Monthly Archives: February 2015

Site Updates

Site updates: February 2015

An ongoing catalogue of Knossos Games website issues and minor updates.

The Space Pods puzzle section received a significant update.

Updated: Knossos Games website homepage

Problem: In the overhaul of the entire Knossos Games website, the homepage was basically an afterthought. I had focused so much time and attention to how the content should be organized and presented (as well as the new code to support it all), that I hadn’t really figured out what should be on the new homepage. I’ve observed a few people interact with the site over the years, and the homepage from the last version seemed to be confusing (people weren’t sure what to click on or where to go next). My first attempt at the new homepage, however, was a boring overcorrection.

Solution: This time, I’ve tried to retreat from the blandness by including more puzzle swaths and sections (carried over from the category pages, like this one). I have more ideas, and it’s still a work in progress, but this is certainly better than what it used to be (and what it used to be before that).

Fixed: Numerous broken links across the site

Problem: There are a lot of broken links (temporarily) caused by pages from the older versions of the site coexisting with newer versions. (I’ll explain this situation in detail in another blog post at some point.)

Solution: The two-versions-ago homepage (kg.kghome.html) and an old attempt at creating an all-in-one puzzle index page (kg.CategoriesV6a.html) have now both been replaced with pointers to the current home page (kg.index.html). This fixes the vast majority of broken link issues.

Site Updates

Update: Space Pods

In bringing the website for Knossos Games back to life (and I promise, there will be a few blog posts about specifically why it was gone and how it has returned), many things needed to be updated. Minor updates will be grouped together, major ones will get their own post, like this one.

With the publication of a new Space Pods puzzle in Imagine v22.n1 (September/October 2014), the Space Pods collection of puzzles became a good candidate for the next group of puzzles to be updated for the website, after the first major update (mazes).

In going through the graphics files in Adobe Illustrator, I realized that, over the years, I had constructed the puzzle graphics inconsistently. While this looked fine in print, and in the low resolution gifs used in the past, these inconsistencies would definitely show up in the scalable vector graphics drawn on high resolution displays of the updated site. Thus, the first task was to go back and clean up the original graphics files for each puzzle: the space pods puzzle and solution diagrams, as well as the solution charts.

If you look closely, there are a few fine details of how each space pods puzzle diagram is constructed. The grey squares representing the “doors” to the space pods are a good example. The surrounding wall lines overlap each door, which is meant to suggest that the doors are recessed and slide into the walls, like on your favorite science-fiction TV show or movie. (This style of door also visually looked the best compared to the many options I originally tried.) I fixed some consistency problems with the size of the gap for each door (especially gaps on a diagonal) by re-slicing and re-grouping the hexagon and hallway lines. The radius of the rounded edges of the doors was also changed to look more consistent across low and high resolutions.

The solution charts use a triple chevron arrow, and that was realigned to make it look sharper on low resolution displays, while also changing the style of the corner and ends. I then included a label above each highlighted step, because of the next change.

I have been increasingly unsatisfied with lengthy pages for solutions that include many steps. Having to scroll through step after step is not the best experience for reading the solution, since there is a temporal gap between focusing on one solution diagram and the next, and during that gap you need to maintain in your working memory the salient features of the last diagram in order to compare what has changed in the next. But a step-by-step approach to the solution is necessary for the these puzzles, in order to show how each of the three scientists moved around the space station.

The improved solution pages now include a user-directed slideshow of the solution steps. The solution diagrams maintain the same position on the page, so clicking from one to the next is a seamless experience. This was accomplished through a modification of a clever css technique to create a slideshow (since I did not want to bother with complicated javascript). Conceptually, the slideshow is a single, giant column containing all of the individual solution steps placed next to one another horizontally. All but one of the solution steps is hidden at any time, and the buttons contain anchor links to an unordered list of the individual solution steps. Because everything needs to load prior to being displayed, this can take a few moments to render properly, but that appears to be the only drawback, as it works in every browser I have tested.

Once the new images and pages were constructed, I ran into a bizarre issue in testing. In Safari (and possibly other WebKit-based browsers), the borders of the doors would inflate when you zoomed in on a diagram. Here is a compilation screenshot of the appropriate behavior:

Proper door behavior

And here’s what happened in Safari:

Improper door behavior

I could not figure out why this was happening. Other objects that have a non-zero point border do not exhibit this behavior when zooming in. The only thing I could think of was to take the rounded squares and expand them so that they would be borderless. In the end, this was a successful, if time consuming, workaround for the problem.

Finally, there is one additional piece of information that I would like to associate with each Space Pods puzzle and solution, and that is a diagram of the problem space (in other words, every possible way that the scientists can move through the puzzle). I have unfortunately run into some difficulties trying to create these charts in a clean, readable way. Since there are many, many more tasks to accomplish in bringing the website back to life, I decided to post the Space Pods puzzles and put this aside for the moment.

Authoring Knossos Games

Authoring Knossos Games: Timeline

You may be curious as to what goes into making a puzzle before it appears in the magazine and, ultimately, on the Knossos Games website. In this series of occasional posts, I hope to give some insight into the process.

Imagine is published five times a year, roughly following the U.S. academic calendar. At the beginning of each summer, my editor e-mails me the topics chosen for the year’s issues. The puzzles for my column are typically due six weeks before the start of an issue’s publication window, and I wait to post a puzzle (and its solution) to the website until after the solution is published in the following issue.

For example, I started working on the puzzle that will appear in the next issue of Imagine (v22.n4, the March/April 2015 issue) back in December 2014. I mulled over a few possible ideas related to the theme of the issue (writing) during the holidays, then worked on a couple of specific concepts in early January. By mid-January, one puzzle idea had emerged as my clear favorite, so I focused my efforts there.

Since the puzzle hasn’t been published yet 1, I can’t give too many details. However, I can say that it has something to do with writing, and was tricky to create. It required charting out a lot of possibilities, and writing up a detailed solution to be certain that the puzzle worked the way I intended it to. I submitted a draft on January 25th, then discussed the puzzle with my editor, and by the 31st had submitted a revision to both my editor and the layout designer that will be the final puzzle seen in the magazine.

Depending on how the rest of the issue is shaping up, the March/April issue could be out any time between mid-March and mid-April. But the puzzle won’t be posted to the website until the following issue is out (with the March/April puzzle’s solution), most likely in June. Check back then for a much more insightful description of how that puzzle came to be.

There is another way that we can look at this, though, and that’s to focus on what I’m accomplishing right now. I’m currently between deadlines. As I said before, the puzzle that will appear in Imagine v22.n4 (the March/April 2015 issue) was submitted a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m working on the puzzle that will appear in v22.n5 (the May/June 2015 issue), which is due in mid-March.

At the same time, I’ve been working on a couple of big website updates for puzzles that were published in the past few months. I just completed a major overhaul on the Space Pods puzzles, one of which appeared in Imagine v22.n1 (the September/October 2014 issue). Work continues on an even larger update for the Logic puzzles, one of which appeared in Imagine v22.n2 (the November/December 2014 issue).

Thus, every puzzle typically covers a multi-month time span from start to finish, and several of these overlap at any one point in time. Since this requires switching off between puzzles, I keep a lot of notes to remind myself of what my ideas are and where I am in the process of creating, editing, submitting, and posting each puzzle. The most difficult part tends to be correctly prioritizing what needs to be done when. Even after many years of creating puzzles, it is still not obvious beforehand how long it will take to complete each step of the process.