Building a Car-Unblocking Puzzle in Cocos Creator

Lot Escape started from one rule: a car can only move the way it faces. Everything else in the game grows out of that.

The rule set

• The lot is a grid. Each car covers two cells and points up, down, left or right.
• Tap a car and it drives straight ahead until it leaves the lot or hits something.
• Hitting another car costs one chance. Clearing every car finishes the level.

That's the entire game. The fun comes from reading the lot: a car near the exit might still be stuck behind three others pointing the wrong way.

Making sure every level has a solution

Hand-placing cars and hoping the level is solvable doesn't scale. Instead, each level is built backwards: start from an empty lot, then add cars one at a time, only placing a car where it could drive out of the current lot. Played forwards, the reverse of that order is always a valid solution.

Where AI helped

I used an AI coding assistant to draft the grid logic, the level JSON format and the editor steps in Cocos Creator. Every piece was read, run and fixed by hand — the assistant is fast at boilerplate, but the level rules and the feel of the bump animation needed a lot of manual tuning.

What's next

More levels, a gentler difficulty curve for the first ten, and a few new car sizes. If you've played it, try the first ten levels and see how few bumps you can finish with.