The game is based on a small region of tiles in a grid that is mirrored, modified, and mirrored again. It’s based on a novel phenomenon I noticed where, once these mutations happen a few times, the original region can be hard to recognize. You have a feeling there are symmetries in the image, but they are just out of grasp. Going further, if only part of the region is visible, such as mirroring off the edge of the board, it adds to the feeling and it becomes a satisfying puzzle to solve.
I originally published this on the app stores, but after spending some money on marketing, I didn’t have line of sight to something people would pay for. I had built it around a hosted level API to tweak levels between version releases, making it prone to software rot over a few years. SSL certs would expire, credit cards would expire, App Store agreements need to be renewed, etc.. Without a continual drip of effort I wasn’t motivated to put in, it defaulted to broken.
With that software rot in mind, and hoping to make something that would be around for a while for my friends and family to play, I started making a web-only, client-side only version. Still prone to rot, but not nearly as many moving pieces. It’s missing some of the polish of the original and the puzzles aren't hand curated with a graduating difficulty, but it’s playable on many modern devices. The generated puzzles are good ~75% of the time. I’m still working out how to detect the dud puzzles- they are playable, but not fun. I’ve got ideas on what defines a “good” puzzle, but haven’t formalized them into a fitness function yet.
One other note– while there are almost definitely UI bugs (please report!), if it says the puzzle can be solved in X taps & flips, it can. Those numbers are derived from how the puzzle itself renders, so it’s (thankfully) not prone to producing impossible to solve puzzles. Merely ones that may appear so at first-- hence the name.
Today’s puzzle is a good difficulty to start with, a new one generates daily at midnight EST. There's no cookie or tracking, so let me know if you're playing!
Puzzle one, I see a grid and what looks like a piece. There's a message that says swipe right, so I click-drag right with the mouse, and suddenly I get 3 stars and a congratulation message. What did I even do?
The same thing repeats for about 5 puzzles. Each time I just swipe left or diagonal or whatever, but I'm not actually learning anything about what these gestures do. I don't see anything move, I don't learn anything about the mechanics of the game.
Then I'm on a puzzle that says swipe -> tap -> swipe and...I have no idea what to do.
EDIT Oh. Once I understand the mechanic, all the puzzles feel trivial, because there are so few things you can do at any time. Each swipe/tap is either correct, or instant loss.
EDIT: I see. Drawing a line causes a mirroring effect at a line perpendicular to the one drawn, located at the furthest point in the direction of the drawn line.
Took me a few goes, but I did puzzle out today's. Very cool.
However, I am not sure about the daily aspect. I doubt I’ll remember about the puzzle tomorrow, and in any case, I like to do puzzles in larger batches, like for one hour in the evening.
Re: visual design: I think showing the actual line of mirroring would be nice. Also, the numbers of taps and swipes were too small for me to notice, I’ve discovered them quite late.
I pass if I try to mirror right to left, but mirroring in the opposite direction does nothing. I have trouble controlling where the mirror plane is. It seems on the 'Tap' level I should be able to solve this by mirroring left to right, but I can only click on the white square to pass.
You control where it is by choosing which tiles to fill.
I first opened this on my laptop with a trackpad and was confused at how scrolling did not work on the "scroll down" section. I ended up reopening it on my iPhone in order to try it. I see from a comment here that you're using this in order to get rid of the floating address bar. Your solution does not work, because if I tap to bring up the address bar once I'm in the game, there's no way to make it go away again and it covers up the bottom bar. So either you need to just live with the idea that the address bar will be visible, or you need to find another solution. [Edit: trying again, bringing up the address bar reverts it back to the "scroll down" screen. The first time it didn't though, so whatever you're doing here isn't reliable].
I also notice that if I add it to my home screen, the icon just opens it in Safari again. You don't have the metadata set up that allows it to be a PWA. Even without taking advantages of any of the extra capabilities of a PWA, it's still nice to support so that way I can have a home screen icon that opens it as its own thing (and this also gets rid of the bottom bar entirely). Every other daily puzzle I play is either in its own app (like NYT Games) or is a PWA.
The tutorial sequence should have some indication of how far along I am. I was starting to wonder if it was going to go on forever when it finally dropped me in the real game. It also should have a step telling me that I'm done with the tutorial and that I'm about to play the real game. This step would be a good place to point out the bottom bar with the tap/swipe counter because I completely missed that until I came back to read the comments.
The "Copy Stats" button should probably be a "Share" button instead that triggers the share sheet (at least on mobile; I don't know what other daily puzzle games do on desktop, maybe they still use the share action there too?).
Overall it's a fun game though! I can see myself adding this to my daily puzzles.
Suggestion:
- make it very explicit that interactions have a mandatory ordering
- make it very explicit that you cannot un-select pre-selected tiles
- make it very explicit that you cannot select "background" tiles
- differentiate phases, "prep / setup" vs "reflection"
Bonus ideas for v1.1:
- track "interactions" accumulating, and provide a mechanism for replaying them (eg "scrub the timeline back and forth").
- help mode: as you "consider" a swipes and the "compass" is shown, have an assistance mode which indicates provisionally the impact of a swipe in each direction as they are selected (but not executed)
Re: differentiating "phases," AFAICT you must always FIRST do any "selection tapping"; and then you must do ONLY one or more "reflection swipes." This was confounding to my way of thinking. I found myself repeatedly making the "wrong" move because while I saw the solution, I was attempting to execute it in a different order.
Or thought I did; because "tapping to fill" ("that's one way...") is allowed, the fact that it is a degenerate solution is not clearly expressed; nor is the fact that there is (I assume) always an "optimal" solution which always involves "prep" followed by one or more reflections.
- It changes the region that reproduces - If a Tap and a Flip produce the same result, scoring prefers the Flip
If you feel like a sequence is being forced that doesn't fit one of those, I'd be curious to see what it is.
The midnight puzzle feels like Wordle style. I'm not sure that's going to pickup in this case. I would just open up all the puzzles. My 2 cents