Puzzle one, I see a grid and what looks like a piece. There's a message that says swipe right, so I click-drag right with the mouse, and suddenly I get 3 stars and a congratulation message. What did I even do?
The same thing repeats for about 5 puzzles. Each time I just swipe left or diagonal or whatever, but I'm not actually learning anything about what these gestures do. I don't see anything move, I don't learn anything about the mechanics of the game.
Then I'm on a puzzle that says swipe -> tap -> swipe and...I have no idea what to do.
EDIT Oh. Once I understand the mechanic, all the puzzles feel trivial, because there are so few things you can do at any time. Each swipe/tap is either correct, or instant loss.
EDIT: I see. Drawing a line causes a mirroring effect at a line perpendicular to the one drawn, located at the furthest point in the direction of the drawn line.
Took me a few goes, but I did puzzle out today's. Very cool.
However, I am not sure about the daily aspect. I doubt I’ll remember about the puzzle tomorrow, and in any case, I like to do puzzles in larger batches, like for one hour in the evening.
Re: visual design: I think showing the actual line of mirroring would be nice. Also, the numbers of taps and swipes were too small for me to notice, I’ve discovered them quite late.
I pass if I try to mirror right to left, but mirroring in the opposite direction does nothing. I have trouble controlling where the mirror plane is. It seems on the 'Tap' level I should be able to solve this by mirroring left to right, but I can only click on the white square to pass.
You control where it is by choosing which tiles to fill.
I first opened this on my laptop with a trackpad and was confused at how scrolling did not work on the "scroll down" section. I ended up reopening it on my iPhone in order to try it. I see from a comment here that you're using this in order to get rid of the floating address bar. Your solution does not work, because if I tap to bring up the address bar once I'm in the game, there's no way to make it go away again and it covers up the bottom bar. So either you need to just live with the idea that the address bar will be visible, or you need to find another solution. [Edit: trying again, bringing up the address bar reverts it back to the "scroll down" screen. The first time it didn't though, so whatever you're doing here isn't reliable].
I also notice that if I add it to my home screen, the icon just opens it in Safari again. You don't have the metadata set up that allows it to be a PWA. Even without taking advantages of any of the extra capabilities of a PWA, it's still nice to support so that way I can have a home screen icon that opens it as its own thing (and this also gets rid of the bottom bar entirely). Every other daily puzzle I play is either in its own app (like NYT Games) or is a PWA.
The tutorial sequence should have some indication of how far along I am. I was starting to wonder if it was going to go on forever when it finally dropped me in the real game. It also should have a step telling me that I'm done with the tutorial and that I'm about to play the real game. This step would be a good place to point out the bottom bar with the tap/swipe counter because I completely missed that until I came back to read the comments.
The "Copy Stats" button should probably be a "Share" button instead that triggers the share sheet (at least on mobile; I don't know what other daily puzzle games do on desktop, maybe they still use the share action there too?).
Overall it's a fun game though! I can see myself adding this to my daily puzzles.
Suggestion:
- make it very explicit that interactions have a mandatory ordering
- make it very explicit that you cannot un-select pre-selected tiles
- make it very explicit that you cannot select "background" tiles
- differentiate phases, "prep / setup" vs "reflection"
Bonus ideas for v1.1:
- track "interactions" accumulating, and provide a mechanism for replaying them (eg "scrub the timeline back and forth").
- help mode: as you "consider" a swipes and the "compass" is shown, have an assistance mode which indicates provisionally the impact of a swipe in each direction as they are selected (but not executed)
Re: differentiating "phases," AFAICT you must always FIRST do any "selection tapping"; and then you must do ONLY one or more "reflection swipes." This was confounding to my way of thinking. I found myself repeatedly making the "wrong" move because while I saw the solution, I was attempting to execute it in a different order.
Or thought I did; because "tapping to fill" ("that's one way...") is allowed, the fact that it is a degenerate solution is not clearly expressed; nor is the fact that there is (I assume) always an "optimal" solution which always involves "prep" followed by one or more reflections.
