knuckleheads
18 hours ago
Very nice! I had been wondering you constructed these. I've enjoyed playing them! A question I would have is how meta do you think can you get with these hints? In crosswords, you often see a lot of references to other clues in the crossword. And so I wonder, with bracket city puzzles, it seems like it would be hard to dip into that self reference, as the tree structure of the clues makes it hard to reference other clues and there's no labels like 2 across you could use.
brgross
18 hours ago
I've played around a little with this but never found a way to do it that I thought worked for the Atlantic puzzle.
Here's a very bad example I just made of one way you might use emoji to make inter-clue references:
https://suburbs.bracket.city/5Q1O24
too confusing/unsatisfying right now -- but I made the builder partly so that people would experiment...I bet someone will figure out something good!
knuckleheads
17 hours ago
Yeah I can’t say the emoji linkage do it for me. Perhaps, though, what about color highlights? Sven’s Sudoku Pad lets you apply colors to cells and this is used to great effect during solves on cracking the cryptic. Flipping that from solving to authoring, if you wouldn’t mind adding the option to allow highlighting of clues from some simple preset color list, that might be able to give people some options.
knuckleheads
17 hours ago
Ah, in fact, could you add three options: 1. Turn off the display of brackets. 2. Pick colors for each clue. 3. Allow the puzzle to be displayed with a preset fixed width.