About

Anamorph is a daily puzzle built on a four hundred year old drawing trick.

Anamorphosis

An anamorphic image is one that has been distorted so heavily that it only reads correctly from a single viewpoint. Renaissance painters hid skulls and portraits this way, stretched across a canvas so that they resolved only when you stood at the edge of the frame and looked along it. Street artists use the same principle today to paint holes in pavements that look real from one spot on the footpath and like a smear of paint from anywhere else.

Anamorph takes that idea into three dimensions. Instead of one distorted surface, the picture is cut into pieces and the pieces are scattered through space, each at its own distance and its own tilt. There is still exactly one place to stand.

How a puzzle is made

The puzzle is built backwards from its own answer, which is what guarantees it always has one.

• The day's shape is drawn into an image and cut into a grid of small tiles.
• A viewpoint is chosen at random for the day.
• Each tile is pushed away from that viewpoint along the ray that passes through it, and scaled by exactly the factor it moved.

An object twice as far away and twice as large covers exactly the same part of your view. That is the whole trick: every fragment is moved and resized together, so from the chosen viewpoint they land precisely where the picture needs them, and from anywhere else they scatter.

Because the construction starts from the answer, the generator cannot produce a puzzle that has no solution. There is no solver checking the day's puzzle and hoping, and no possibility of a day that cannot be finished.

Making it hard honestly

The hard part of designing this game was not making it difficult. It was removing the accidental clues.

An early version had every fragment facing the same way at the answer, which meant you could ignore the picture entirely and simply rotate until the pieces stopped looking skewed. Another version arranged the fragments so that the outline of the whole cloud quietly pointed at the answer. Each of these was fixed at the root rather than patched: fragments now sit on randomly tilted planes, and the cloud is shaped so that its own form gives nothing away.

The rule that came out of it is that anything whose appearance depends only on where the answer is will eventually be read as a hint, so it either has to be randomised or removed. The glow is the single deliberate exception, kept because without it a new player has no feedback at all, and limited so that it only ever says near.

Contact

Feedback, bug reports and shapes you would like to see are welcome at abhisheksharma09.work@gmail.com.