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Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website

puzzlepanda.com

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Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website

#2
Hi HN!

I built this website last year for family members who enjoy playing jigsaw puzzles on their computers. I decided to build it because I frequently heard complaints about how slow some of the more popular jigsaw apps are and how they are filled with annoying advertisements.

The site is completely free to use. No advertisements and no selling of user data. However, I do offer a paid tier for users that want more jigsaw puzzles and difficulty options.

On the technical side, I'm using Svelte on the frontend with a tiny bit of wasm, and Rust for a few backend APIs. I hope the site feels snappy, it's one of the main reasons why I decided to build it.

There's a demo puzzle linked on the home page for anyone who doesn't want to sign up! I'd recommend trying it on a computer or tablet as mobile is still a little rough around the edges.

Happy to answer any questions about it!

Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website

#4
post #3

moving the pieces cause them to rotate (to the correct position). Doesn't that make the puzzle super easy if you know how everything is oriented?

Yeah, this is something I'm considering still. I've heard from a few users that they don't like the pieces being rotated at all, and some would rather have click-to-rotate to make it more difficult.

I might have to make this an option, but waiting to hear from more users on this before deciding.

Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website

#5
post #3

moving the pieces cause them to rotate (to the correct position). Doesn't that make the puzzle super easy if you know how everything is oriented?

In real life puzzles you can often see the correct orientation from the grain of the paper so it's not completely unrealistic.

Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website

#6
post #5
post #3

moving the pieces cause them to rotate (to the correct position). Doesn't that make the puzzle super easy if you know how everything is oriented?

In real life puzzles you can often see the correct orientation from the grain of the paper so it's not completely unrealistic.

As a casual puzzle fan, I never relied on that and knowing the orientation of a piece changes the experience for me; sample size one.

Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website

#7
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In real life puzzles you can often see the correct orientation from the grain of the paper so it's not completely unrealistic.

As a casual puzzle fan, I never relied on that and knowing the orientation of a piece changes the experience for me; sample size one.

Exact same thing here.

Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website

#9
post #8

I would be surprised if anyone gives you money. There are many other free puzzle websites that exist that have those same features and are free. One comes to mind that has multiplayer: https://jigsawpuzzles.io But good luck, and have fun making the thing :)

You would be surprised then :)

Looking forward to adding multiplayer soon! I actually added websocket support last week and I'm currently running a test in the background to see how many I can handle concurrently.

Other than that, I have many ideas to make the paid plan more valuable too!

Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website

#10
That bring me a memory of building something very similar to this at work. So back in time I worked on an online game server framework and we needed some sort of technical demo, and it occurred to me that a multiplayer jigsaw puzzle would work. I quickly prototyped an JavaScript client and that eventually became a fully-blown online social game, but the project was shelved because we had other things to work on. A glimpse of that client can be seen in my website [1]. (The prototype was built in my spare time so I could release this in public. It was a mistake to build this on SVG, by the way.)

[1] https://s.mearie.org/jigsaw/

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