Hacker News Reader

Comment by clarkmoody | Hacker News Reader

Feature request: user-defined lock of selected circles, similar to how the existing red circles are locked.

(This is like the Minesweeper flag option)

Another feature request... if a tile is already illegal (too many committed blue in line of sight, or no way to commit more blue to satisfy requirement), flag it already. I think the biggest pain is the counting. Otherwise, a nice game!

That's what the hint button is for.

If you start adding any automated processing like that, then you're only a couple more processes away from the game just solving itself without you.

The elegance of this implementation is that you are doing all the solving. Unless you specifically ask for help from the hint button.

It is a balance between playability and automation. Even minesweeper does that (auto deduce that a large region can be opened up). What I described is only the first-order "convenience" checking to avoid the pain of going way back because of a miscounting.

Regarding the hint button. I don't want to use it precisely because I don't want to "win" by repeatedly getting hints.

I really like the realtime feedback idea, similarly you could always show how many additional dots are needed (e.g. the starting counts are correct and count down as you add visible blue dots in it's line of sight), 0 is blank, negatives could be hilighted as issues. Then you don't have to count existing circles, and errors are clear in real time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com