Puzzle Massive - Multiplayer Jigsaw Puzzle

[jkenlooper]

I've recently started working on my old side project which is this online jigsaw puzzle website.  I did most of the development a few years ago, so it's not really using anything modern like web sockets and such.  Anyways, here is the front page of the http://puzzle.massive.xyz which shows an image which you click on to start assembling that puzzle.  The most recent puzzle that has had a piece move will be listed here.

When assembling the puzzle all the pieces that are moved will also move for any other players viewing that puzzle.  It basically does a bit of polling every 15 seconds to check for other player piece movements.  While I could set it to have the piece movements be more immediate, I found that having multiple players on a puzzle all moving pieces at once caused it hard to focus on the puzzle.  So every 15 seconds it'll simply do a puzzle piece update which moves the pieces in a batch.

Oh, and the majority of puzzle images that I'm using are just random photos from https://unsplash.com.  The Puzzle Massive site also has a simple form to upload your own images to create puzzles with up to 3000 pieces.

The design of the site is somewhat lacking.  I'm more of a developer and not much of a designer.  At the moment I'm just concentrating on a lot of the server side code to make it work better.

Check it out at: http://puzzle.massive.xyz

[ecv]

I see a few problems here: 

The preview picture shows a cropped version of the picture, although I don't know if this is intended.

On the phone it's easy to move around. Not that much on the desktop. The MMB isn't working to move around the screen for me in Chrome. Using the scrollbars for this is rather uncomfortable and if I zoom out I can't really tell much detail (I'm still using 1024x768 and a small screen by today standards).

Other than that your idea's quite original.

[jkenlooper]

Yeah the puzzle picture was cropped to just show the interlocking pieces.  I usually zoom out with the browser and use a trackpad.  I did create an "auto scroll" option that will scroll the browser window when moving a piece.  Thats a little checkbox on the left side.  Obviously the "auto scroll" feature would only apply for desktop or laptop devices.

I guess I've never really used a mouse with a Middle Mouse Button.  I'll have to play around with one sometime to see what I could do with it.

The site could use some design improvements for sure, thanks for the feedback on it.