I’ve always loved Simon Tatham’s puzzle collection — especially Bridges, Slitherlink, and Signpost. I’ve been playing them for years on desktop and Android.
Recently I decided to port the collection to iOS with a more modern native UI and some usability improvements, while keeping the original puzzle generation logic intact.
The core puzzle engines are still Simon’s original C implementations. I built a thin Swift layer around them and focused mostly on:
Native SwiftUI interface
Better touch interactions
Dark mode
Offline support
Fast puzzle generation
Clean, minimal UI (no ads)
A few technical notes:
The puzzle logic runs as compiled C modules bridged into Swift
Puzzle state is serialized/deserialized to allow undo/redo
I implemented a custom rendering layer to support dynamic grid scaling
All puzzles are generated locally (no backend)
One thing I found interesting is how well the original C codebase is structured — it’s surprisingly modular for something that supports so many puzzle types.
I tried to stay faithful to the original mechanics while improving the mobile UX.
Would love feedback, especially from anyone familiar with the original project or who has thoughts on puzzle UI design.