[HN Gopher] Show HN: Domino Fit - Domino Tiling Puzzle
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Show HN: Domino Fit - Domino Tiling Puzzle
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!
Author : macromaniac
Score : 169 points
Date : 2024-02-18 17:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dominofit.isotropic.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (dominofit.isotropic.us)
| anotheryou wrote:
| Fun game!
|
| 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.
| macromaniac wrote:
| TYVM! Ok, fixed up the tutorial. The domino shadow is a good
| suggestion, hope I can put it in before the wife gets back from
| her trip
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| A little intimidating at first but eventually all the pieces fit
| into place. I feel like the challenge is in finding early on the
| rows/columns that can only be one exact combination of pieces and
| then building from there. Also looking for odd numbers means
| there must be a 1-piece in that alignment.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| This is fun! The exact type of game my wife loves. Agree on the
| other comment about misclicking off-by-one placement errors on a
| phone touchscreen.
|
| Small feedback, the "copy" button doesnt seem to work on iOS
| Safari. Otherwise would be a good rip of the wordle emoji share
| ability.
| hexomancer wrote:
| That was very fun! Are the puzzles handmade or procedurally
| generated?
| macromaniac wrote:
| Yey these comments are making me smile.
|
| 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.
| josiahpeters wrote:
| I love this approach. Great work.
| codingdave wrote:
| You should be smiling - this is really a decent puzzle game.
| And the last level did take a couple tries before I got it,
| but that was great. The earlier levels were too quick and
| easy once you figured out a couple patterns to look for.
|
| 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.
| transportgo wrote:
| Ar first I didn't understand that you couldn't rotate. Would love
| to have "R" reset the board.
| cperciva wrote:
| Yep, I got stuck for 10 minutes on the first level because I
| didn't realize the pieces couldn't rotate. It's much easier to
| solve once you know about that constraint!
| gus_massa wrote:
| Sometimes my mind wanders until I decide I want a "01" and I tap
| on the "01" tile at the bottom to select it. If the "01" is
| alredy selected, it switchs to the "02". But I tapped the "01" to
| select the "01" in spite it's already selected! (I have the same
| problem with the "02".)
|
| 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".
| SamBam wrote:
| Yes, it was a fun game but that was my only minor criticism. I
| did that all the time. I came to make the same suggestion: the
| domino's at the bottom should only select that domino, not
| toggle between the two.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Really annoyed me too. Should really be a radio button behavior
| instead of a toggle. This post is relevant:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342649
| macromaniac wrote:
| I will try to fix this, sounds frustrating. Most likely I will
| change the default to what yall suggest and keep the way it
| works now as a settings option just for me because my muscle
| memory can't handle the change ha.
| silviot wrote:
| Excellent game. Excellent attitude towards feedback. Keep up
| with the good stuff!
| gus_massa wrote:
| Just in case: Nice game!
|
| 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.
| tcmb wrote:
| I really enjoyed playing it, seems to hit the right sweet spot of
| difficulty. The earlier puzzles (1-4) seemed a bit easy at first,
| but not so easy to deter me from continuing. With #5 I needed a
| bit of back and forth, but not frustratingly much.
|
| 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.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Please change the red/green colors on the row numbers, it's
| difficult for colorblind people. I didn't even realize it was
| changing colors from green to red when I had too many dots.
|
| In general, though, a fun game and looks very polished!
| macromaniac wrote:
| Tyvm :D. There should be a colorblind mode in the settings
| (hotkey combo is szs). There's a kid I want to show the game to
| but he's colorblind too.
| laurentlb wrote:
| The colorblind mode is just using blue instead of green.
|
| 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.
| laurentlb wrote:
| Alternative suggestion: instead of showing the target
| number, show instead the difference between the current sum
| and the target.
|
| 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.
| milemi wrote:
| Great game, enjoyed it a lot!
| recursive wrote:
| Love it. I'd appreciate an endless mode that's not clock gated.
| frogpelt wrote:
| Cool game! Curious, why are there numbers on both sides?
| _fw wrote:
| This is great! I was hooked after the first game. I'm glad these
| are a challenge, but not mind-bendingly difficult.
|
| Thanks for making and sharing, I love it.
| z5h wrote:
| Love it out of the gate.
| toutenrab wrote:
| Really nice, thanks for the discovery and the work behind it!
