A long time ago I made a maze on paper called Twistile. I want to put it on my webpage, online. Programming the interactive part was easy, but making it user friendly is turning out to be hard.
If you are interested in helping me out, please take a look at it, and give me any comments and criticisms at all. I especially need help making the instructions complete and easy to understand. Just about everyone I show this to asks me how it works.
I would like to help, but I can’t.
I tried four times, in fact. Each time, my internet connection quit.
I got the “Internet explorer has unexpectadly quit” message.
I am on a Mac, on OSX (what ever the newest updated version is).
Hooo man, that’s pretty bad. Thanks for the heads up.
Okay, I don’t have easy access to that OS, so could you try one thing for me real quick? Try disabling JavaScript and then opening the page. If it works okay, you should see the grid but with no arrows on it. And of course you won’t be able to do anything. But at least tell me if the page comes up.
I guess my JavaScript must be doing something illegal, but IE for Windows 2000 showed no errors. If someone is familiar with it sees a problem, please let me know.
In the meantime, I’m sorry it didn’t work. I hope that can be fixed.
I like the twistile maze! I had no technical difficulties, but I haven’t solved it yet. (but I will, so help me…must have more)
I clicked on a couple of links on your page, but then I couldn’t find my way back to the maze without backing up… or is that part of the puzzle? I found a few non-working links too.
That’s expected, but it’s not part of the puzzle. My site is under construction. You shouldn’t have to leave that page to solve the maze. In fact, if you leave and come back, it resets.
The site itself came up fine. Also, the instructions seemed pretty obvious. It looks very professional actually.
Now the bad part: Honestly, I felt a little frustrated playing it, as I couldn’t really see more than a step or two beyond the current location. So, I couldn’t really “figure” a way to win and instead it felt like I was just clicking, hoping the Twistile gods would deliver me to the exit. I don’t really have a good suggestion of how to improve this point.
Although, now that I think of it, plenty of games are just like that, solitaire and mines to name two of the most popular. So maybe it’s just fine.
One other thought: In my case, I didn’t win and after a while I was sorta frustrated that there was no conclusion. One possible addition: limit a “game” to 50 (or other) maximum moves, and if 50 moves go by without reaching the goal, the player loses and gets to start again.
I found the game way too hard (or maybe it’s aimed at people with way more 2D reasoning than me). Gave up after about 5 minutes because I wasn’t getting anywhere.
Also, it would be nice to be given an indication that you’ve hit a wall (maybe a red border), and the ability to go back by clicking the previous square, rather than clicking the “go back” button.
ArtyDooDoo, I don’t believe there is a “known solution” in the sense that the game doesn’t know any better than you. It’s like if you shuffle a deck of cards and deal out a game of solitaire. Maybe it’s a winner, maybe it’s not but there’s no way of knowing without actually playing out the possibilities.
Okay, thank for the comments, evereyone. I can include a reset button, and I can also implement jjimm’s two suggestions. It’ll take me a couple of hours, but I’ll let you know when I’ve added these features.
For everyone who thinks it’s too hard, I should say that I intend this to be a “puzzle” and not a “game” as such, if that makes any sense. I spent several days coming up with a layout that was challenging but possible. Does that make it better?
Here is the amount of time I think it would take the “average puzzle-solver” to complete it (your results will of course vary):
20-30 minutes
Here is the number of steps in my solution (there may be a shorter one):
46
Here’s my solution: solution
I hope it’s not too late to save ArtyDooDoo.
Actually, I thought of a complication with this. Sometimes the previous square is also the next square, or at least it can be. That is, sometimes you’ve just come from a square that your current tile also points to. I could make it so that clicking on the previous square takes you back unless this is the case, but would that be too confusing?
