Light up complete words #24
Conversation
This makes most of the UI the same light color as before; only pieces and their borders are a bit dimmer than before, so as to contrast with the glowing "lit" color.
Also rename it to getCountingGrid and make markLitLetters optional.
|
OK, I'm not the best at graphic design, so please feel free to push more commits here for any reason :) I do like the gameplay. I like knowing right away when a word I've made is not going to be accepted (today I learned that DOLT is not in the list) and I like being able to find the "loose ends", places in the puzzle where something isn't solved yet. It is a little weird that when you drag the very first piece onto the board, if the piece happens to make any words by itself, they light up: 
I can imagine this being a bit mysterious for folks. Best case, the new player says "hmm, that's funny", and then they figure it out a bit later, and there's a nice moment of a perplexing thing suddenly clicking and making sense. This feature requires 3 distinct levels of brightness: the background, the normal letters, and the lit letters. They all need pretty good contrast with each other for the feature to work. So I made the I made the text-shadow less noticeable, but kept it. I think it helps with the contrast. I didn't try making the letter bold/italic instead. |
This is slightly precarious--we call getCountingGrid on non-square grids sometimes (individual pieces and groups), which transposeGrid can't handle; but luckily we don't need to transpose in that case.
|
Possible problem: Every letter in a valid Down word lights up, even if it's also part of a Across word that is not valid. This means there can be cases where it looks like everything is OK: 
but actually none of AR, RA, YG are words. I tried un-highlighting any letters that have a non-word in either direction; but the behavior is too strange in common cases: 
|
|
Another option could be to use lines to indicate whether a letter is part of a valid word horizontally and vertically. The lines look pretty crowded though, so I'm not sure if the increase in information outweighs the increase in clutter 🤔 We could add a button to toggle the validation on/off. 
|
|
Alternatively (if you like the idea of indicating horizontal/vertical validity) horizontal/vertical lines in the corner of each piece could be less obtrusive than the lines crossing the full letter: 
(The spacing in the screenshot needs some tweaking.) |
|
(Also, I should have prefaced by saying that I like this idea. I often find myself doubting whether a word is valid, but not having an easy way to tell.) |
|
I opened #32 to play with a separate horizontal vs vertical indicator. Any thoughts are welcome there. |
2 participants
This gives a visual indication of whether the word I just made is in the dictionary or not.
It turns out it's also just kind of nice. You can tell where the remaining broken fragments are while you're solving.