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Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game

figure.game

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Re: Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game

#81

Post by sumul »

t_mann wrote: post #75

Nice, and cool that this was your first project! Could you share more on your background / how you went about learning those tools? Did you use online courses, or just read the docs?

Oh, just want to clarify that I've done tons of projects. I've been designing and building interactive products professionally for about 20 years. This was just my first time using Next.js, React, etc. I spent about a week reading the official docs for React, Redux, and Next.js and then started building, with lots of visits back to the docs, Stack Overflow, tutorials, and blogs as needed throughout the process.

Re: Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game

#82

Post by Sverigevader »

Hey! Fun game! I very much enjoyed the technical details in your post. Nice work!

Problem: I can't share results with Firefox on my Android. It works with Chrome. After pressing the share button, I get the share menu but when I choose for example WhatsApp, it fails with a toast msg: "Can't send empty message". Choosing "Copy to Clipboard" works but it copies null. Any thoughts? :)

Funny thing is; This isn't the first time this has happened with these Wordle style games where you share your results in a msg.

Re: Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game

#83

Post by t_mann »

sumul wrote: post #81
t_mann wrote: post #75

Nice, and cool that this was your first project! Could you share more on your background / how you went about learning those tools? Did you use online courses, or just read the docs?

Oh, just want to clarify that I've done tons of projects. I've been designing and building interactive products professionally for about 20 years. This was just my first time using Next.js, React, etc. I spent about a week reading the official docs for React, Redux, and Next.js and then started building, with lots of visits back to the docs, Stack Overflow, tutorials, and blogs as needed throughout the process.

Thanks. The UX feels really polished, that makes sense if you're a seasoned professional.

One thing, just curious: did you look intwo whether your privacy notice is GDPR-compliant? Sounds more like frank talk than legalese, haha

Re: Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game

#84

Post by sumul »

MilnerRoute wrote: post #71

I played it and it was fun. Wordle (and some other games) do a mandatory pop-up of the instructions just to make sure first-timers understand the rules. This game didn't -- I see now that there's a small question mark at the upper left -- but "clear everything", and then seeing that things disappeared when I clicked on them, was kind of enough. If I really thought about it, I might even say that was part of the fun f…

I'm glad you enjoyed figuring it out without instructions. Thanks for letting me know. I got some helpful feedback early on that resulted in the "Pick any tile from the bottom row" prompt. I grew up on Atari and NES and would never read game instructions (Atari was before I could read anyway, ha), so my hope was that I wouldn't need to force a walkthrough on anyone, especially since there's no risk in poking at it to see what happens.

Re: Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game

#85

Post by bscphil »

sumul wrote: post #61
parasti wrote: post #53

I couldn't figure out how the game is supposed to be played. I clicked some squares and something happened, but what? Your help screen doesn't contain any information about this. Maybe it's obvious once you know it?

Thanks for letting me know, and sorry if that was frustrating. Your goal is to clear away all the tiles. Tiles that are linked together clear together. Links are made when same-color tiles are contiguously adjacent to each other. Blank spaces are filled in from above. You have a fixed number of moves available to clear them all. Hope that helps!

1. I think giving a proper set of rules in the screen incorrectly titled "how to play" would help a lot. Currently it doesn't tell you how to play, it just says what the win conditions are: "Get rid of all of the tiles before running out of moves."

2. The animation is actually quite misleading, given the absence of rules. When you pick a tile from the bottom row, tiles that will be part of the new bottom row (or touching a tile on the new bottom row) become solid before they slide down to the bottom. (This may only be detectable on slow devices. Unfortunately, the animation for your game is extremely slow and janky on my Android phone from 2019.) This gives the impression that my touch has somehow transformed them, and I spent probably a dozen "games" frustratedly trying to figure out how they were being transformed before I realized that it was just a misleading animation.

IMO the way it should work is that the removed tiles should disappear, then all tiles should slide to the bottom, and only then should tiles newly located on the bottom become solid.

