Hey, pixel people... this is a personal appeal from that silly avatar founder of tzigla /end-wikipedia-joke

Pretty please grab some tiles on the checker board, it's really looking great so far and we're sad to see it stalling.

We promise we're working really hard on making tzigla more friendly and usable and we'd really really be encouraged if you'd keep using it. We're not getting anything out of all the hard work we're putting into it more than seeing people do nice tiles.

Also, this week we're starting work on brick style boards which are the intermediary step towards hex tiles. But I'm actually scared of working on that too fast since I'm afraid this board would die off and all the tiles worked so far would go to waste.

Thanks. And glad I helped lead you to a better solution for the idea.

LiGhTbUlB: There should be a way to instantly find a certain artist's tiles. I keep scanning over the entire thing looking for certain artists with the rollover effect to see which/how many they've done. I imagine a list of contributing artists in the UI, you can click a name and their tiles highlight somehow. Perhaps each artist name is a toggle button that highlights or unhighlights their contributed tiles. When multiple artist's names are clicked, you can keep them differentiated with randomly assigned color coding. And maybe this only works in "artist mode" (or something), which when activated places an overlay of information on the whole collab, such as name, etc. Because normally, you'd want clicking an artist's name to bring up their profile-ish info.



Ya know . . . I was going thru the last Hex Collab thread. Such a dramatic event, lotta excitement bottled up in it. But with the Tzigla thing now, the enthusiasm just isn't there. And I wonder why. There's no sense of urgency about it among participants.
I don't know exactly why, but if there was a Hex Collab 3 going on I would've already jumped in. I'm not nearly as compelled with Tzigla. Bringing this up because I suspect most feel the same way. I don't know if the Hex Collab's appeal was due to it being all handled by ptoing, a local resident admin, and it being more Pixelation exclusive, a more local thing, whereas Tzigla certainly feels like you're leaving Pixelation and going somewhere else entirely. Is it because it's squares? When I first caught wind of Tzigla, I was actually a little disappointed that a 3rd party would be handling what I perceived as a Pixelation novelty. It's like something rare, fresh, new and inventive being snapped up by a corporation, bottled and sold on shelves, in bulk. Is there a degree of that sold-out feeling? Am I just a freak? Eccentric about it. The collaborative spirit is still there, it's just not nearly as electric anymore. I would like Tzigla to have that. But since it's so intangible and hard to define, I can't tell you how to get it.

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. You make some very good points and we've spent all day today busting our heads on how to fix things. We now realize we've been doing a lot of things wrong and that we didn't think enough about the people that will actually use the site.

One enlightenment in particular is that the hex collab was more about the conversation than the board (until the board was over) while tzigla is all about the board, and zero about conversation at the moment. I think this one of the main reasons for the feeling of coldness and impersonality.

The board should probably be a very tiny bit of the interface (even tho it's the actual tech behind it that makes running a collab easy) and most should be about what those people did and what they said. We were probably so proud of our collab enabling code that we forgot about making people happy :/.

We didn't realize this before your post (maybe we were in denial?) so thanks for bringing it up. We've definitely invested a few hundred hours (a lot of them instead of doing paid work, heh) so we really want tzigla to be used and loved and make life easier for collab happy people.

We'll be back tomorrow with ideas and start working on making tzigla a place for people, more than just a place for cold rules, image stitching and palette enforcing.

Ho, ho, ho!

Just deployed a new version. It contains mainly changes for not signed in users (help, better sign in texts, hints, etc) and a bunch of new texts.

It also has an even more streamlined sidebar, that manages to actually add more info in less space, yay

As always, see it in action at http://tzigla.com/boards/3

Happy pixeling!

Thanks for the compliments

Because of the minimal things, we took the percent out because it was not essential and had too little info (we want to bring it back with a few more stats). Other UI updates coming today, btw. Thanks for the progress bar style idea. W might implement it another way tho, maybe as a bg for the header or such.

We have two options that control the revealing of tiles:

1. never show tiles until the end, even if all neighbours are done (defaults to false)
2. always show tiles, even if neighbours are not done (defaults to false)

The C64 board has the first option set to true, which is exactly what you want, and the quack board uses the defaults, which makes the game a bit more palatable to people new to the tzigla concept. The second option allows us to support the pixeljoint style collabs (for which we still have to allow saving WIPs and rereservation of already done tiles).

As for the visibility of tiles, it would be pretty difficult to break that since we upload by default as private to amazon s3, and we only make them visible once they have to become visible (based on the logic described above). Thanks for trying tho . We would appreciate if you find any security issues (except issues involving social engineering).

Some good changes. I like your minimal UI thinking. Though, I did like the percentage complete being visible by default; not requiring a rollover. Seems like pertinent enough info to not be hidden.

Further on the percent complete  - it would be cool if not only a number was used, but along with a numerical percentage, a progress bar (pbar) subdivided into as many segments as there are tiles total, in the collab. Segments of this pbar representing completed tiles would be a different shade than the ones representing incomplete ones. You could even use a 3rd shade for tiles currently checked out.
This pbar idea adds a nice functional visual representation of collab completness/incompleteness for all the visually-oriented people that will visit Tzigla. The difference in how left-brained and right-brained people prefer to get information can be humorous sometimes.


Are you really purposely revealing completed tiles landlocked by other completed tiles? Yikes, that nearly ruins the fun, and surely spoils any element of surprise and anticipation as the collab progresses. We dealt with this issue during the Hex Collab here. We pretty much all decided to keep it hidden, until the very end. The surprise at the end is astounding. I strongly suggest keeping everything hidden from sight until all done.

A serious web programmer friend, and myself, attempted to reveal your blacked out tiles in both collabs, and were unsuccessful, so good job. Yer doing some server-side magic to keep everything under wraps, and it works.

Familiar with the exquisite corpse site/collab, Start a Story?

aw shoot, you know what would be great? if you made the ends loop to the other side, so you could scroll in one direction indefinitely!

In our 160 line TODO file, there are 15 lines mentioning new board types we thought of adding.

Wrap around boards is one of them and it'll most likely be the first (ok, maybe the second) one we do since it's the easiest