Looks great. FYI, Claude has idunno, maybe 20-30 different strongly themed websites it knows how to make, and this newspaper aesthetic is one of them, and all the sites it does this way look exactly the same.
It's a good aesthetic for your site, and I thought it was a good one for one of my sites. But eventually I redesigned my site significantly when I saw that it's gonna be common among vibed-up website designs and they look exactly the same.
I feel like the Nonogram is AI generated? There’s no way a human would set a perfectly symmetrical “diamond” as a medium difficulty puzzle. Worse yet, the hard difficulty is just “big diamond”, the same thing on a slightly larger grid.
The nonograms get more difficult as you do them. I actually made the diamond one myself, haha! Not too challenging really. I'm not good with making pixel art, but I probably made half of them by hand and I used Fable 5 to make the rest. I didn't actually find Opus or GPT-5.5 very good at making them. Or if they had an idea that was good, I had to fix it myself. Fable 5 was much better and 80% of its ideas looked decent.
I was also very confused. I started a medium puzzle and was immediately thrown off by the borders. Thicker borders are usually every 5 cells, but here it looks like they've been added just to equally divide the puzzle into 3 chunks.
Missing small details like these makes it fall into the uncanny valley. It looks like a typical puzzle on the surface but when you try to solve it all the mistakes stick out.
I hear ya. Fair criticism. I'm a professional developer myself, but not great at design. I've tried to come up with a different looking site best I could. I went with a newspaper theme like back in the day when you'd get the puzzles in the paper. And then it was my idea to have a sudoku being solved as a graphic on the front page. I would push back that this could be one-shot by any of the leading models including Fable. Each of the 10 puzzle types has to have its own generator and they're different from each other. They have to handle uniqueness, solvability, and difficulty and none of the leading models have nailed even just a single generator on the first shot. Plus, there's monetization, rate limiting, caching, among other things under the hood that models wouldn't typically touch without specific instruction or would, at best, half-ass it. Maybe you have better luck with them, but for my job, I work on a large legacy app as well as various microservices and the LLMs miss things all the time. I have a system I use that does make them perform better, but you still gotta watch em like a hawk.
I'm curious, What kind of details are you thinking of? I'm not sure I really have much of a radar for LLM websites in the way I do for LLM pictures or music.
I don't know for pictures, but I have gotten pretty good at detecting AI in videos. I am noticing these a lot on youtube. Often you can tell, e. g. movements being weird, animals behaving in ways that are only in a short and nowhere else to be found. And some more indicators e. g. youtube insists on showing sexy girls, but the video is clearly "cut" into another video and the surface layers also don't fully align; or some proportions are odd (I don't mean the "regular" ones but e. g. when the biceps looks like semi-hulk, you know something is AI slop). I try to not watch AI slop but sometimes it happens.
For images, there are some clear styles AI leans heavily on if not actively steered away[0].
It can definitely be prompted pretty successfully though, a bird spotting app was up her on HN recently with some really nice looking woodblock prints that were AI generated (I always feel disappointed/tricked when art turns out to be made by AI, I'm not sure why, it seems to pull the joy out of it for me)
I one shot games every now and then, just to see how much it can do. For anyone wanting to experiment, I have come to learn that if you make it make browser games the setup is even easier since it can just inject the JS into the HTML and import from a popular CDN, no node, no compilers needed, just a single HTML page with inline JS.
Just before putting the 2 in here (above the pencil 6), I put in 6 and it said Mistake, so I erased it and put 2. But... why wouldn't 6 be valid there?
EDIT: As per replies, "X" Sudoku is variant with a different rule. While I saw the diagonals "highlighted" in another color, I didn't know that rule. Perhaps it could be added to the page for those unfamiliar with this non-standard Sudoku variant?
Because there's already another 6 on the same main diagonal. This is an "X Sudoku" puzzle, which means that each main diagonal must have all 9 different numbers.
It doesn't cost me much to run. About $9/month for the VPS + domain and I run other apps on the same VPS. Just my little hobby server. It does have monetization though, but I give the first 25 puzzles of each type + difficulty for free and then you pay a few bucks to unlock the rest. Maybe I'm being too generous, but it's not a big deal really.
