Mhm... my suggestions:
A) Let the user find out the correct orientation.
B1) Make the snapping happen only on click/touch release.
B2) Make the snapping happen over a longer distance.
Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website
41–50 of 74 posts
Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website
#42Possibly just for me, but joining pieces doesn't exactly feel right. Specifically the distance required for snap feels random. Also minor annoyance: it seems that you can't join more than two pieces at once.
Yeah, I think I need to tweak the snap distance a bit further. Sometimes pieces snap together unintentionally while dragging across the canvas, which surprises users. Would you be able to clarify the second point? You can drag groups of pieces to connect to other groups. But I have a feeling you're talking about something slightly different.
Came here to comment about this specifically. Being a little more generous on the drop zone would be nice. I could see the dragging around and pieces snapping in would be an odd behavior. Can you limit the "snap" test until a piece drop type of something to make it more of a concious effort than magic?
Another thing I missed was being able drag select multiple pieces to move them around the workspace. The large zoomability to increasing work area was nice.
Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website
#43I really enjoyed that. Thank you. This is great! I have some suggestions, if you don't mind:
- Biggest feature that I'd like to see is a leaderboard. While it wouldn't be fair to allow me to get on the leaderboard after already seeing a certain puzzle.
- Allow users to upload their own pictures to use as puzzles. But for obvious reasons, don't make these public.
- The auto-rotation, though convenient, kinda took away from the jigsaw puzzle experience. Maybe make it rotate to a random perpendicular orientation on the first touch and allow manual 90° rotations afterward by tapping it. To make these operations mutually exclusive, add a spacial threshold and a temporal threshold such that if neither has been surpassed during an active operation, then handle the operation as a tap on release, and if either is surpassed during an operation, then handle the operation as a drag.
- Add a temporal leaderboard. Only allow times for first attempts. To deter cheating, maybe make it available to logged in users only. Though that's not a perfect solution for determent of cheating, it's at least something. The RNG would need to be seeded for fairness.
- I'm glad to see that you're planning on implementing multiplayer. That'll be exciting!
- Allow bulk movement of unconnected pieces—something like Photoshop's smudge tool. If you're unfamiliar with that, you essentially set the radius of the brush, and press and drag to push anything that intersects the brush circle in the direction that the cursor last moved. Or do something simpler like dragging a rectangle over some region to select all pieces that are contained within the region by some percentage (e.g. 50%) and then dragging the selection to the desired region. The current workaround is to zoom or pan and then move each piece individually to the desired region.
I did the demo puzzle on easy mode, so I apologize if some of this is already a thing.
Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website
#44moving 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.
I'm not your target audience, I rarely try puzzles, but I went for the easy demo. With the auto-rotate I even finished it, probably would have quit without.
Perhaps five difficulty levels, have auto-rotate for the first two, and make the final two levels only available to winners of a third/fourth level puzzle.
Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website
#45Really slick demo, lots of fun. +1 to adding a leaderboard and then segregating by first attempts and multiple attempts.
1v1 could also be quite fun.
Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website
#46moving 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.
It feels like the automatic rotation is a middle ground that isn't going to make either groups happy. It's not realistic enough for the folks who want manual rotation, and it's too realistic for people who just want to put the picture together (or are used to traditional digital jigsaw puzzles). So, I think either implementing the option to choose or sticking to one style would be the way to go.
Personally, I'd be happy with either method, but this middle ground hits an uncanny valley, and makes it too difficult to visually recognize which pieces have already been auto-rotated. It'll basically just encourage folks to click on every piece to start with, which is a lot of extra clicking.
Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website
#47I just did the demo puzzle on an iPhone (11 Pro running 15.1), and I found it worked surprisingly well for a phone screen, and I didn’t have any problems completing it. Nicely done.
It works on Firefox on Android too.
The only complain is that autorotating pieces makes it too easy.
Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website
#48moving 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.
Another suggestion:
Tabletop Simulator has a Jigsaw Join 2 add-on that is really great for doing puzzles. They allow you to rotate the piece by scrolling the middle mouse wheel while "holding" it.
Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website
#49Pieces are missing! I scrolled around everywhere and couldn’t find them. Yes I differentiated between scrolling the canvas versus the pieces versus the completed portion. If this is how the demo works, it’s kind of off putting since it punishes you for just trying it out. Even if I was interested I would not sign up for a site that does this. At least there should be a warning up front before you waste time on the de…
There was no missing pieces for me. Are you sure you weren't like me and your missing piece was under the board?
Re: Show HN: I built a jigsaw puzzle website
#50Worked great on mobile.