Occam's Quilt is a game of logic and deduction. The goal is to rearrange the 'plus-shaped' quilt pieces so that each of them shares at least one attribute in common with each surrounding quilt piece (both the 'plus-shaped' pieces and the 'octagonal-shaped' pieces). Most puzzles will have more than one solution, but even discovering one solution may prove challenging. The picture above is of the smallest sized puzzle. There are 5 puzzle sizes from 4x4 (shown above) up to 12x8. Each quilt piece has three attributes: color, background pattern, and picture. There are 6 colors, 6 patterns, and 6 pictures (although not all may be used in any given puzzle).

Alternate Image Sets

Below are alternate image sets for use with the Occam's Quilt game. They're stored as self-extracting archives (ZIP files that have been turned into EXE files). Just download the desired file and run it to install. The files should be installed in the IMAGES sub-folder of the folder containing your Occam's Quilt game (C:\EKS\QUILT\IMAGES is the default).

OQEXTRA - alternate image sets and color sets. ALL of these are included with the licensed version of the game when purchased on CD. However, if you purchase the licensed version online (where you just download the licensed version and don't receive a CD) then you'll want to download this file and run it to install these extra image sets. This download file is about 4 Mbytes. Included are sets designed by Amy Lindesmith, Kris Pixton, Judy Spence, M. David Wilson, and PJ. My thanks to all of them for saving me the time and effort of having to create alternate sets!

Notes On Creating Image Sets

For those of you interested in creating your own image sets, here are a few points of interest:

1) It's VERY important, for a good (ie, playable) image set to:

a) have six texture patterns that are clear and easily distinguished from each other at all six image sizes.
b) have six symbol pictures that are easily distinguished from each other and that stand out well against all six texture patterns.
c) all six texture patterns should be rendered at a very similar level of darkness/lightness. This one is hard to quantify, but if you squint (so your sight is blurry) and look at your image set, do some of the textures look significantly darker or lighter than the others? If so, you should try to adjust their brightness to better match the brightness of the other textures. Otherwise, when the different textures get colorized to the same color, they won't LOOK like the same color.

2) It is important that the "move this square" and "to here" indicator animation graphics NOT be completely congruent. ie, if either is placed in front of the other, will the either COMPLETELY obscure the other? If so, that's bad news for the player, because frequently a square can be placed where it already is, so both the "move this square" (source) and "to here" (destination/target) graphics will be drawn on top of each other at the location that the player has right- or middle-clicked upon, and if they're totally congruent, one of them will completely hide the other one.

3) The game graphics 'pieces' are actually square-shaped, with "transparent" areas causing the pieces to look non-square (see the Occam's Quilt help pages about creating graphics for more on the transparency colors, etc). The top-left-most diagram below shows how the default image set graphics are arranged when drawn on the game screen. The larger plus-shaped pieces are outlined with black squares, and the smaller octagonal-shaped 'post' piece is outlined in white. For each of these 'squares' the ENTIRE square is drawn, except for those areas with a transparent color. This means that you can make the shapes of the pieces be ANY shape you want (within reason). They don't even need to be symmetrical. An example of this is shown in the top-right diagram. When trying to create a set of pieces with alternate shapes, the best way to do it is as shown below. Then, once you've got them designed the way you want them to look, then you can cut the individual shapes out and paste them into your new image set. You'll probably start with one size of image (the largest, for example), and once you've got them done, then resize them, use those resized images to create another 'working bitmap' like below, clean them up (get the edges sharpened), then cut and paste them back into the image set. This will establish the basic SHAPES for your image set (if you want the same shapes as some other image set, then simply copy that image set and skip this step). Then you still have to create the six different texture patterns and six different picture images (at all six sizes). Nobody said this was going to be easy! :-) The bottom two diagrams below show other possible alternate shapes. Remember, the 'pictures' have to fit within both shapes, so don't make the 'post' shape TOO small!

KINT Interpreter Source Code

If you're interested in the KINT interpreter source codes (which are mentioned in the Occam's Quilt help page about porting the game to non-Microsoft OS's) see the KINT web page. This will NOT be of interest to you, I suspect, unless you're a programmer.

A 32-bit version of MS Windows (such as Win 9x, Me, 2000, NT, XP, etc) or something able to emulate that environment.

Minimum of 64 Mbytes of RAM

6 Mbytes of disk space for the shareware version.
40 Mbytes of disk space for the licensed version (much of this is additional image sets, which can be deleted if you wish to conserve disk space).

Everett Kaser Software
PO Box 403
Albany OR 97321-0117
Phone: (541) 928-5259 between 8am and 8pm Pacific Time daily.
email: everett@kaser.com