Tap the hint button in JellySplit and you’ll get a swap that’s guaranteed to be part of a winning line — and not just any win, a three-star win. There’s no clever runtime AI behind that button. We solved every puzzle in the game, offline, and shipped the answers with the app.
Every puzzle in the game has an answer
JellySplit’s 168 campaign levels and 1,364 daily puzzles are all hand-authored. Before any of them ship, a solver runs over them on our build server, walks every possible sequence of swaps, and proves at least one solution exists. Puzzles that can’t be three-starred don’t get shipped.
That’s the promise the game is built on: every level you see in JellySplit can be three-starred. Not “probably,” not “if you’re clever enough.” Verified, every build.
The hint button just reads an answer key
Because every level is solved ahead of time, the hint button doesn’t need to think when you tap it. It looks up your current board in a small precomputed table and returns the next move on a three-star winning line. It’s instant, it’s the same on any device, and — this is the important part — it’s always a move that leads to a win, not a guess.
That matters because a hint that leads you into a dead end is worse than no hint at all. It breaks trust in the system. The only way to make sure that can’t happen is to never rely on a runtime guess in the first place.
Hints are a budget, on purpose
You start with three hints. A new one regenerates every six hours, up to the cap. Burn them all and you have to either wait or play on your own. That rhythm is intentional — if hints were unlimited, the answer would always be one tap away and reading the board would stop feeling like part of the puzzle.
A test plays every puzzle on every build
Before the game ships, a test creates a virtual player whose only strategy is “tap the hint.” That player plays all 1,532 puzzles in the game. Every one has to finish with a three-star win. If even one doesn’t, the build fails. That’s how we stop a bad hint from ever reaching your phone: the answer key is re-verified from scratch every time we push an update.
For developers
The full engineering writeup — the memoized DFS solver, the 96-bit packed board representation, the memo-key collision that silently returned hints from the wrong search branch, and the seven daily puzzles the quality test quietly killed — lives on the Island & Pine studio blog: Solving every level at build time: how 1,532 hand-crafted puzzles stay winnable.