developer stories
The power of puffies.
fun game Puffies Combines the satisfying snap of a jigsaw puzzle with the nostalgic joy of a sticker book.
This 2025 Apple Design Award finalist for inclusivity is filled with virtual puffy stickers, the kind ’80s kids used to slap on their binders or trade in at recess. Players tear off 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 precision that players can almost feel the light touch of their shiny surfaces beneath their fingers – and the gentle haptic “blop” that accompanies each placement is extremely satisfying. Those sensations are no accident: Puffies Developer Lyke Studios spent months perfecting these little 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 content we love,” says Jacob Lykegaard, founder of Lykke Studio. For the company’s 2023 Apple Design Award winner, Stiching.That material was the thread woven into whimsical embroidery puzzles. For their 2022 Apple Design Award finalists, Colour.It was watercolor paint on thick, textured paper.
When the team began brainstorming the project that would become PuffiesThey focused on a jigsaw-style experience that would feel natural on a touchscreen. His eureka moment was landing on the puffy stickers as puzzle pieces; They’re tactile, nostalgic, and much more interesting to look at than a single jigsaw piece.
And then it was all destroyed. “Because of game physics, our first prototype exploded a lot,” laughs Lykkegaard.
sticker shock
Every one of the game’s 4,000 stickers is a 3D-modeled object thanks to the game’s physics engine – and early tests proved they don’t play well together. Once the team figured out how to prevent the pieces from moving 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 this something that comes up often during play? Not necessary. Did they spend months perfecting it? Absolutely.
Remember to discuss the optimal outcome of this sticker-on-sticker scenario with the Likeguard team. “Does it stick where it is? Does it slide downwards? And if it slides downwards, in what direction and at what speed?” He says. Ultimately they decided to put the sticker zip back on the edge of the puzzle where it came from, but “It’s not unfair to say we spent three months on this,” says Lykkegaard. “We deleted the entire code base and started again until it felt right.”
That pursuit of perfection is woven into the game’s design. The cutouts around each sticker were made by hand because automated tracing would have looked too sterile. Tilting an instrument creates a subtle parallax effect on the vinyl surface of the sticker, as if it is catching the light in the room. And the team iterated endlessly on snap distances – down to the last pixel – to determine how close a piece should be to its proper location before gently clicking into place upon release.
“Players can feel it subconsciously,” says Lykke Studio producer Tannin-André Hohmann. “They may not know it, but they’re like, ‘Oh, I like this better.’ And then if you ask why, they say, ‘I don’t really know.’ It fits just better.”
Cactus and Plunger
That best-possible philosophy also extends to the art of the game. From cute cactus creatures to anthropomorphic toilet plungers, Puffies The stickers are brought to life by talented illustrators from around the world. “It’s literally the artist’s art,” says Hohmann. “We wanted it to be as unfiltered as possible.”
The game also benefits from its own country. While Denmark-born Lykkegaard and many of his colleagues hail from Europe, Lykke Studio is based in Phuket, Thailand – away from stuffy boardrooms and packed conference halls, closer to a slower pace of life and easier creativity. “I love coming to the bubble of the Bay Area or Europe, discovering things, and then leaving that bubble again,” Lykkegaard says. “And then there’s unlimited time to think and come up with new ideas.”
That impatient mentality can be felt only in puzzles. Each sticker-sheet level is painstakingly designed by hand – no algorithms, no automation. Timers and “game over” screens are not a thing Puffies; The difficulty depends entirely on how many stickers are in the pack chosen by the player. And to make sure the large puzzles don’t overwhelm players on smaller devices, the camera slowly zooms in to frame the area where the existing handful of stickers are.
maximize reach
Accessibility follows the same no-compromise logic. Players can enable more generous snap distances, toggle the sticker-placement outline, and use a finger-offset option that accommodates reduced motor function — or simply very large hands. The guiding principle is simple: If a player comes up with a valid obstacle that the team has not considered, and it is possible to fix, the team adds a solution.
The cost of all this craft? Time. Thankfully, the team’s past successes have given them the freedom to hone their game without any rigid goals. But still, is it worth it? To obsess over squishes and snaps, to tune out the “rip” of opening sticker packs, to delete piles of code because certain interactions don’t feel right?
“There are a lot of things in the game that no one will ever see, we put energy into them just because we know it’s there,” says Lykegaard. “And that makes us proud.”
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