Comment by paulhebert
1 day ago
I recently launched a daily word puzzle!
It’s inspired by tile placement board games like Patchwork and crosswords. You rotate and move tiles to rebuild a broken crossword.
It’s free, web based, and responsive.
I currently have several hundred daily players and growing. My wife and I create the puzzles and I’m continuing to fix bugs and add new features.
I just launched a ”community puzzle” feature to let players help build new puzzles.
I’d love to know what you think!
It was super fun! Would love a little more space to move pieces around but otherwise fantastic job!
Very nice game, good job!
Just played it, really super. Great job.
There are not many sites I whitelist for javascript, or even bookmark these day. Really glad I tried your game, it's fun and nicely executed. Well done to you both.
Thanks!
I love it!
Amazing game, perfect for me.
Really great! One of the things that Wordle did that I thought was very clever was having a copy and paste social media preview of how you did. It might be worth adding that for vitality... you could even add an image preview with Open Graph meta tags if you were clever.
Thanks, yeah I’d like to improve this. There is a “share” option when you complete a level but I don’t think it works as well as Wordle’s in terms of storytelling.
Generating a custom sharing image is interesting!
This is something I've gone and forth on for https://threeemojis.com/ as well. I think it's pretty hard to generate a story of a complicated puzzle, in part because the person you are sending it to doesn't have an idea of the terrain you were playing on and so kind of doesn't care. I do see some people doing custom share images with their puzzles, but it doesn't seem to have caught on so much.
* virality :-/
Good fun. I discovered a big though. I could not yet reproduce it, but I managed to somehow have letters glitch out of the Tetris shapes they are in. When I move the tiles or rotate them, the letters are back where they should be. So it's not game breaking, but seems to happen in some case. At first I suspected, that it was because my phone was locked in between, but I tried that and when locking it manually, that bug did not happen. So no idea, sorry!
Ahh dang I’ve had a few people report this but I haven’t been able to reproduce it. I think it does have something to do with locking your screen and coming back but I haven’t figured it out yet
Nice! Some feedback from my wife, who is into all manner of word games: she found it a little bit brute-forcey: needing to try all different combinations in order to get the right configuration of the word. In contrast to a crossword where there is already a layout, which gives her a hint for how to proceed with the rest.
(She finished today's puzzle, and I gave up.) From a UI perspective it is very slick - very smooth, and I like how it kind of "gets" what you were trying to do when providing corrections/hints.
>In contrast to a crossword
there's a type of crossword called "diagramless" where you have the numbered clues and an empty grid
there was one in NYTimes Magazine Sunday puzzle page this past weekend
Thats great feedback, thank you!
This is a lovely game!
This game was Show HNed two times in ten days, [1][2], but unfortunately, it didn't get as much attention as it should! Ironically, this current thread has already gained almost double the comments from both submissions combined!
I whish you best of luck to succeed in your journey.
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1.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45634525
Thanks!
Yeah I felt odd reposting the Show HN but I thought that the HN crowd would enjoy the game if a post got traction
I really enjoyed this! wondering about a possible "scratch" section or larger area - found myself spending a lot of time moving pieces around to get enough space
Yeah I’ve gone back and forth on this.
On large screens adding more space would be a big quality of life improvement.
But it doesn’t really work on smaller screens.
So far I’ve tried to keep the experience as similar as possible across devices but maybe that’s silly
Yeah, I think you should be actively encouraging the sales of laptops/desktops.
I saw your Show HN post a few weeks ago! Really appreciate the smoothness of your UI and the simplicity of your onboarding, I see how much you have dialed in. I've been working on a daily puzzle game too (it's getting there...), maybe you'd enjoy it https://slab17.com/
Very cool!
I solved the first puzzle: -Congratulations! -You solved Paprika with 18 slabs
But this was unclear: -You've solved 0 puzzles! -Reveal Rule -Next Puzzle -View Archive -You still have 2 guesses left. Finish guessing before revealing the rule if you're feeling brave!
I have to do 2 more guesses before I can reveal the rule that I already figured out?
Thanks for the note! This part needs work and I really appreciate the call out. I'll try to explain here to share, and maybe clarify my own thinking.
