Tiles collector

I could not managed to embedded the html version...

@dhim same

I liked it, nice puzzle that gives you time to think and correct your moves. Also the idea itself is pretty original, i haven't seen anything close to this.

@d-omino, in my case, I think the high score might prevent me from embedding the game (no fetch allowed)

@evgenii-petrov, thank you ! have you try the daily ?

This is very impressive! I can't say I've seen something like this before, so it feels very original. Good job! I feel like this has a real NY Times game vibe.

The coloring mechanic is really clever—it uses combinations in a smart and engaging way. At first, it feels a bit tricky, but once you get the hang of it, it’s super satisfying and fun.The 2D level just like Sudoku! Well done on creating something both challenging and addictive in such a short time!

@tim-eriksen @nekowei, thank you both for the kind words!

Cool game, quite complex. I think it would be nice to have a reset button to clear all inputs, as I found myself to almost randomly changing colors when everything was filled in, and also make it easier to distinguish the set tiles (like a darker color)

This is cool. A totally new puzzle game!

I felt super smart when I finally put together the final tutorial puzzle where you have to get 9 pairs per row! With these puzzles, the second it clicks and you realize the pattern is amazing! Testament to a super well-designed game, great job! Very unique and interesting puzzle game, loved it!

@nekowei thank you for playing. Reset and save option are still written on my to-do list...
@gwhyang thank you!
@captaindreamcast you are smart! Thanks for the kind words!

This is an amazing puzzle. I could definitely see a lot of variants being developed for this like sudoku. Would love to see more!

Wow, you have to think about that :)

This is a brilliantly realised puzzle game with excellent presentation. I'm amazed you were able to create something that looks so professional in just 48hrs. The mechanic is novel and I think it's great that you were able to implement daily challenges. I can definitely see this as a New York Times game :)

@kassanu, @kit-gorn, and @alex-mulkerrin, thank you for the kind words!

- @kassanu: I really wanted to implement the square 2x2 mode, which is for me the real challenge. With 3 colors, it is fun to play the full board.
- @alex-mulkerrin Daily challenges were really something I wanted, sadly not so many people are inputing their highscore :(

I loved it. The only downside is that in the 1D version, the tile count goes off-screen.

Nice try. It’s not often that we see a puzzle game like this in Ludum Dare. The aesthetics are simple, as is the gameplay, but the game is deeper and harder than it looks.
Et en voyant ton profil sur github, je constate que nous sommes voisin. J'habite à Pau :)

@baluj I screwed up in the latest commits something about the screen size checks. If you go even lower in size it should
1. Puts the hints below
2. Switch to vertical mode (broken)

@vikfx merci voisin!

Very interesting puzzle game!!

It's an interesting puzzle, I've never seen anything like it. It's simple at first glance, but I'm stuck on the puzzles.

A very minimalist and cute design - I like it. And thanks for the detailed tutorial

@porcupine-sashimi, @yarli @torte478 thank you for playing my game and leaving a review!

@torte478 : Having a tutorial was **one of my goals** for this LD, I had previously always wrote some brief instruction at the end of the compo

Pretty hardcore puzzle game. Simple mechanism but enough complexity.
Tutorials and guidance were good so I could easily figure out the goal.

thanks @keith-wang !

Interesting puzzle game! The written explanations were too complex but the mechanic is so simple yet so engaging. Cool you managed to get sandbox mode and tutorial in for a fellow compo game. Not a fan of the UI but it's well done. Good job!

Well done! This is a very interesting puzzle!

Wow, amazing little puzzle game after the easy 4x4 2 colors I spent like 10 minutes on that huge level. It gets hard insanely quick very very nice game.

I found this super interesting! It's very impressive to build something like this for the compo, congratulations! It looks very clean and the interface is slick and easy to use.

Very cool taking a mathematical concept like this and making a game out of it! The tutorials were educational and very well made in the way the introduced the rules.

Thank you for github repo badges) I've updated my repo with your recommendations!
Your game is also very cool. I really like all the geometric patterns!

Pretty interesting puzzle with new mechanicsm, well implemented. When the level became two dimentional, I could not beat it(

Wow, this puzzle game is great, really simple rules but challenging to complete at the same time.

