Huedoku is a color puzzle where the answer is color harmony. Like Tetris, except, instead of fitting shapes, color matching is what matters. This is a game unlike any other, where the puzzle is a micro AND macrocosm of colors in exact order as if zoomed in on a gradient color spectrum where the pixels become big enough to move with your fingers.
Simple, and yet when you zoom in on a five pixel by five pixel grid of related color swatches, something astounding occurs.
The solution for a huedoku puzzle is obvious. Or at least, so I thought.
When the first beta of huedoku was released my Mom asked if I could make some easier puzzles. She wasn’t the only one. So, I made a gallery called “Play School”, intended to show color blending as expected, where blue and yellow make green, and all the world was right.
“Gumballs” became the first puzzle in the entire game, reasoning that everyone would get it, blue and red make purple. The resulting data from the puzzle play of 100 testers revealed something unexpected.
The first thing I discovered was that the size of the puzzle caused the difficulty to fluctuate. Meaning, a difficult puzzle in the largest size (a 5x5 matrix) might be average difficulty when rendered as a 3x3 matrix with the exact four starting colors.
The second easiest 3x3 puzzle, “Gumballs” becomes the 7th most difficult puzzle when rendered as a 5x5 matrix. What did it mean that “Gumballs” was easy as a small grid, yet seemingly more complex, or at least harder to solve, as a larger grid? It begs the question, why would a smaller sized puzzle change the difficulty of the puzzle?
The second discovery was more mysterious. The hardest and the easiest puzzles were consistent for large and small renderings.
The Easiest Puzzle Had Complementary Colors, So Did The Hardest
These two puzzles with similar colors tell a revealing story about what elements of visual perception and color theory play the most important part in determining difficulty of a huedoku puzzle. In “Sunrise” (a puzzle worth exploring for matching color value) the complementary colors are in opposing corners, making it an exceedingly difficult puzzle.
The easiest puzzle, “Balloons”, contains essentially two hues. The complementary colors of Orange and Blue. Complementary colors are opposing on the color wheel. They always make grey when they mix. They also reveal one another in after-image.
“Every decided color does a certain violence to the eye and forces it to opposition.” —Goethe on complementary colors
I would never have thought a puzzle made of complementary colors, would be easiest to solve.
I believe there are two important conclusions to be made about what factors determine the difficulty of a huedoku puzzle.
The most apparent difference is value. In “Balloons” the top orange and bottom blue colors get darker from left to right. Value is the easiest distinction for us to see, and in fact is processed in a different part of our visual perceptive system than color. In fact, “Sunrise” was created to be intentionally difficult as every hue is very close in value. This achieves a radiant glowing visual effect called vanishing boundaries that was leveraged by the Impressionist painters.
That explains why “Sunrise” is so tough, but a number of other puzzles have a great difference in value. So why is “Balloons” with complementary colors the easiest puzzle in huedoku? This leads us to our second insight.
The reason is halation, something a surprisingly few artists have even heard of. Many have seen it, but have lacked the term for this guiding visual phenomena. Halation is an illusion created in our eyes when color divides. A flat color appears three dimensional, seemingly aware and clearly in harmony with its surroundings. spreading like a gradient colors in relationship have halos.
They glow, become vibrant, their physical appearance is changed. Colors out of relationship, a huedoku puzzle scrambled, appear flat. Colors in relationship, a huedoku puzzle solved, sing in harmony.
