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Show HN: Jigsaw Haiku
Hi HN! Jigsaw Haiku was originally designed with my puzzles site The Daily Baffle (https://dailybaffle.com https://dailybaffle.com) in mind. But once I had built it, I realized it just didn't quite fit with the aesthetic of the Baffle's other puzzles, so I decided to put it up separately.
While most of the puzzles on the Daily Baffle were intended to be rather challenging, for this one I really just wanted to make something somewhat beautiful and relaxing. It wasn't so much about coming up with a highly original idea or a difficult challenge as much as just combining a few familiar ideas in a pleasant way.
It was coded entirely by Claude, with me carefully prodding it on to achieve the look I wanted. I had hand-coded everything on the Daily Baffle, but those days are past now. I was pretty thrilled with the "window through the fog" effect that CC was able to achieve from my written design spec. I wasn't sure if that would come out right, but it did. It's just a static react app hosted on Render, no backend. The haikus are handwritten with the help of a massive list of generated nature concepts alongside possible metaphor angles. The art is generated by Gemini and ChatGPT. I wish it was hand-painted, but that would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming and then this puzzle would likely not exist.
Happy to answer any questions, and encourage anyone to check out the Baffle if they like harder puzzles!
- lucitaro 10d ago[dead]
- inatreecrown2 10d agoI found it quite difficult to find fitting pieces, maybe add an option to also show the painted background?
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- pimlottc 10d agoThe borders on the pieces obscure the edge details that you need to help match the pieces up. Often there were pieces with letters that looked like they were needed another piece to complete them but actually they were whole but the border covered the edges. It would also be nice if I could position pieces freely outside of the board so I could test out potential matches. In the end, it became easier to just keep trying to place pieces on the board until they stuck together automatically.
- shermantanktop 10d agoI was baffled by this because the rightmost square didn’t seem to have any pieces where the letter would fit vertically — the unplaced pieces had a border which made it impossible to see which might.
- deckar01 10d agoThat would make it very easy and less about the words. They gave you a whole day to finish it for a reason.
- windowshopping 10d agoYou're totally right about the edges, I just fixed it so that the letters overlap the tile edges, which should help a lot with that issue. Thanks for the feedback! It's a little less clean-looking, I think, but it's worth it for the practical benefit. If anyone has an idea for a better solution, I'd be interested to hear it. I'll take a look at free positioning pieces outside the board too, but I just want to give that a little more thought.
- reneherse 10d agoOne small improvement IMO would be to display the pieces at the same scale as the board. It's more difficult to visualize potential positions while the pieces are at a smaller scale than the gaps they could potentially occupy. BTW- This was really fun to solve! (And I rarely play games or solve puzzles.) Thanks for sharing it!
- blobdole 10d agoThat was a lot of fun! It would be cool if I could kind of place things "wherever I want" because sometimes I want to test if this fits here or not, and the easiest way is to place the piece there and drop it. Because the borders are less distracting/smaller after dropping it. But if I do that in a place that is not valid, it snaps back to the original position. I once had to drag two completed chunks sequentially to one side of the puzzle area before I could test a piece I was looking at and discover it was wrong.
- mid1221213 10d agoNice, fun and poetic! GG I <3 it!
- BiraIgnacio 10d agoThat was fun, thanks!
- buyTheDip 10d agoVery nice. Challenging and fun. I was able to drop the pieces anywhere to test alignment. When I then moved them around got them next to the right neighbor, they glommed onto each other. No changed needed to have fun!
- alanbernstein 10d agoNeat. Doesn't work well in android Firefox for me.
- windowshopping 10d agoYeah I haven't been able to get it to perform smoothly in mobile firefox. It works well in mobile chrome or any desktop browser but mobile firefox specifically has been an issue I haven't had much luck resolving yet. Sorry about that! I use mobile FF too so I'd love to figure out the cause.
- windowshopping 9d agoThis should be fixed now.
- alanbernstein 6d agoThanks! Another suggestion: more feedback when two pieces click together - I'm currently dragging it around to check if they're connected. For example, they could lose the outline that separates them, or change outline color to be the same.
- riddley 10d agoI found this very challenging. Thanks for making it.
- ferar 10d agoVery nice! Thanks!
- sssilver 10d agoPlaying this on an iPhone 15 Pro, I was wondering — did the frame rate of dragging have to be so painfully low?
- sssilver 10d agoTesting this on a Macbook Pro M4 Max, dragging is still so choppy that it makes the game significantly less fun.
- windowshopping 10d agoWhich browser are you playing in? For me I find it works smoothly in everything except firefox mobile, and I'm just on an M4 Air, so you've got way more compute.
- sssilver 10d agoLatest Safari
- windowshopping 10d agoThis should be fixed now.
- sssilver 9d agoThanks -- much better now!
- JKCalhoun 10d agoWould be interesting to see if it was logging hard to the Web Inspector console.
- windowshopping 10d agoWhich browser are you playing in? For me I find it works smoothly in everything except firefox mobile.
- dvt 10d agoVery fun and great "tactile" experience. Fantastic job!
- anigbrowl 10d agoThe end state is aesthetically pleasing. The game, not so much, I found the cuts on the tiles unpleasant to deal with (especially the ones that shaved ~2 points of ~20 point text) although I solved it in the end. I did like that once you had connected two or more pieces correctly they stayed connected, but I think it would be better to mix the jigsaw aspect with individual monospace font letters and make it into more of a word game than one about trying to match font ligatures.
- windowshopping 10d agoI fixed the text shaving. Thanks for the feedback! I actually initially envisioned this the way you described with monospaced font and one-letter-per-square, but I found that it wasn't possible because the puzzle became prohibitively wide to such a disproportionate extent that it A. couldn't fit on a mobile screen, B. looked very odd, C. involved so many pieces that the challenge was elevated to a tedious level.
- deleted 10d ago[deleted]
- phyzix5761 10d agoI loved it. Looking forward to playing again tomorrow.
- animanoir 10d ago[dead]
- albert_e 10d agoWhen you place any piece on the board in any position, you can drag that piece all over the board to "reveal" the painting behind it whenver you move your piece. Is that intentional or a sneak peek?
- windowshopping 10d agoThat is intentional. The painting isn't a secret, but seeing it all at once with its completed poem is the goal.
- theycallmeritik 10d agoit was funny tho
- MoneyLovesSpeed 10d ago[dead]
- hamza_ali_shah 10d agoLoved it. Adding a hint what the haiku is about might help. At the end credit who wrote the haiku too?
- rooty_ship 10d ago[dead]
- roshanabdullah1 10d agoit was fun to play! I love how smooth the animations are when placing jigsaw block.
- maledadams 10d ago[flagged]
- karkengc 10d ago[dead]
- matthew_payne 9d agoSomewhat challenging and lots of fun. Great job