Prototyping your puzzle

Puzzle development should be started with the most obvious and easy-to-develop game mechanics, I'm talking about a simple match-three game with a passive array. Let's call it Static. The artwork will feature the flat look that is currently in fashion; instead of complicated images, simple color squares are used as main tiles. They look stylish (as you can see in the following screenshot) and they facilitate the debugging process:

Tiles cover all of the screen with the exception of the very top part, where a status bar is situated, displaying the Menu and Undo buttons and the scoring values. The width of the tile is 40 points, so there are eight items in a row and eleven in a column; the dimensions of the array are 8 x 11 elements for the iPhone 4 and about 8 x 13 for the iPhone 5 (for the iPad, the dimensions can be changed). Also worth noting is that these dimensions should be adjustable and depend on the difficulty level of the game. Easy mode may utilize smaller...