I 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.
moving 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?
Nice work. One thing though, I completed the demo puzzle and created an account but then under completed puzzles in my account, the list is empty. I wish the puzzle I had just completed when it prompted me to create an account to play more puzzles, would be added to the list of completed puzzles.
I 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.
Pieces snap together when moving passed each other, even if they aren't both in front. I just had a lot of fun exploiting this by stacking all the pieces on top of each other and then just "printing" the puzzle by moving the connected pieced past the pile.
The website looks nice and all, but I see you want to charge a $5/mo subscription for access to 200 puzzles (initially). Considering that there are websites like https://www.puzzlefactory.com or https://www.jigsawplanet.com that are free and have literally hundreds of thousands of jigsaw puzzles available I wonder what do you consider to be your added value in order to justify the subscription. Could you share some of your thoughts behind that?
That bring me a memory of building something very similar to this at work. So back in time I worked on an online game server framework and we needed some sort of technical demo, and it occurred to me that a multiplayer jigsaw puzzle would work. I quickly prototyped an JavaScript client and that eventually became a fully-blown online social game, but the project was shelved because we had other things to work on. A glimpse of that client can be seen in my website [1]. (The prototype was built in my spare time so I could release this in public. It was a mistake to build this on SVG, by the way.)
I clicked on the site just to check it out and ended up spending 15 minutes on your demo puzzle... well played.
Awesome job on all the user interactions. The dragging controls are pretty intuitive, it always did what I expected, and it's very smooth/seamless. The little touches like the autorotation are very helpful. I can imagine that having really great interactions differentiates this from many other similar sites so good job there.
Hi, firstly great job on the app - really nice. I tried to do the demo puzzle on my touchscreen laptop, but while the dragging worked very nicely, I wasn't sure how to actually rotate the pieces myself (seemed to happen randomly when tapping the piece), would be nice to have a clearer way to interact, e.g. double tap to rotate 90 degrees.
This was cool but it's kind of cheating auto rotating the pieces to the correct orientation. Good work though. I never thought of doing a puzzle on a device but I guess sometimes I am listening to a podcast and just want to keep my hands active so that I can concentrate on the podcast.
Cool concept! Few ideas:
1. when you hover over puzzles, they could shuffle/rotate a bit, so that there's no easy option to just click puzzles and rotate them appropriately upfront
2. an option to select a group of puzzles and move them, just as you categorize and group puzzles in real life
I'm in the demo and trying to click and drag pieces and all it does is pan the screen. I'm using Chrome on Windows 10 if it helps. Also, I noticed that maybe 10% of pieces actually do let you move them around, but the other 90% only pan the screen.
Possibly 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.
Congrats! I just completed the easy demo on an iPhone SE and it worked great. No issue at all with selecting and positioning the pieces. Great work!
The UX is not good only because of the screen size. Either you see too few of the pieces or the pieces are too small. But I think there is no software solution to that, just a matter of being a game better suited for larger screens.
I thought the UI was brilliant and enjoyed the example a lot (Android phone).
Having to tap the pieces to orient them correctly became a task to do before I started. But I wouldn't have wanted to try to do that myself either on a phone.
Sad that the picture was obscured at the end. I wanted to admire my work.
Cool project! The site is pretty laggy on firefox. My resolution is 1440p and making the game fullscreen causes a noticable framerate drop. I don't notice the issue on Chromium.
Figured you might want to know.
There's something very satisfying when a piece clicks in place :)
Really 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.
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.
I would be surprised if anyone gives you money. There are many other free puzzle websites that exist that have those same features and are free.
One comes to mind that has multiplayer: https://jigsawpuzzles.io
But good luck, and have fun making the thing :)
Great site! Love the idea. I would love to see the ability to alter the background color. I may also suggest you never default the background to pure black.
https://gomakethings.com/design-tip-never-use-black/
You will now notice this on most websites you visit.
You may also consider adding more sound effects and/or royalty free light background music that can be toggled on/off.
Good luck!
click sounds great. winning screen should hide that big annoying banner and just let me enjoy my masterpiece instead
Pieces 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 demo: “You will not be able to fully complete the demo puzzles.”
Worked great on mobile.
Great work!
Hi HN!
I built this website last year for family members who enjoy playing jigsaw puzzles on their computers. I decided to build it because I frequently heard complaints about how slow some of the more popular jigsaw apps are and how they are filled with annoying advertisements.
The site is completely free to use. No advertisements and no selling of user data. However, I do offer a paid tier for users that want more jigsaw puzzles and difficulty options.
On the technical side, I'm using Svelte on the frontend with a tiny bit of wasm, and Rust for a few backend APIs. I hope the site feels snappy, it's one of the main reasons why I decided to build it.
There's a demo puzzle linked on the home page for anyone who doesn't want to sign up! I'd recommend trying it on a computer or tablet as mobile is still a little rough around the edges.
Happy to answer any questions about it!