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Comment by paulhebert

7 hours ago

I'm continuing to hack on Tiled Words, my daily word puzzle!

https://tiledwords.com

After winning the Playlin Player's Choice award I've noticed an uptick in players as well as some people sharing videos on YouTube which has been fun. I've got a few thousand people playing every day.

I just launched user accounts today so user's can now track their progress across devices and share their stats with each other. This ended up being a bigger chunk of work than I expected but I'm really pleased with how it turned out. (Though I launched it 15 minutes ago so I'm holding my breath for bug reports)

I'm fine-tuning my internal puzzle-building now with the goal of letting people use them to make and share their own puzzles soon!

17 comments

paulhebert

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dodu_  6 minutes ago

I can't say I'm a regular user but a while ago I stumbled upon another post about tiledwords while a loved one was in the hospital and it was a fun and welcome distraction to solve some of the puzzles together while stuck in an otherwise grim environment.

Thanks for making this and I wish you all the success in the future.

rnoorda  4 hours ago

I've been enjoying Tiled Words! I find myself playing in a weird way, by totally ignoring the clues. I look at the title and try to puzzle out all the answers myself. I don't know if I'm alone in that, but it could be a neat mode to have a setting to hide the clues.

  • paulhebert  3 hours ago

    Thanks! I’ve heard that from a few people! Adding that as an official mode is on my road map but there are a few big features ahead of it right now

vlatoshi  4 hours ago

this is so cool, i liked the musical instruments one!

would be super interested to hear more about the puzzle-making process too, is it fully automated with AI at this point or is there still a good amount of manual work and fine-tuning involved?

bookmarked already, can't wait to play tomorrow again

  • paulhebert  2 hours ago

    Thanks!

    It’s a lot of manual work right now. I don’t use AI in the process. I think it could help with some of the brainstorming but I kind of like the human connection of making a puzzle and having people solve it.

    Here’s the basic process.

    My wife and I do this part together:

    - Think of a theme

    - Think of words related to that theme, ideally with a second meaning

    - Think of clues for those words

    Once we have a good set of clues I plug them into a program I wrote to make crosswords.

    The program isn’t that smart. It tries making random crosswords. I run it 1500 times and then sort the results to get the best ones. This brute force approach works pretty well for how simple it is.

    I pick the crossword I want and then I use another tool to split up and rearrange the tiles. This step could probably be automated but there’s some finicky logic to the best way to split up the tiles and it goes pretty fast manually.

    I’ve been meaning to make a video of the process! I’ll share it here when I do

kvirani  6 hours ago

Oh wow. This seems like it was a lot of work. Bookmarked and installed!

  • paulhebert  6 hours ago

    Haha yeah it’s been a labor of love!

    The design and dev took a while but building the has been the most time consuming at this point. My wife and I make the puzzles together.

    We’re getting close to 6 months of daily, hand crafted puzzles!