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.
You'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.
I 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.
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.
I 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.
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.
Which 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.
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!
Yeah 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.
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.
I'll take a look at free positioning pieces outside the board too, but I just want to give that a little more thought.
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.
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.