Re: Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game

#86

Post by thehigherlife »

Someone wrote: post #20
thehigherlife wrote: post #5

I like it but wish the puzzle had gravity at the x,y intersection and not just the x axis. For example if you clear out a row it would shift the other rows over to the left.

I think you meant column and columns , not row(s) (for those who need mnemonics: Rows Run to the Right, Columns Climb) I think whether to do that is a design choice, though. The current setup puts a penalty on clearing center columns early, effectively splitting the game in two.

You are correct. I meant Columns. If you clear a column it the whole puzzle should shift left.

Re: Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game

#87

Post by freediver »

asicsp wrote: post #31
sumul wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really appreciate the feedback. This is one of the main things I think about, and relates strongly to the part I mentioned about puzzle generation and difficulty variability. I do want this to feel like a consistently great puzzle. For comparison, the median number of tries it took people to solve yesterday's puzzle (10 moves) was 7. Figure #35's median was 19 tries! Today's puzzle is definitely one of the easier o…

https://davidkoloski.me/blog/intelligent-brute-forcing/ might help, if you don't already have some sort of automatic solver to figure out solutions.

This was a great read, thanks for posting. Would like to see similar quality article for solution to similar problems using genetic algorithms.

Re: Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game

#88

Post by Closi »

sumul wrote: post #38
Closi wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I mean that I went like this: * Solve two pieces * “Oh, maybe if I did it the other way around I could get that in one” * “ok that worked but I wonder if it’s different if I did this…” * “Ok actually all of those have been exactly the same number of moves, but how about if I just reset and do the first again?” I just mean I’m not sure I would class the above as “4 attempts” to show difficulty as you are just u…

Ah, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.

Good luck with the site, production value is great and looks amazing! Finding the difficulty balance will be tough to satisfy both repeat and new visitors, but worthwhile!

Re: Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game

#89

Post by sumul »

t_mann wrote: post #83
sumul wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, just want to clarify that I've done tons of projects. I've been designing and building interactive products professionally for about 20 years. This was just my first time using Next.js, React, etc. I spent about a week reading the official docs for React, Redux, and Next.js and then started building, with lots of visits back to the docs, Stack Overflow, tutorials, and blogs as needed throughout the process.

Thanks. The UX feels really polished, that makes sense if you're a seasoned professional. One thing, just curious: did you look intwo whether your privacy notice is GDPR-compliant? Sounds more like frank talk than legalese, haha

I did look into it, although I'm not a lawyer. My understanding is that privacy notice compliance is a function of how personal information is being collected and used. I chose to collect no personal information whatsoever. I think of this as being respectful of you as the user and to the spirit of these types of regulations, rather than being "maliciously compliant" (like the ubiquitous strong default action of "accept all cookies").

Here's a quote from https://gdpr.eu/privacy-notice/ (emphasis mine)

> If an organization is collecting information from an individual directly, it must include the following information in its privacy notice:

Re: Show HN: Figure is a daily logic puzzle game

#90

Post by sumul »

Sverigevader wrote: post #82

Hey! Fun game! I very much enjoyed the technical details in your post. Nice work! Problem: I can't share results with Firefox on my Android. It works with Chrome. After pressing the share button, I get the share menu but when I choose for example WhatsApp, it fails with a toast msg: "Can't send empty message". Choosing "Copy to Clipboard" works but it copies null. Any thoughts? :) Funny thing is; This isn't the first…

Thanks for reporting. That's a known bug that I'll try to fix soon. Firefox on Android is doing something weird with the Web Share API [1]. In a nutshell, the API has two methods. The first is `canShare`, which lets you ask the browser if it can share the data you're about to give it. The second is `share`, which does the sharing. I only attempt to `share` if the browser gives me the green light via `canShare`. So basically Firefox on Android is saying, "yup this object looks good" and then "nope won't share it." If it just told me no in the first `canShare` check, it would gracefully fall back to just going straight to your clipboard, which is what happens in Firefox desktop browsers.

For now, you can use the little "Copy" button in the corner of the results text bubble area. That one just goes straight to the clipboard reliably.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Share_A...

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