Naptide Devlog 1: When a sleeping cat blocks the way

A sleeping cat blocks the way

In Naptide, every awake cat slides when you swipe. A cat that reaches its own bed falls asleep and stays there. Other cats' beds are passable, but a sleeping cat blocks the way. Filling the nearest bed first can leave another cat trapped. That small rule makes the order of settling in as important as the direction of a swipe.

The aim was a small room where you could think for a moment and take a break. Undo stays available in place of a timer or lives, and a round ends when every cat is tucked in. The design leaves room to try a different order without demanding quick hands.

We placed the first three rooms by hand

The first room contains one cat and a bed with the same mark. One swipe to the right solves it. The second introduces a change of direction. In the third, stopping against a wall lines the cat up with a bed inside the room. Each room introduces one movement instead of asking the player to read a long explanation first.

Rooms 4 through 6 introduce two cats. We selected them so that moving together and being stopped by another cat appear in the solution. Adding a second cat can simply make the player do the same thing twice. We wanted the early rooms to show cats moving in the same direction while also using one another's positions.

Choosing rooms that can be solved

After the first three rooms, we generated candidates and searched for solutions before keeping them. We checked that each could be completed, that its shortest solution matched the intended move count, and that it was not just a rotated or reflected version of an existing board. The resulting 48 regular rooms form four chapters. Shortest move counts helped put them in order, but those numbers alone cannot establish how difficult a room feels to a person.

Today's room comes from a separate collection of 120 boards, selected using the device's date. It rotates through rooms with checked solutions rather than inventing a new puzzle on the spot. The day's room is available without an internet connection.

Rethinking a stuck position

Hints search from the cats' current positions instead of repeating an answer for the starting board. If the position is trapped, the game asks the player to undo or restart. It does not suggest a direction while pretending that a route remains. Undo and restart have no usage limit, and every room is open from the beginning.

Progress and best move counts are stored on the device using SharedPreferences. Restarting the current room preserves completed rooms. These are local records and are removed when the app is uninstalled.

Getting it onto an Android screen

This game was written in Java, with the room and beds drawn using Android Canvas. The cat illustrations were generated with GPT Image. Circle, diamond and triangle marks identify the matching beds alongside their colors. Short windows and enlarged text use a scrollable layout to keep the controls reachable.

Getting an Android screen was still a separate hurdle after checking the puzzle logic. The app file referenced by the installation record had disappeared. Reinstalling the retained APK allowed us to capture the home screen. The Room 01 image in this article was captured separately from the signed 1.0.0 version on September 8.

At the September 8, 11:00 KST checkpoint, Google Play had accepted Naptide 1.0.0's submission and was running automatic checks. Public availability had not been confirmed. The next question is where players stop to reconsider the order, so we can revisit the difficulty we have so far estimated from move counts.