When I got to level 6 I thought that's enough for one day haha, but I'd love to revisit this if I want to play something challenging! Great work!

Simple put a bit of a head scratcher!

I really like the concept here. I especially like how there are emergent "rules" I started to build in my head as I played: in the 3-color mode, for example, there should be 1 pair of each color & exactly 3 instances of each color tile. I got faster at scanning rows for issues as I played, and it was fun to mentally rearrange the rows to figure what might be possible.

After recognizing these derived rules, it also became clear to me that the generated puzzles were not "perfectly" solvable - any row that generates 3 matching tiles in a row will be missing points, as will one that (in 3-color mode) has 4 instances of a single color.

On an instinctual level, the puzzle not having a "correct" solution feels kinda wrong, but after thinking about it some more, I think it's probably okay. Especially in a compo game, I don't know how practical it'd be to generate a system for guaranteeing perfect solvability, and even if you could it wouldn't necessarily make it a more-fun game. If it made the puzzle too repetitive, it might actually make it less fun!

With all of that in mind, the inclusion of the scoreboard is a very good idea. You can see what the puzzle's current best score is to have an idea of what the upper bound will probably be. It's probably possible to determine what they highest possible score could be, but I don't think it's a bad thing for it to be left open-ended; proving that your solution can't get any better could be a part of the fun.

I do think the satisfaction of finding the "perfect" arrangement of numbers in sudoku puzzles & similar logic games is an important element of that whole genre. So even with the upsides I outlined above, the not-perfect-ness of this game's puzzles may still be a detriment to folks' enjoyment (or at least a barrier to entry). That said, sudoku sets a very high bar - to create a puzzle concept that draws comparison to it in 48 hours is a great result!

Nice work on this one, I'm glad I got the chance to play it!

Bonus feedback lightning round:
* The color-picker selection method was intuitive, I liked click + drag interface (and would work well with mobile)
* Having an option to clear a color would be very useful, as would "clear row", "clear column", and (maybe most importantly) "undo"
* In the tutorial, being able to hide the pop-up to review the game state hidden behind it would be very useful. Sometimes I finished a tutorial, but would've liked to review the solution after reading the message at the end - a way to confirm my understanding of the concept is complete.
* Experimental idea: letting player specify a "best score possible" for a certain row / column could be useful - kinda like marking a square with a flag in minesweeper, it helps the player remember logical deductions they've previously worked through.
* Having more-clear distinction between player-filled & pre-filled tiles would be very helpful. When doing sudoku, my terrible handwriting is very clearly distinguishable from the nicely printed pre-filled numbers; this helps me understand what can be rolled back & undone vs. what must stay. Maybe having a textured crayon / colored-pencil look for player tiles to contrast flat pre-filled boxes?
* Dots on the problematic edges is good for readability when I got used to puzzling.
* Reading the score display on the right side was a bit tricky. Some grouping of the tile-pairs may be helpful: separate rows / columns for each leading color would make it easier to review which type of tile is underutilized.
* I bumped the escape key while submitting my score and lost my progress :cry:. No biggie given the time constraints, but having some confirm pop-up before losing the puzzle stuff (or just removing the hotkey) would be a-okay by me.

@doctor-zeus Thank you for the extensive comments :

- There should not be generated puzzle that have impossible rows... I construct the rows from possible variation and remove some tiles...


fun fact (spoiler)
!> For the three-color line puzzle, there exist only 4 variants

!> 001021122

!> 001022112

!> 001102122

!> 001120221

!> All possible lines are just offsetting and transposing the colors (what color, 0,1,2 are associated with)

!> For 4-colors it 864 unique combinations.

However, for the 2D, I don't enforce the columns. The only grids that I know that are perfect are *boring* (offsetting the rows by one). I don't know if there are other perfect grids that are not boring. What I did not check either was : Is there a unique solution or multiple solutions to a given puzzle.

