When I was younger, I remember spending way too much time with a puzzle much like this one. Mine was diamond shaped, and on the back there were triangles to create a 3D pyramid with the same shapes. It came with a solution guide, and at the time it seemed like there were thousands of solutions. In retrospect, there were probably only a few hundred.
The simplicity of the game made it seem accessible as an early programming project, and indeed it was one of the first graphical applications I tried to make. My GitHub log tells me the first commit was in July of 2012, and I can’t believe it’s only been three years since I started getting serious about programming.
I never really finished that project and have been wanting to revisit it for some time now. When I decided to learn more about HTML5 canvas graphics, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. But I kind of hate JavaScript. Whenever I find myself writing JavaScript, I feel like I’m hacking my way through the code to fix some weird UI behavior. So it seemed obvious to me combine my recent dabbling in Scala.js with my exploration of HTML5.
The result was a first draft of Hexiles.
