Show HN: Domino Fit – Domino Tiling Puzzle

[macromaniac]

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!

[gus_massa]

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".

[macromaniac]

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.

[SamBam]

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]

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

[darajava]

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.

[anotheryou]

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]

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

[matsemann]

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/

[ilikehurdles]

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.

[lanternfish]

If you like this style of puzzle, I highly recommend Simon Tatham's Puzzles on android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?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.

[fragmede]

Simon Tatham's puzzles are also available on the web on his site:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

[execat]

I love this. The app is less than 4MB and with so many puzzle types!

[JKCalhoun]

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.

[transportgo]

Ar first I didn’t understand that you couldn’t rotate. Would love to have “R” reset the board.

[cperciva]

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!

[pimlottc]

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!

[bhtdz]

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!

[_fw]

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.

[tcmb]

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.

[hexomancer]

That was very fun! Are the puzzles handmade or procedurally generated?

[macromaniac]

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.

[navane]

I played it a couple of days and it's great. I agree about the selecting the different tiles, it's not the smoothest but it's very easy to understand how that works. The whole puzzle really explains itself well with the numbers turning green. I love how I'm building a set of heuristics (this space only fits a horizontal, if I need X points on a vertical, I need doubles...) in my mind to solve these puzzles step by step, just like with a sudoku, but very much it's own.

Maybe tapping on the left selects the left piece, right the right, and middle toggles? But that's just booked shedding. Great, polished puzzle!

[TheJoeMan]

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.

[serenepipe]

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)

[pimlottc]

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]

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.

[alstonite]

Today I got "wizard" on one of the levels! What does it mean?

My entire friend group and I love the game, thank you for making it <3

[lxe]

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.

[aardvark179]

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. :-)