chains (Skyscraper, 2-String Kite, Turbot Fish), Fish variants (including Finned Fish), and XYZ-Wings.
Practice Campaign: 7 levels with 30+ puzzles to test your skills across a wide range of difficulties.
Expanded Chain Techniques: Added support for Skyscraper and 2-String Kite.
Advanced XY-Wings: Added support for complex extensions like WXY-Wings.
Trim Path: The Sudoku Editor and Generator can automatically change opening Naked/Hidden Singles into givens, reducing repetitive opening steps.
Symmetry Preservation: The Sudoku Editor can intelligently maintain symmetry when minimizing or adding clues.
Contextual Help: Added help buttons to hint text in Gameplay Screen for fast access to technique documentation.
Better Gameplay Help: Added an instruction button to the gameplay interface showing controls and input methods.
Classic Input Mode: Added an option to disable “Auto Candidates” in Settings, allowing for manual candidate input in Rated and Campaign games.

Improvements

Difficulty Overhaul: Completely re-evaluated technique weights to better match human intuition.
Library Cleanup: Removed puzzles with tedious openings and replaced them with “Trim Path” versions.
Unique Rectangle Optimization: Decreased levels from 4 to 3; merged “Avoidable” and “Missing Candidates” into Avoidable Rectangles.
Standardized Terminology: Renamed “General XYZ-Wing” to “ObiWahn XYZ-Wing” and “Unique Rectangle (Filled)” to “Avoidable Rectangle” to align with community standards.
UI Enhancements: Added horizontal scrolling to the hint list for better readability of long text.
Better Explanations: Rewrote logic explanations for XY-Wing, XYZ-Wing, and Unique Rectangles for clarity.
Visual Consistency: Weak links are now drawn as dashed lines, matching standard Sudoku software conventions.
Candidate Highlighting: The number highlight button now also highlights corresponding candidates.
Screenshot Guide: Added a prompt telling players where to find the screenshots after they are captured.
Input Feedback: Improved error messages when inputting invalid initial states in the Analyze Screen.
Broader Search: Expanded the difficulty search range in Rated Games from ±50 to ±300 for better puzzle variety.
More Info: Campaign level details now display puzzle rating and required techniques.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a cell calculation error in the Unique Rectangle explanation text.
Fixed an issue where numbers could still be input while the Generation Result dialog was open.
Fixed a bug where the “Level Completed” toggle was interactable in the level details view.
Fixed an issue allowing board input while the Analyze Screen Initial State Dialog was active.
Fixed a database creation failure on the first game launch.