Comment by sparky_z
14 hours ago
There are some fun ideas here, but also some rough edges. Using today's puzzle (steak->boring, which I have not solved yet) as an example:
-It's not clear to me whether the game is intended to accept any valid intermediate move or to only accept moves that lead to the correct solution. For a while, I though it only accepted correct moves, because it would not accept "steak->house" or "stake->holder" as valid moves, when I think those should clearly be valid "compound" actions (if I understand the rules correctly).
-On the other hand, I now realize that it wouldn't make sense to have an "undo" button if it were impossible to input valid but wrong moves. So maybe omitting steakhouse and stakeholder was an oversight? But now I've spend a while in a "dead end" when I thought the game was telling me I was on the right track.
-At this point, I've spend more time trying to figure this meta question about the rules than I have spent trying to solve the actual puzzle. It would help if the instructions or the game feedback made it clear whether "acceptance" = "correctness" or mere "validity".
-Also, I tried to start off with steak->stake as my homophone move, but it only accepts it as an anagram move. Obviously it's both, but there's no way for me to pick which one I want to use (and therefore free up the move I want to reserve for later).
Yeah I think these are all really fair criticisms and I agree with them all.
Regarding the steakhouse/stakeholder issue, I think that because these words lean American they got missed in the compound word generation stage. Will add them now. Can totally see how that created a lot of confusion for you when trying to solve yesterday’s puzzle.
And yeah I've been finding differentiating between correctness and validity a really hard design challenge because I don’t want to reveal to the player that they are on the solution path since the ambiguity/branching is often what makes it challenging. I think there needs to be a clearer signal that whilst your answer might be accepted, it's not necessarily the correct solution.
Steak/stake is both an anagram and a compound and I still haven’t solved how we handle these edge cases. I shouldn’t really have released this particular puzzle given it starts with this issue. I just didn’t even notice till it was too late!
Thanks for playing and for the super valuable feedback!