Getting any of the guesses right counts as a win, and you get different guessing slabs for each guess (this latter part isn't made at all clear upfront).
If you have a rule in your head like "no red", but the true rule is "no red or orange", it's possible that on the guessing slabs those two rules evaluate to the same things (e.g. there weren't any oranges present in the guessing slabs). You could then try the rest of the guessing slabs, which might have an example where you get it wrong, giving more gameplay.
I wanted to give a victory on any subset of 5 slabs guessed successfully since trying to get all the guesses is very hard (especially the first guess on many puzzles), and you can get new information from guesses which fail, which offers some progression. Hence getting "you won" and the ability to reveal the rule (I've also thought about keeping the reveal unavailable until you do all guesses) and the invitation to keep playing.
If you have a minute I'd love to hear from you if that makes sense and if you have thoughts about what might make more sense. I've also tried to consider ways of restructuring the gameplay, e.g. automatically progressing to the next set of guessing slabs, such that the flow here is less confusing.
Thanks for playing, and for sharing!
1 reply →
Slab 17 is a really interesting and unique puzzle! I love the act of slab creation. It’s very satisfying and the aesthetics are great.
I found the instruction about double tapping a little confusing at first but figured it out as I played.
Nice work!
Thanks for the note and the feedback about the instructions! Got me to rework the wording.
This is really fun — have you played with making the tile position opinionated (not agnostic)?
i wonder if have the clues point to a starting square (e.g., "E5") would be better than the current "reveal" aid. The spatial information would become more helpful toward the end when the player is dealing with the words they need help on.
Could you expand on what you mean about opinionated vs agnostic? It sounds interesting but I’m not sure I follow.
I like that clue idea! I want to change how the reveals work. I’ll play with that!
Nice! What might be a nice lesser 'clue' to simply revealing a word is highlighting letter(s) on the board that are part of it? Favouring maybe highlighting letters that are contiguous with a blue bit?
Yeah that’s a good idea!
This puzzle is genius.The interface is minimal and user-friendly, everything feels smooth and intuitive.
That's awesome!! It took 15 min and I gave up on some words.
As a non native it feels awesome to finish a puzzle like this haha
Nice job! I’m glad you enjoyed it!
I shared with people. They loved it.
Thank you!
You had me at Patchwork. This is super fun. Thanks for making it!
I love Patchwork! One of my wife and I's favorite, easy, go-to games.
This is really good. I like the idea of the game and your execution of it is superb.
The animations in the interface make it feel more "jelly" and not "wooden" like a number of other such interfaces.
Thanks! I spent a long time trying to make the core controls feel intuitive and natural to use
The amount of care you put into it must be massive; a noticed so many nice subtle details that make interacting with the pieces easy and fun. Kudos!
Very neat and clean UX, kudos to that!
How do you market it – now or planning to, if I may ask?
Great question… marketing is not my strong suit.
I showcased at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game squad and that got me some players. I also shared it on my various personal social medias. The neighborhood board game store let me put up a poster!
I’m also hoping that organic sharing will drive growth.
This HN comment has been some of my most successful marketing so far. Around 2400 people from HN have visited since I posted!
Fun game! Shared with some friends :)
Thanks!
I also enjoyed this, great work!
I love it. I struggle more than I want to admit, but super fun nonetheless.
It definitely has a bit of a learning curve! In playtesting it sometimes took a bit for the rotation to “click” for people.
Yeah that was it for me, the rotation really threw me off.
Wow that is a clean and responsive interface! It feels great on mobile.
Awesome game! I've been looking for something like this.
Thanks, I’m glad you like it!
That was wonderful, I'll be back tomorrow.
Thanks, I’m glad you like it!
this is very cool, noticed vue and nuxt nice.
Thanks! Yeah I love Vue and Nuxt. They worked great for this project
very addictive and original puzzle game, like it!
This is bloody good
Super fin idea, very nicely executed, thanks!
That was fun, I’m in!
Awesome!
Great game! The effort you put into animations and interactivity really pays off, especially when first learning how the game works.
This is a classic HN comment but I’d love a Thursday/Friday crossword difficulty equivalent in addition to the dailies which are a ~Monday.
Thanks! I would like to explore different difficulty puzzles in the future!
Awesome work