- It changes the region that reproduces - If a Tap and a Flip produce the same result, scoring prefers the Flip
If you feel like a sequence is being forced that doesn't fit one of those, I'd be curious to see what it is.
The midnight puzzle feels like Wordle style. I'm not sure that's going to pickup in this case. I would just open up all the puzzles. My 2 cents
Feedback: Desktop with trackpad, I swiped and my pointed ended out of the grid and it doesn't let this swipe occur.
Echoing others: - "the numbers of taps and swipes were too small for me to notice, I’ve discovered them quite late" - "The scroll down section felt odd." - on desktop I couldn't figure out what "swipe" meant for a bit (just click-and-drag)
Thank you again for this gift.
Great comments and some new bugs on my list.
The "scroll down" is definitely odd, I haven't quite decided how to handle that.
The reason for it is the floating address bar on mobile browsers- the only way I can find to minimize them is an authentic scroll of the page body. window.scroll() methods or anything I try to do that doesn't literally display an overflowing body requiring a scroll, and it won't retract.
To have the address bar full height while I'm trying to play just kills it for me. I've got some great animations from the original version I haven't brought in yet; the scroll down might "reveal" the puzzle with an animation that feels more natural.
- No more "Scroll Down", which fixes a large group of bugs
- All-new interactive training
- Can be saved as a PWA without re-opening in Safari
- Tweaks to the puzzle generator algorithm (better, but still too easy)
Thank you for playing and reporting bugs!
The daily puzzle isn’t quite enough to scratch my own itch, either. Expect some new puzzle options eventually.
When do the puzzels get updated? It makes sense to add a time zone. I’m definitely going to take another go tomorrow.
- I always wish daily puzzle games like this had an archive of past puzzles.
- The scroll down section felt odd. Maybe an HTML #anchor tag could jump the user to the game screen
- Settings button wasn't working for me. Not a big deal tho
- some extra UX polish always feels nice. Like animations, sound effects. Maybe some color and spacing tweaks. Maybe making the taps/flips numbers more noticeable.
There's a nice 3D animation where you can see the region come towards you as it "flips" in the original, I'll look at bringing it back at some point.
Archive of past puzzles is a good idea.
I’m curious how much difficulty falls off over time after regular play. I’ve only played one puzzle, but without expanding the rules of the game, I feel like the following approach is all I’d need to solve any other puzzle pretty easily:
1. Build local early to save taps. Two squares touching can be painted with 1 tap and 1 flip. 2. Use taps in the middle of the game to create “pivots” for flips. 3. Big and “obvious” symmetries are solved with flips towards the end, taking advantage of “off the edge” squares getting ignored. 4. Fill “islands” (white squares without a corresponding white square for any axis of symmetry + pivot + valid flip) last with taps.
Did you ever try it with hexagons and 12 flip directions? >:)
Today’s and yesterday’s were easy for people that play a lot.
There was one last week that took me a shocking number of tries, I was getting victory texts from friends at 11:50, people who’ve played for years never solved, etc.
It would make experimenting to get the right solution quicker by not having to restart from scratch and take away the pain of having to restart because you accidentally interacted with the game.
For today's daily puzzle, there are two solutions that give different rankings but are effectively the same in terms of moves. You can solve it with 3 taps 4 flips or 2 taps 5 filps. It's not clear why one solution is more efficient than the other since the first two taps or the first tap+flip cover the same amount of the board.
Perhaps a scoring system that was based more on how efficiently you cover the board would allow for different solutions to be equally valid?
Generally, the only time you'd be penalized for an "alternate" solution is when a flip adds a single tile, like you're describing. Any other scenario the flip is the most efficient way to solve the puzzle.
One fun thing– because of this edge, you can occasionally "beat" the generator and solve a puzzle with a tap left over.
Even if I start with a downward swipe, it treats that as a scroll action, not a swipe action.
This is in the tutorial. FF on Android.
OP, have you considered making each level a non-scrollable page?
Until then- I’ll add a way to reset the tutorial when I go back for the accidentally-fake Settings link.
On phone it works perfectly and is very cool! Nice work.
Adding to the list.
Can you elaborate on the swipe aid being buggy?