Show HN: Domino Fit – Domino Tiling Puzzle(dominofit.isotropic.us) Domino fit is a domino tiling puzzler I spent a lot of time both making and playing. Its like sudoku but with a geometric angle, the sum of the dots must match the row and column numbers. It's running on Betsy, the server under my couch, and was made with typescript. I'm proud of it. I hope you give it a shot, and appreciate any thoughts or criticisms! |
One suggestion: I have a friend who is color-blind and has a hard time seeing the red and green numbers. Maybe add a visual indicator? Thanks!
Would also love to hear about how you designed the algorithm for generating puzzles!
Absolutely yes-
Funny story, originally it was generating 10kish tilings for a 6x6 board with 2 stones. but when I moved one of the stones over we would get... 0. WHAT? Apparently there is an entire field about dominoes (of course) and I had stumbled into something called the "Mutilated Chessboard Problem". It's impossible to tile a chessboard that has the top left and bottom right square removed. 62 open squares, doesn't matter, it's untilable. Crazy. Many boards are like this.
There is actually a very neat proof as to why, too. Placing a domino tile removes 1 black and 1 white square. So if you have e.g. 10 black and 12 white squares you're done for, you will always end up with the 0 black squares and 2 white squares remaining. With this intuition I was able to speed up the generator by skipping these types of boards.
As for it's implementation, it is a bit brute force, it recurses over a 64 bit bitboard to find all the possible domino tilings for a particular board, using bitwise operators for moves. I then use the 01 02 domino values and group them by the row/column numbers, so I can eliminate multiple solutions (less fun imo). There are definitely trillions of tilings, so after calculating all of them for a particular board and shuffling them only the first N are stored and then saved to a sqlite database.
Inspired me to build a clone to learn Svelte. I'll try that this week.
Is there just one solution for each puzzle?
My recomendation is to change the logic of the selection at the bottom. Instead of switching each time, I'd like that if I tap on the left bottom I select the "01", and if I tap on the right bottom I select the "02".
Another thing that would help me is if it showed a ghosted image of where the piece will be before I place it (like Starcraft, Age of Empires, and a million other games do). If you had that, I would never place the wrong piece accidentally, or accidentally in the wrong place.
Great game, really fun!
I played the new set today, and I think the balance between the 01 and 02 is very good and make the puzzles very interesting.
I think there would be more chance of it going viral if there was one difficult level per day, rather than 5 increasing in difficulty.
But please change the tutorial example to something where the dots don't align with each other on the dominos (this is obviously not required, but part of the usual domino game and therefore it's easy to make that wrong assumption here)
It would also be nice to see how the domino will be dropped, I often put it down off by one square. Maybe a faint outline under the cursor, or even snapped to the grid.
"youwin3.mp3" sounds a little harsh to my ear for some reason. I looked at the sound in Audacity and it wasn't clipping — but sounded like it.
- Move the "next board" arrow to appear within the playfield. It feels weird to move the mouse outside the playfield just for that, and then back to the playfield to hit the "start" button. Just have them both appear in the same place.
- Rework the progress/trophy icon to make it clear there are 5 stages. It gave me the impression there were 4 stage and that you receive the trophy as a reward after the four stage (when the row of dots is full).
These are relatively minor, though, it's a fun game!
Nice game!
Thanks for making and sharing, I love it.
Also I really like the graphics and sound, it's pleasant to look at and to listen to, which is important for a puzzle game imo.
A bit of both, made a generator that spits out games and then I played 10 procedurally generated levels and picked the ones I liked.
In general my favorite levels are the 7x7 with 5 stones, you can legit logic them out if you are patient. I only put in one since it takes quite a bit of practice to get to that point.
Everyone is correct that this needs a better intro and better overall UX. But the concept is solid enough that I think this idea could go somewhere. Well done.
Maybe tapping on the left selects the left piece, right the right, and middle toggles? But that's just booked shedding. Great, polished puzzle!
Small feedback, the “copy” button doesnt seem to work on iOS Safari. Otherwise would be a good rip of the wordle emoji share ability.
In general, though, a fun game and looks very polished!
While it might work for some people, I'd suggest to redesign. Don't convey information with color alone. For example, you could switch the boldness, circle the number, or something else. The goal is to make it playable even if my goal setting is set to grayscale mode.
Once you do this, you may be able to get rid of the colorblind setting.
My entire friend group and I love the game, thank you for making it <3
Edit: just finished the set. This is wordle-level addicting at this point. Different strategies to think of, and insanely satisfying endgame.
If you’re trying to make this a daily thing then I think I understand that decision on difficulty, and I may have played too many games of magnets in Simon Tatham’s puzzle collection so I may not be your target market. :-)
I think there should be a way to mark dominos as "confirmed" vs "guesses", because not everyone is going to have working memory to remember which tiles laid down are "guesses" for deriving contradictions.
The small example at the home page didn't prepare me to play the level. I had to place many pieces on the board before I realized that the sum of the number of dots must match the number on the rows and columns. The example didn't lead me to that.
So 0 would tell me the line is complete. A negative number would show there's an error and I need to remove a piece.