[Kde-games-devel] How do you play jigsaw puzzles

[Parker Coates]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 13:04, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> In particular, I am very pleased
> that you avoid the typical mistake that pieces snap to their final
> positions, rather than each other. Real life doesn't work this way, but
> many computer jigsaw games have absolute places that define a piece's
> "final position", and will lock pieces into place if you can position
> them correctly.

It's funny that you mention this, because I was just about to suggest
it as a feature, but not exactly in the sense you mean. I thought it
might be interesting to have a puzzle option for creating "framed"
children's puzzles. In case anyone isn't familiar, these are puzzle
with a low number of large (usually wooden or plastic) pieces that fit
into a frame that usually shows the completed image and the pieces are
then placed on top of this. Generally each piece will only physically
fit in one particular spot.

These are great for young children as they greatly simplify the
puzzling solution by making it more linear. Instead of searching the
entire set of pieces to find a pair that mate, one need only pick up a
piece, examine it, find the corresponding spot on the board, and move
on to the next piece.

The implementation would "just" require painting the final image
(probably half transparent or washed out) on the table, disable pieces
snapping to one another, enable snapping to final position instead. I
say "just" as I have no idea if this is even remotely doable with the
Palapeli framework. I also have no idea if there's any real demand for
such a play mode. It was just the first thing that came to mind when
Stefan asked for suggestions.

> - Pieces don't rotate :-). Having all the pieces correctly rotated
> reduces the challenge somewhat.

I think the option to rotate the pieces is a good idea, but I think it
should definitely be an option and probably an opt-in one, at that.

> - Creating puzzles by number of pieces in X,Y direction. Please just
> give us approximate number of pieces, and let the slicer decide based on
> that, and the input image's aspect ratio. I accidentally made a 10x10
> puzzle out of a 16:5 image.

I think it would make sense for the puzzle creation UI to only ask for
the total piece count, but to internally store and use an X by Y
system. This keeps things simple for the basic user,  but allows one
to manually tweak the puzzle file if one wants tall skinny pieces.

One other suggestion. Don't add highscores. I've already seen one
person suggest it at your blog and I have to say I'm strongly opposed.
The concepts of jigsaw puzzling and time pressure are so intrinsically
opposite that the idea of adding highscores to a puzzling game seems
downright blasphemous.  In my experience, the success of a puzzling
session is best assessed by the quality of conversation and the volume
of tea consumed in the process, not by a stopwatch. (Unfortunately,
curiosity got the better of me and I did some research. It turns out
there is such a thing as a speed puzzling competition. Sigh.)

Parker