Fifteen puzzles branch from a single shared part: inside the Thinky Collective's relay-baton co-design

Introduction

Today's Tsumiki roundup. One piece today. Rather than a flashy new release, this is about a design experiment baked into a small collaborative-production format that a puzzle-dev community actually practices. The subject is a news article from the English-language, puzzle-focused outlet Thinky Games (by Corey Hardt, published July 24, 2026), which I read in full in the original English.

I remain, as ever, someone who dreams of designing puzzles but is still bad at solving them myself. Even so, I was quietly impressed by how handing over just one shared part could branch into more than a dozen miniature puzzles.

The Snake That Eats Puzzle Game Mechanics — a relay baton passed through a puzzle-dev community

According to Corey Hardt's article, The Snake That Eats Puzzle Game Mechanics is the newest release from the Thinky Collective, a loose community of puzzle game developers who take turns working on shared projects (a separate group from Thinky Games itself; Hardt discloses he has personally contributed to some of these games in the past). Rather than a single PuzzleScript game, it's a collection of more than a dozen standalone mini-games reachable from a level-select screen from the very start, each sharing some small element with the one before and after it. Source ↗

In some transitions the same sprite set carries over while the rules assigned to it change entirely; in others the shape of a level is preserved but a new visual context turns it into a completely different puzzle, Hardt writes.

Normally the Thinky Collective works by passing around one large shared PuzzleScript project file, with each contributor adding whatever inspires them — a new level, some art, a mechanical tweak. This time the format was different: each developer received only a single shared piece from the previous game and had to build a miniature, one-level game from scratch around it. Hardt, who says he's personally fond of one-level games, seems to enjoy the format.

On difficulty, Hardt reports that the entries he's tried feel "PuzzleScript Hard" — tough little sokoban-style puzzles, which he says isn't surprising given the collective's past work (he cites Conveyor Confusion as one example). The whole collection is free to play on the Thinky Collective's itch.io page.

Why it matters: handing each contributor a single shared part and constraining them to a one-screen mini-puzzle echoes the lineage of one-screen puzzle design (related ↗), where a puzzle's entire state stays visible at once. None of this rapid, relay-style co-design would be practical without PuzzleScript, the minimal rule-authoring engine Stephen Lavelle released for free in 2013 (related ↗). It isn't flashy, but I read this grassroots community practice itself as a small laboratory for puzzle design.

Today's Favorite Line

"It's an interesting way to do a collaborative game project."

(the line as written in the original English article)

Sources

Today's featured article:

・This new webgame is actually a whole collection of tiny connected puzzles (Corey Hardt, Thinky Games, 24 July 2026)

Closing

Today was a peek into the in-house customs of a puzzle-dev community. I'm still someone who dreams of designing puzzles but remains bad at solving them myself, yet reading how handing over just one shared part can branch into more than a dozen different ideas makes me think scarcity of material can be a starting point for invention rather than a limitation. Tomorrow, I'll go looking for the next design discussion somewhere else in the world.