The tech industry in a nutshell is that "prefers dark mode" is built into CSS and "is colourblind" is not. This should be a one-shot setting at the OS level, instead of telling every site individually.
The whole thing strikes me as art that's for creating rather than consuming, like life drawing or a mandala, so like, obviously my goal here is not to create computer-generated images so I don't have to draw them.
I'm playing with the maths of these knots with a view to seeing if there's a puzzle game in there, perhaps in a "get all the red dots on one knot and all the blue dots on another and you only have three walls to place" kind of deal.
Normally I'm a "stare at the puzzle and do logic until it breaks" kinda guy but given the nature of the source material it feels like this ought to be a more meditative "click around and chill out" vibe. But I've no idea, this isn't a fully-formed plan, it's just a poking-around "I bet there's a fun puzzle in here somewhere" dive.
No idea what the puzzle is, but can confirm it's nice to click around with, so that's at least a big part of the experience taken care of. All games should be fun to play even when you're getting nowhere and nothing's happening.
As well as switching to some nicer controls, I've set this to draw a handful of coloured markers at random points on the grid. I've been playing "add walls until all the markers of each colour are on the same ribbon, and no ribbon has more than one colour of marker on it, and no ribbon has zero markers on it". The randomly generated puzzles have all so far been solvable, but I assume that isn't the case in general so if it's going to be a satisfying puzzle it needs either a much more robust generator, or else a manual step to playtest and tweak puzzles.
I did try with just two colours of dots, but that's too often trivially easy — you can almost just divide the grid into two regions and let the ribbons fill them up, or add so many walls you're not really engaging with the mechanic. "At least three" seems to be the rule, and four is pretty challenging.
It does seem like quite a common … not quite failure mode but unsatisfactory solution mode is for you to end up with three very neat loops and one big mess of "everything else". Perhaps this is moving towards being a daily puzzle type game where everyone gets the same challenge and there are lots of solutions, but the aim is to get a high score, where your score is something like "number of walls ÷ standard deviation of all ribbon lengths" so you'll be motivated not to do this kind of thing.
That feels like it might have the kind of zen feel I'd like it to have, but also a bit like I'd solve it and think "well that's that done, why bother going for anything better?"
Maybe I should try to write a proper puzzle generator next, see if this gets better or worse.
Adding more colours does seem to lessen my temptation, as a player, to optimise out the entire premise of the game — although it does that mostly by making the game hard enough that that approach doesn't work any more.
I'm thinking maybe the way to go is for each puzzle to have a kind of phone-game-style system where you can complete the level any way you like and earn ⭐️, then there's a challenging but entirely do-able wall limit to earn ⭐️⭐️ and maybe the theoretical optimum solution earns you ⭐️⭐️⭐️?
Well. For the time being, I've got a nicer puzzle generator working and I've got it to highlight the knots in the appropriate colour when they have only one type of token on them. Lastly, when you complete the puzzle, the screen turns yellow. Also there's a text status bar underneath telling you how many walls you've used, as well as whether or not you've completed the puzzle. For this version, the aim is that every knot must collect every pip of a particular colour.
Still a lot to do on this — it's janky as hell and probably unplayable if you're any kind of colourblind, and it runs so much blocking JavaScript in the main thread to generate the puzzle, but if you want to put up with all that and let me know what you think of it so far, there's a prototype up now at https://www.andrewt.net/stuff/celtix-prototype/
So I thought I could do something terribly clever by having block-colour SVGs using fill:currentColor, that show through transparent gaps in a PNG overly. (This overlay doesn't join up properly because it's just a proof of concept.)
It works, but where I'd hoped it would make it easier to see which ribbon is which when they were the same/similar colours, it actually just makes the whole view way too busy to be easily understood. I think I might put the outlines into the SVGs and that way I have a nice, easily colourable ribbon system at least.
Also I made the ribbons smaller which I think should make it easier to parse. And there's some nice reset/undo/redo controls too which make the whole thing way more playable in practice.
I think this has got to a pretty nice place in terms of playability and so on so I've updated the prototype at https://www.andrewt.net/stuff/celtix-prototype/ — the share button and main menu don't work yet but the gameplay is there. (Imagine the share button is big and red so you can't miss it when it appears to say you've won.) I've not put in any cachebusting so you might need to clear your cache manually.
It's a slightly smaller grid than before, which makes the puzzle generation faster and makes the game a little nicer to play, I think.
But my plan to make it accessible for colourblind players has fallen through and I'm not sure what to do about that. Applying stripes and so on would be technically difficult and using hover wouldn't work on mobile which is a main platform for this kind of thing, so I'm not sure what to do about that. Suggestions would be welcome.
@christianp I was thinking about something like that to deemphasize the completed ribbons— once a ribbon is done you mostly aren't looking at changing it so long if who cares if two completed ribbons look all that distinct? It's not ideal but it's probably a better compromise.
I'm also planning a "highlight" tool so you can click somewhere and it'll switch you a view where maybe all the other ribbons are very dark, and this one is lighter with an even lighter stretch around where you clicked — that should help with pulling out specific details.
Some subtle pattern probably is in order — if I add dots and dashes along the middle then that'd be technically doable and combined with a couple of distinguishable colours I probably get enough distinct ribbon styles to make it work, especially with the highlighter for fallback.
I had been thinking the pips would simply have numbers on them but now I'm thinking different shapes, and maybe then I can add those shapes to the completed ribbon patterns.
@christianp oh yeah, I was thinking of a tool you turn on but i could use hover on desktop and drag on mobile, that might be nice
All the colours and patterns are mostly CSS now, though, so for the most part it should be fairly easy to add options to switch between whatever view works for people.
I'll have a go at implementing some of this stuff and we can see where it lands. Thanks for your help!
also, "wearaware" is such a confusing domain to print in all lower case. i gather it's "wear aware" which is a cute name, but it reads like "we are wear" and once your brain's latched onto that it's a little puzzle to unpick the real meaning. it's a small thing but also it would have been quite an easy thing to get right
I am (CURSED! CURSED! CURSED!) writing a batch file.
I want to prematurely exit the batch file with a success code.
This page https://ss64.com/nt/exit.html
claims the way you do this is to type "exit". Quote: "When used in a batch script, this option will exit only the script (or subroutine) but not CMD.EXE. If executed on the command-line it will close CMD.exe"
I execute my batch script on the command line like .\build.bat. It reaches the line "exit". My CMD.exe terminal closes.
@mcc@mike I guess based on @jernej__s's reply you could go for the most cursed option and write an extra, empty file called "exit_batch_file.bat" and run exit_batch_file.bat without "call" whenever you want to get out of your original batch file