Nice! I wanted to share a link to Ripple Effect Hard with my time (23:47), but it seems the URL only captures attempts, so there's no real way to link to the puzzle itself.
Might be useful to
- add a wordle-style 'SHARE' button, and/or
- make the canonical URL that of the puzzle (and only the attempt on completing/abandoning it)
Haha, yeah, the early puzzles are pretty simple, but they do start to get more variety as you progress through them.
I hear ya. Maybe multiples of 5 would've been better. Mainly, I was trying to get a good mobile experience with as big of a board as I could. Perhaps not the best call.
By the way, if you are interested in nonograms specifically, there is a great website nonograms.org that has tens of thousands nonograms (both B&W and color) and no ads.
Oh yeah, I think I've seen it before. I got some inspiration for some of the nonograms that I made from some different sites. Not all of the sites that I've seen have had a great UI, especially on mobile, which is why I wanted to add nonograms to this site specifically.
Nice! real cool! This site does have monetization, but I give the first 25 puzzles free for each difficulty level. So a good amount of free content and I'm still trying to add more games.
// Fire view events (e.g. unlock_prompt_viewed) for any monetization prompt
// present in the freshly loaded page. data-analytics-view-events is a JSON
// array so one rendered prompt can report several events at once.
This is nice!
Readers may also enjoy Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, available for mobile as well: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
(My favorite currently is Dominosa. Playing the Hard mode is teaching me new patterns.)
Mine is currently Net, 7x7 grid with wrapping variant. I take about 5 minutes on average to solve a level, which is the sweet spot for me
Oh, this is kinda fun, I'm gonna play with it for a bit!
Looks great. FYI, Claude has idunno, maybe 20-30 different strongly themed websites it knows how to make, and this newspaper aesthetic is one of them, and all the sites it does this way look exactly the same.
It's a good aesthetic for your site, and I thought it was a good one for one of my sites. But eventually I redesigned my site significantly when I saw that it's gonna be common among vibed-up website designs and they look exactly the same.
I feel like the Nonogram is AI generated? There’s no way a human would set a perfectly symmetrical “diamond” as a medium difficulty puzzle. Worse yet, the hard difficulty is just “big diamond”, the same thing on a slightly larger grid.
The nonograms get more difficult as you do them. I actually made the diamond one myself, haha! Not too challenging really. I'm not good with making pixel art, but I probably made half of them by hand and I used Fable 5 to make the rest. I didn't actually find Opus or GPT-5.5 very good at making them. Or if they had an idea that was good, I had to fix it myself. Fable 5 was much better and 80% of its ideas looked decent.
I was also very confused. I started a medium puzzle and was immediately thrown off by the borders. Thicker borders are usually every 5 cells, but here it looks like they've been added just to equally divide the puzzle into 3 chunks.
Missing small details like these makes it fall into the uncanny valley. It looks like a typical puzzle on the surface but when you try to solve it all the mistakes stick out.
I mean the front page is full of LLM smells, so presumably the games are made that way too.
And that's fair; this whole thing could be one-shot with any of the leading models.
I hear ya. Fair criticism. I'm a professional developer myself, but not great at design. I've tried to come up with a different looking site best I could. I went with a newspaper theme like back in the day when you'd get the puzzles in the paper. And then it was my idea to have a sudoku being solved as a graphic on the front page. I would push back that this could be one-shot by any of the leading models including Fable. Each of the 10 puzzle types has to have its own generator and they're different from each other. They have to handle uniqueness, solvability, and difficulty and none of the leading models have nailed even just a single generator on the first shot. Plus, there's monetization, rate limiting, caching, among other things under the hood that models wouldn't typically touch without specific instruction or would, at best, half-ass it. Maybe you have better luck with them, but for my job, I work on a large legacy app as well as various microservices and the LLMs miss things all the time. I have a system I use that does make them perform better, but you still gotta watch em like a hawk.
> the front page is full of LLM smells
I'm curious, What kind of details are you thinking of? I'm not sure I really have much of a radar for LLM websites in the way I do for LLM pictures or music.
