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Show HN: I made a daily puzzle game about mixing colors (refractor-game.com)

19 points by tlackemann ↗ HN
While on paternal leave, I wanted to create a game my newborn daughter could eventually play and learn something from. I was heavily inspired by the daily puzzle games I consistently play such as Wordle and Strands.

Refractor is a game about connecting colored tiles together to reach all the goals. Use "refractor" tiles to combine two colors together but be careful not to trap yourself in! The game is won when all goals are fulfilled.

The tech stack is: Laravel + Inertia, React + TypeScript, and DaisyUI + TailwindCSS.

Open to any questions or feedback. Hope you might find it interesting!

19 comments

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aabbcc1241
I'm also thinking about a color game but not committed to make it yet. Congratulations on release it.
playingalong
Nicely done.

I need to admit the second step in the tutorial took me a while. It's not obvious the mixing tiles accept incoming colors only at some of the sides. I.e. you need to go further with the blue and make a U turn.

alok99
Agreed. I think a tutorial step with mixing from obvious directions followed by the current one would be better.
uxamanda
Ah I gave up until I read this comment
dustyduster
I had the same experience. Once I figured it out though, it made for a really fun mechanic. Better I think than what I expected (that I could "enter" the tile from any direction).
tlackemann
I really appreciate this suggestion. I also had a friend hung up on the directional concept. I'll look to fix that with a gentler tutorial possible. Thanks for trying it out!
dustyduster
Enough with the daily stuff. I would like to actually play the game you made.
invisibleloop
Looks good. Unfortunately my colour blindness means the first level after the tutorial was difficult for me to play. Which sucks.
datascienced
Would a hover with RGB values help? It then becomes a bit of a logic game. For example you have F00 and 0F0 and you need a FF0
yunruse
Having to hover each time is a little unwieldy. Patterns [0] could be helpful? In this instance it might be neat to have stripes in the cardinal/diagonal directions which can combine into crosshatch, though after 4 colours it would get crowded to represent.

[0] Something similar to https://images.wsj.net/im-194691 for lighter-shade-on-darker shade.

tlackemann
I'm really sorry about the color problems, my wife also has some color issues that I was trying to work around. I think having a high contrast mode is something I can add.

Thanks for trying it out, really appreciate you letting me know.

invisibleloop
Thanks for your reply. I love playing these sorts of games but colours have always been an issue where colour is the primary mechanism of the game. So some games will just be out of reach and I’m ok with that. I wouldn’t want you to over complicate or ruin a nice UI to cater for my needs! Greens, browns and reds will always be an issue. Even blues and purples are hard too.
invisibleloop
At work we had a red/green system for deploys of code to production. We would use a red or green dot in a messaging system. I had to ask if we could use the words stop and go inside the circle which we did and that helped a lot of people. In my company there are a lot of Colourblind developers!
tlackemann
Hey, I'm not sure you'll see this but I wanted to let you know that I added a color blind assist mode based on another comment's suggestion of adding patterns/textures to the tiles. In the top-right corner is a hamburger menu where the mode can be enabled.

I'm not 100% if this is the right solution for your needs but I'd be interested in hearing if the update helps at all.

Thanks again for the feedback!

nextaccountic
I want to play more, 1 puzzle per day is satisfying for word puzzles but not for this kind of puzzle IMO

Maybe you can still have a hand-curated daily puzzle, but also have some procedural generation to have endless puzzles

thesh4d0w
1. The restart button doesn't seem to work half the time

2. As a techie who thinks of color in RGB, it took me a very long time to understand how to make green from yellow.

tlackemann
Well in elementary school they'll be teaching my daughter that blue and yellow make green and red and blue make purple. Not sure how I could help the techies here :)