alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Jigsaw Haiku
Hi HN! Jigsaw Haiku was originally designed with my puzzles site The Daily Baffle (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!
Comments
The 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.
Loved it. Adding a hint what the haiku is about might help. At the end credit who wrote the haiku too?
That 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.
When 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?
I found it quite difficult to find fitting pieces, maybe add an option to also show the painted background?
Very 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!
Playing this on an iPhone 15 Pro, I was wondering — did the frame rate of dragging have to be so painfully low?
I found this very challenging. Thanks for making it.
Very fun and great "tactile" experience. Fantastic job!
I loved it. Looking forward to playing again tomorrow.
Neat. Doesn't work well in android Firefox for me.
Nice, fun and poetic! GG I <3 it!
Very nice! Thanks!
That was fun, thanks!
it was funny tho
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The 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.