Started reading the article, immediately thought of a relative simple solution:
- the most important thing is: is a bottom layer ‘solid’. So looking from above seems the most obvious
- you could use e.g. numbers to indicate height, so a 3 is ‘three up’, a ‘1’ is one up, and a ‘0’ is: you are at the bottom.
- and use colours to indicate ‘holes below’ (e.g. blue is one hole, green 2, and red 3).
The blocks that are falling could be shown in multiple views, e.g. from above, from the front and from the right (with e.g. again numbers saying how ‘high’ it is.
You would not see the complete picture, but surely when you play from the start you would get a good mental picture from where the holes are, certainly if you played it for some length?
Edit:
A separate view of e.g. the bottom layer or perhaps the two lowest layers could make it completely playable?
That definitely sounds like some approaches that have been taken. Blockout and Welltris are workable. I was just trying to do something that gave access to all information in a consistent way, so that someone might develop an intuition for a space outside of their usual 3D vision.
- the most important thing is: is a bottom layer ‘solid’. So looking from above seems the most obvious
- you could use e.g. numbers to indicate height, so a 3 is ‘three up’, a ‘1’ is one up, and a ‘0’ is: you are at the bottom.
- and use colours to indicate ‘holes below’ (e.g. blue is one hole, green 2, and red 3).
The blocks that are falling could be shown in multiple views, e.g. from above, from the front and from the right (with e.g. again numbers saying how ‘high’ it is.
You would not see the complete picture, but surely when you play from the start you would get a good mental picture from where the holes are, certainly if you played it for some length?
Edit: A separate view of e.g. the bottom layer or perhaps the two lowest layers could make it completely playable?