| noduerme wrote:
| Really fun and clever. The N64 Mario font is a nice touch ;)
| matsemann wrote:
| I really enjoyed this! I've played lots of "Magnets" from
| Tatham's Puzzle Collection [0], which is similar but not the
| same. Your game was really well polished and easy to quickly
| grok. Well done.
|
| [0]: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
| lxe wrote:
| Very satisfying! And definitely unlike any other puzzle I've
| seen. Nicely done.
|
| Edit: just finished the set. This is wordle-level addicting at
| this point. Different strategies to think of, and insanely
| satisfying endgame.
| kevindamm wrote:
| DOMINO FIT #1
| gbdubs wrote:
| This was really good, really intuitive design, the sound added a
| ton to the experience, thanks for building and sharing!
| darajava wrote:
| I can't get over how smooth and satisfying it is, not to mention
| how fun the game itself is! Very well built, I really enjoyed
| playing it!
|
| 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.
| thatguysaguy wrote:
| I think it'd be nice to have some harder puzzles, it seems a bit
| too straightforward once you figure out the tactics ATM.
| pmontra wrote:
| I passed the first level right now. The game is OK but there are
| a couple of things that confused me.
|
| 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.
| Aken wrote:
| This was fun! Thanks for sharing
| city41 wrote:
| It really reminds me of picross, which is a good thing.
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| Hey nice work, I enjoyed that
| tamimio wrote:
| Love it! Hope there was a level selector of some sort if you exit
| the browser.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Thank you for no timer. Timers ruin puzzles.
|
| "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.
| yesthisiswes wrote:
| This is awesome! Great work!
| bhtdz wrote:
| At first, I didn't realize that all of the spaces must be filled
| by tiles. Perhaps that could be made more obvious.
|
| Nice game!
| nhatcher wrote:
| Loved it! Well made and engaging.
|
| Is there just one solution for each puzzle?
| macromaniac wrote:
| Thank you! Yes, only one solution.
| cbracketdash wrote:
| Super cool! Maybe a bigger board would be cool too :D
|
| Would also love to hear about how you designed the algorithm for
| generating puzzles!
| macromaniac wrote:
| TY. I am a fan of 7x7 with 5 stones, 8x8 I need to revisit (I
| haven't tried 8x8 with stones, was playing without stones for a
| while but they add a lot to the game).
|
| 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.
| prezjordan wrote:
| Surprised how much I enjoyed this. Great work! If you made a
| mobile app with, say, 40 puzzles I could easily see myself
| throwing 5 bucks your way. Perfect subway game.
| dudus wrote:
| I loved It.
|
| Inspired me to build a clone to learn Svelte. I'll try that this
| week.
| serenepipe wrote:
| Really fun! Reminds me a lot of Nikoli puzzles[0], which I have
| spent many, many hours playing.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikoli_(publisher)
| rock8y wrote:
| Had a fun few minutes playing the game. Thanks and keep up the
| hard work.
| lanternfish wrote:
| If you like this style of puzzle, I highly recommend Simon
| Tatham's Puzzles on android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/d
| etails?id=name.boyle.chr...). It has implementations of a dozen
| or so puzzles including a domino puzzle not unlike this one. And
| it has no ads or microtransactions to boot.
| execat wrote:
| I love this. The app is less than 4MB and with so many puzzle
| types!
| lanternfish wrote:
| I see it as a kind of "perfect app" in that it does what it
| sets out to do very well and does exactly nothing else. If
| only all mobile games were the same...
| grapescheesee wrote:
| Really enjoyed playing this. Larger board, would be great. Also
| had experienced the switching issue, but everything else was
| smooth.
| ozyschmozy wrote:
| This is really fun, wonder how many different dominos you could
| introduce and still be able to generate puzzles with a single
| solution
| aardvark179 wrote:
| It's a nice puzzle, but because the two dominoes only have one
| fixed orientation some of the puzzles end up being a little too
| easy as the blocked spaces strongly limit the possible tilings. I
| think I did at least one without having to look at the row and
| column counts.
|
| 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. :-)
| chr1 wrote:
| When winning turning green numbers black makes it feel like you
| lost the game. Numbers should stay green until a new game is
| started.
| danjudgemusic wrote:
| Very much enjoyed this, my avg completion time was 267
| sharken wrote:
| Playing this on Android Brave browser using dark theme is not
| possible. The dots do not show.
| pimlottc wrote:
| A few more bits of feedback after playing it a while:
|
| - 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!
| longtimelistnr wrote:
| I couldn't stop playing. very fun game
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