I'm calling this Puzzle #0 because it's really a test / demo. I'll talk about it in a moment, but first of all:
Click here to visit the puzzle page!There's three links at the top of the linked page which open the puzzle at 100% zoom, 75% zoom and 66% zoom. By default they use the greybox (just because it looks cool!) but if you right-click on each link you can open the puzzle in a separate window, tab, or what have you (which might make it work slightly faster). All three zooms use the same images; it's really only meant to adapt the puzzle to your screen resolution.
I was thinking about how we could put puzzles together more easily, and this is a solution. Basically, it's a fixed set of frames, each of which loads a page consisting of a single
Carcassonne tile. When you click on a tile, it loads another page, containing the same tile but rotated 90° clockwise. And that's about all there is to it. You can then decide how big the 'playing field' should be - in the demo's case, 5x7 - define a page which should be loaded into each frame, and away you go.
The theme I've used is a simple one, but I could easily imagine more elegant ones, where (for example) there are two farmers and two pigs on the playing field, and your task is to first of all arrange the tiles so that each farmer is on the same farm and his pig, and secondly to arrange the tiles to that either blue or red scores the most. Or arrange the tiles so that the princess on the top right tile is able to seduce the knight on the bottom left. And so on.
I've already created - and posted - the html files and jpgs for the 149 current tile configurations. 34 are used in the demo.
But I think the coolest thing about this puzzle structure is that, basically, anyone can set up a file, because there is no programming involved. Only one file needs to be edited, and in that file, only the name of the tile, and possibly the rotation, needs to be changed. Here's a sample of the html:
<frameset rows="75,75,75,75,75" cols="75,75,75,75,75,75,75" border=0>
<!--row 1-->
<frame marginheight=0 marginwidth=0 noresize="yes" scrolling="no" src="../../pages/ffrr04/0b.html">
<frame marginheight=0 marginwidth=0 noresize="yes" scrolling="no" src="../../pages/ccrf04/0b.html">
<frame marginheight=0 marginwidth=0 noresize="yes" scrolling="no" src="../../pages/cccc04/0b.html">The only thing that needs editing is
src="../../pages/ffrr04/0b.html, where 'ffrr04' is the name of the tile (based on the system I used in the consolidated tile reference) and '0b' stands for '0° rotation' that's the '0' part) and 'at 75% zoom' (that's the 'b'). I only changed the first part - the tile name - and left the rotation at 0 for all tiles, because it creates a nicely illegal set-up for the initial position.
So, if anyone wants to create a puzzle, all they need to do is design a playing field (probably using the real tiles), change the names in one html file, and voilà!
I'm thinking that, rather than me and Gantry designing puzzles when the inspiration strikes, we could also turn puzzle design into a community activity. Anyone who designs a puzzle could send it to us and we'll add it to a gallery. A developer's guide would be easy to put together: the whole set of tiles and html is only 3.6MB. To create custom tiles (with meeples on them, say) all we need is a transparent image of a meeple added on top of a tile using Photoshop or Graphic Convertor or whatever. And, seeing that all this is done in really elementary html, it should even be easy enough to put together a widget for Opera (why Opera? Because I don't have Microsoft or Vista, Dashboard is Mac only, Yahoo! sucks, and Opera widgets are both easy to make and cross-platform).
Yup, I'm enthusiastic about the possibilities here. Of course, this type of puzzle is a little abstracted from
Carcassonne, in that the positions of the tiles are pre-determined by the designer. The 'puzzle' itself lies in rotating the tiles in such a way that a goal can be achieved within a legal tile arrangement. It's not a substitute for
Carcassonne itself - but it should still capture a number of elements, while allowing everyone a way to design puzzles for the rest of us to try out.
What do you think?
