Tile Fuse build notes: the mystery puzzle was a merge game all along
The second blurred card on our homepage â "Mystery Puzzle" â is now open: Tile Fuse, a sliding merge puzzle in the proud 2048 family, dressed as a circuit board where number chips fuse into bigger silicon. Build notes below.
Merge logic is a minefield of tiny bugs
Sliding tiles sounds trivial and isn't. The classic traps: a tile double-merging in one move (4+4 becoming 8, then instantly eating another 8), and merges resolving in the wrong order when three equal tiles line up. Two rules kill every edge case: iterate from the far side of the swipe direction, and give each fused tile a one-move flag so it can't fuse twice. With those in place, the whole move algorithm fits in a screen of code you can actually reason about.
DOM tiles beat canvas here
Neon Breaker needed a canvas â hundreds of moving pixels per frame. Tile Fuse is sixteen cells and a handful of sliding chips, which is exactly what the DOM is good at: each chip is a <div> whose position animates via a CSS transition, and the browser's compositor does the smooth sliding for free. Merge pops and spawn animations are two tiny keyframe rules. Less code, crisper text, native-feeling motion.
Timing is the flavor
The move feels right only if things happen in order: chips slide (120ms), the fused chip pops and doubles, then the new chip drops in. Fire those simultaneously and the board reads as chaos; stagger them by a frame or two and your eye tracks cause and effect. We tuned these delays longer than any other part of the game.
Swipes, honestly
Mobile swipe detection is just touch-start minus touch-end: whichever axis moved farther wins, with a 24-pixel dead zone so taps don't register as moves. The board sets touch-action: none so swiping down doesn't scroll the page â the single most important line of CSS in any touch game we've shipped.
Strategy, for the record
Our office best so far parked the big chip in the bottom-left and never swiped up. The full strategy corner is on the game page â but the short version is: corners, ladders, patience.
Slide the first chip, and welcome to cabinet three.