In a sense, I wanted to have a unique puzzle for the 1D, with maybe different levels of difficulty (like Sudoku). But for the 2D as there are no perfect solution, I wanted the goal to find the best possible, so if several grids are possible, I think it is better. Although I don't test while generating the grid that there exist multiple grids that have perfect rows. So maybe the best score is maybe not a satisfying grid..

My end goal is, in fact, to find interesting perfect grids. I was thinking a bit like the protein folding game, to use human creativity and problem-solving capabilities to explore the space of possible grids.

Well I have two research questions :

- Are there non-boring perfect grids
- Are there amazing perfect grids: Where Amazing are grids that have all the possible 2x2 squares.

I know there exist Amazing grids, but all the grids that I know of are not perfect. I know that for 2 and 3 colors there are no perfect Amazing grid (or amazing perfect grids).

@dhim Ah, I see. I had the impression that rows and columns were similarly generated, but the idea of the last tutorial is to explain otherwise; rows can always be solved, but columns are the "bonus points". I figure this is made quite clear in the text of the tutorial, I'll blame myself for not paying close enough attention.

Related to the spoiler:

!> I didn't actually do the proof for myself, but I had the impression that the number of options was limited like this. Mentally I was considering the rows in terms of "there must always be a pair of each color, and there will be a fixed number of 'loose' tiles that must fit around them in ways that create the missing combinations.

I like your idea of scoring 2x2 squares. The idea that they're aesthetically pleasing & but difficult to perfectly optimize is good. Making the maximum score uncertain (and always presenting it as a high scoring challenge) makes it easier to pick up & put down, and maybe can make it even more fun for a group of friends to talk about.

One idea I had while typing this: even though it's a optimization challenge (not a pure-puzzle solve) maybe it'd be nice to have some loose "grading" system for your solution to give folks an objective benchmark for their result. A bronze / silver / gold medal award, or a 3-star system. A solution that at least gets the points for all rows being "solved" gets bronze or silver, but getting gold depends on you achieving some level of high score in the columns, 2x2s, or other scoring categories.

That would help folks have a kind of "off-ramp" that's satisfying when they've pushed as far as they can in the puzzle. From one perspective that kind of thing's unnecessary - just seeing how high you can go might be satisfaction enough. For a lot of folks, though, it'll help to get a little encouragement from the game to push a liiittle further. At the point they can consistently reach "gold" they'll know if they have the personal drive to take the high score higher!

Let me say that I fail big time at games involving math. The idea is cool, I haven't seen anything like that so far so kudos for coming up with something original.
It really gets too difficult for me, but again, that's just me. The minimalism and clean design is real nice. I would still have loved some chill-out background music to be there. I read you wanted players to choose their own background music, but some default theme would have been a nice addition.
Overall I believe this is a solid game that could definitely be something to keep working on. I am sure out there there are plenty of players that enjoy fiddling with this kind of challenges

@tanis thanks for the comment! I love making music, ld is really the only occasion I have to compose. But I had not much time this weekend... In addition those kind of games on the nyt don't have music. All in all, that's why I decided not to add music.

@doctor-zeus I had this idea of the copper,silver,gold.(or stars) levels at some point and I forgot. But it's true that's a great idea, and your rational for it is exactly what I wanted

This is the most unique game I have played, and I really like that it's a game inspired by your love for math and for computer science. Very quickly when playing, I immediately wanted to write a program to help me solve these puzzles.

I love the color picker. I rarely see cool interfaces like this, it's always just a lot of buttons all over the screen, but you came up with an interface perfectly suited for how it was being used. I also like that the game was part of a bigger webpage with links to the source, the change log, etc.

I hope that you get to share your puzzles even after the jam is over, and that someday a company like NYT wants to buy this game from you.

@sslees thank you for the very kind words!

I have a background as a Human-Computer Interaction researcher, hence the UI tricks (the menu is called a marking-menu, you find it in a lot of application and game)

Really love the concept! It feels intuitive and elegantly executed. Also appreciate the clear and tutorial. It might be even better if there is some kind of hint(Unfortunately I am bad at this kind of puzzle games)

I swear I had to write a solver for this as an assignment back in college...

Very nicely implemented!

This is a really cool and unique concept! I love it! The minimalist vibe works perfectly IMO.