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The delightful game puffies. combines the satisfying snap of a jigsaw puzzle with the nostalgic delight of a sticker book. This 2025 Apple Design Award finalist for Inclusivity is brimming with virtual puffy stickers, the sort that ’80s kids would slap on their binders or trade at recess. Players tear open themed packs of vibrant, kitschy decals — maybe punk-rock capybaras, maybe sporty sushi rolls — and place them on a blank sheet so everything fits without overlapping. The stickers are rendered with such accuracy that players can almost feel the slight give of their glossy surfaces under their fingertips — and the gentle haptic “blop” that accompanies each placement is supremely satisfying. Those sensations are no accident: puffies. developer Lykke Studios spent months fine-tuning these small moments. puffies. Available on: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV Team size: 8 Based in: Thailand and Cyprus Download puffies. from Apple Arcade > “We always start with a material that we like,” says Lykke Studios founder Jakob Lykkegaard. For the company‘s 2023 Apple Design Award winner, stitch. , that material was thread woven into whimsical embroidery puzzles. For their 2022 Apple Design Award finalist, tint. , it was watercolor paint on thick, textured paper. When the team began brainstorming the project that would become puffies. , they set their sights on a jigsaw-style experience that would feel natural on touchscreens. Their eureka moment was landing on puffy stickers as the puzzle pieces; they’re tactile, nostalgic, and far more interesting to look at than a lone jigsaw piece. And then it all blew up. “Because of the game physics, our first prototypes pretty much exploded,” laughs Lykkegaard. Every one of the game’s 4,000 stickers is a 3D-modeled object that’s beholden to the game’s physics engine — and early tests proved they did not play well together. Once the team figured out how to stop pieces from ricocheting around the virtual tabletop, they turned to the problem of what should happen when a player tries to place one sticker on top of another. Is that something that comes up a lot during play? Not really. Did they spend months perfecting it anyway? Absolutely. Lykkegaard recalls discussing the optimal outcome of this sticker-on-sticker scenario with the team. “Does it stick where it’s at? Does it slide down? And if it slides down, in what direction, and at what speed?” he says. They ultimately decided to simply have the sticker zip back to the edge of the puzzle where it came from, but “it’s not inaccurate to say we spent three months on this,” says Lykkegaard. “We scrapped the entire code base and started over again until it felt right.” That pursuit of perfection is threaded throughout the game’s design. The cutouts around each sticker were drawn by hand because automated tracing looked too sterile. Tilting a device causes a subtle parallax effect on a sticker’s vinyl surface, as though it were catching the light in the room. And the team iterated endlessly on snap distances — how close a piece needs to be to its proper spot before it will gently click into place when released — down to the last pixel. “Players can feel it subconsciously,” says Tanin-Andre Hohmann, producer at Lykke Studios. “They may not know it, but they say, ‘Oh, I like this more.’ And then if you ask why, they’re like, ‘I don’t know, really. It just fits better.’” That best-it-can-possibly-be philosophy also extends to the game’s art. From cute cactus creatures to anthropomorphic toilet plungers, puffies. stickers are brought to life by talented illustrators around the world. “It’s literally the artist’s art,” says Hohmann. “We wanted it as unfiltered as possible.” The game also benefits from its home country. While the Denmark-born Lykkegaard and many of his teammates hail from Europe, Lykke Studios is based in Phuket, Thailand — far from stuffy boardrooms and packed conference halls, close to a slower pace of life and easygoing creativity. “I tend to like coming into the bubble of the Bay Area or Europe, exploring things, and leaving that bubble again,“ says Lykkegaard. “And then having an unlimited amount of time to think and come up with new ideas.” That unhurried mindset can be felt in the puzzles themselves. Each sticker-sheet level is painstakingly designed by hand — no algorithms, no automation. Timers and “game over“ screens aren’t a thing in puffies. ; difficulty comes entirely from how many stickers are in the pack the player chooses. And to ensure larger puzzles don't overwhelm players on smaller devices, the camera gently zooms in to frame the area where the current handful of stickers belongs. Accessibility follows the same no-compromises logic. Players can enable more generous snap distances, toggle sticker-placement outlines, and use a finger-offset option that accommodates reduced motor function — or just very large hands. The guiding principle is simple: If a player comes up with a valid barrier the team hadn’t considered, and it’s feasible to fix, the team adds a solution. The cost of all this craft? Time. Thankfully, the team’s previous successes have given them the freedom to polish their games without rigid milestones. But even so, is it worth it? To obsess over squish and snap, to tune the “rip” of opening a sticker pack, to jettison heaps of code because a few interactions don’t feel perfect? “There are many things in the game that nobody will ever see, that we put energy into just because we know it’s there,” says Lykkegaard. “And that makes us proud.” Keep reading Developer stories explore best practices and philosophies from some of the most inventive developers in the Apple community. In each story, we go behind the screens with developers, designers, and engineers to find out how they brought their remarkable creations to life. Browse all developer stories >
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