I don't know for pictures, but I have gotten pretty good at detecting AI in videos. I am noticing these a lot on youtube. Often you can tell, e. g. movements being weird, animals behaving in ways that are only in a short and nowhere else to be found. And some more indicators e. g. youtube insists on showing sexy girls, but the video is clearly "cut" into another video and the surface layers also don't fully align; or some proportions are odd (I don't mean the "regular" ones but e. g. when the biceps looks like semi-hulk, you know something is AI slop). I try to not watch AI slop but sometimes it happens.
For images, there are some clear styles AI leans heavily on if not actively steered away[0].
It can definitely be prompted pretty successfully though, a bird spotting app was up her on HN recently with some really nice looking woodblock prints that were AI generated (I always feel disappointed/tricked when art turns out to be made by AI, I'm not sure why, it seems to pull the joy out of it for me)
[0] https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/the-100000-whys-of-ai
I one shot games every now and then, just to see how much it can do. For anyone wanting to experiment, I have come to learn that if you make it make browser games the setup is even easier since it can just inject the JS into the HTML and import from a popular CDN, no node, no compilers needed, just a single HTML page with inline JS.
I'm 99% sure this was an invalid Sudoku puzzle.
Just before putting the 2 in here (above the pencil 6), I put in 6 and it said Mistake, so I erased it and put 2. But... why wouldn't 6 be valid there?
https://imgur.com/a/aOnKbiT
EDIT: As per replies, "X" Sudoku is variant with a different rule. While I saw the diagonals "highlighted" in another color, I didn't know that rule. Perhaps it could be added to the page for those unfamiliar with this non-standard Sudoku variant?
Because there's already another 6 on the same main diagonal. This is an "X Sudoku" puzzle, which means that each main diagonal must have all 9 different numbers.
All I've never done the diagonals before... oops.
https://imgur.com/a/Dfxf9CJ (before picking 2 / 6 / 7.)
Yeah, that Sudoku puzzle has multiple valid solutions, whereas the page only seems to accept a single one.
There's an extra constraint on that one: the two main diagonals must both have nine different digits. That's what makes it a single-solution puzzle.
How do you plan to keep it free from ads? I see it has accounts, if it was completely client side, it could have been forever free.
It doesn't cost me much to run. About $9/month for the VPS + domain and I run other apps on the same VPS. Just my little hobby server. It does have monetization though, but I give the first 25 puzzles of each type + difficulty for free and then you pay a few bucks to unlock the rest. Maybe I'm being too generous, but it's not a big deal really.
Nice! I wanted to share a link to Ripple Effect Hard with my time (23:47), but it seems the URL only captures attempts, so there's no real way to link to the puzzle itself.
Might be useful to
- add a wordle-style 'SHARE' button, and/or
- make the canonical URL that of the puzzle (and only the attempt on completing/abandoning it)
Well i like the theory but all of your nonograms are symmetrical or diamonds. Not exactly much of a puzzle
And what sort of monster doesn't have nonogram sizes in multiples of 5?
Haha, yeah, the early puzzles are pretty simple, but they do start to get more variety as you progress through them.
I hear ya. Maybe multiples of 5 would've been better. Mainly, I was trying to get a good mobile experience with as big of a board as I could. Perhaps not the best call.
The homepage is a little overwhelming, other than that cool site
By the way, if you are interested in nonograms specifically, there is a great website nonograms.org that has tens of thousands nonograms (both B&W and color) and no ads.
Oh yeah, I think I've seen it before. I got some inspiration for some of the nonograms that I made from some different sites. Not all of the sites that I've seen have had a great UI, especially on mobile, which is why I wanted to add nonograms to this site specifically.
Nice job! I made something similar, mostly for myself: https://www.vexling.com
Plan to keep it forever free :)
Nice! real cool! This site does have monetization, but I give the first 25 puzzles free for each difficulty level. So a good amount of free content and I'm still trying to add more games.
Please copy the LinkedIn Games !
I second this suggestion.
Oh yeah? I'll have to check them out. Good tip!
I took a quick look at the source:
What's a monetization prompt?Are you blocking Tor?
Checked on it and I'm not blocking Tor. Are you getting issues? Maybe it's not handling the boost in traffic from this post
Hmmm, if it is, I wasn't aware of it. Let me look into my rate-limiting settings that might block something like that.
Nice! A few word games would be cool: scrabble, boggle, etc.