Currently about 2,000 people play every day and I’ve released 59 puzzles!
One feature I’m excited about is crowdsourcing puzzles. Today’s puzzle is a “community puzzle” made entirely from clues that players submitted! I plan to do this every week or two.
I wrote about launching and the first month of puzzles if you want to learn more!
My sister and I are glued to it, and she continues to destroy me, with consistent zero reveals and half the time to complete, as yours truly. We love this game. thanks.
I started playing a couple weeks ago (and got my Mum and one of her friends playing too).
I enjoy it, but I find the clues seem a bit too easy, and honestly I'm normally terrible at crosswords. Take that for what you will, totally understandable if you're aiming at "cozy/relaxing".
I appreciate the polish of the UI compared to a lot of the other janky word games out there anyway.
I've been playing by just looking at the title of the puzzle and ignoring the clues. I can solve most of the puzzles that way, and it increases the challenge.
And thanks for the feedback! Balancing the puzzles is really tricky so it’s good to know when folks think it’s too easy or too hard.
It’s interesting to see the range of player skill (and how much they do or don’t enjoy challenge.) On a recent puzzle one player left feedback that it was too easy and another left feedback that it was too hard.
My aim is for puzzles to be challenging but not frustrating. The hard part is frustrating means different things to different people. From my stats I can see some players complete a puzzle in 2 minutes that takes another player 20.
For the daily puzzle I do lean towards making it a little easier but I want to explore a few ideas for making trickier puzzles in the future.
- Releasing additional “bonus” puzzles this are harder or more complex
- Letting people build and share their own puzzles at whatever difficulty they choose
- Adding settings to allow players to toggle things like hiding the theme at first.
That said, I’m still trying to figure out the overall balance for the daily puzzles! It’s good to know you think they’re a little on the easy side. I should try to gather more feedback and maybe tweak that!
I noticed it was added to a couple of others that I didn't submit to (goldles.com and dles.aukspot.com) I'm not sure if there are others I should be aware of.
I’m not totally sure! Marketing is not my strong suit.
I think my biggest advantages are:
- It’s sticky. A good percentage of players keep playing once they start
- Organic sharing. Lots of people have told me they shared it with friends and family. (I also built a “share” feature)
The pattern so far has been:
- I share it or someone else shares it somewhere.
- There’s a big spike of people trying it out.
- I get some new players.
- The player count stays roughly steady until it gets shared somewhere else that gains traction.
It was featured by Thinky Games. Sharing here got people interested. Someone shared it on Metafilter and that got a lot of views. Other folks have shared it on other sites that have led to smaller bumps.
IMO angular provides such a great experience developing.
They had minimal API changes in the last 10 years, and every project looks almost the same since it’s so opinionated.
And what they DO add? Only things that improve dev exp
You aren’t wrong. I basically stopped using any OSS code backed by Google as a result.
I’d pushed Angular over React[0] for a massive project, and it worked well, but the migration to Angular 2 when it came created a huge amount of non-value-adding work.
Never again.
I don’t even really want to build anything against Gemini, despite how good it is, because I don’t trust Google not to do another rug pull.
[0] I’ve never enjoyed JSX/TSX syntax, nor appreciated the mix of markup with code, but I’ve subsequently learned to live with it.
No one forced you to migrate immediately. (Also, non-value-adding work? You don't think the rewrite to TS did not bring any value? And thanks to that rewrite that app can be upgraded even today to Angular v21. And likely it'll be the case for many years.)
React also went through a lot of churn. (Still does.) There's no magic optimal duration for keeping API stability. Not in general and not for specific projects.
Ecosystems sometimes undergo a phase-shift. Sometimes they take a long time, based on the size. Python 3 was released in 2008, just a year before Angular 1. And the last Py2 release was in 2020, about 2-3 years before the last AngularJS version. (And of course there are many businesses running on py2 still. I know at least one.) These things take plenty of time.
Angular1 was pretty opinionated, willing to break with the tradition of just add one more jQuery plugin.
Miško was working at Google, he persuaded some people to take a look at the framework that he and Adam Abrons were tinkering with.
Angular 2 was announced in 2014 January. And then v1 still got years of support, even the component architecture was "backported" around 1.5 (in 2016?)
You can run old v1 code side-by-side in a v2+ app up until v17. (At least the v17 docs describe the process in full and later docs link to this page. https://v17.angular.io/guide/upgrade )
...
Google did a pretty good job IMHO. Google throws products under the bus, but not so much OSS projects. (Though the sate of AOSP comes to mind.)
> Google throws products under the bus, but not so much OSS projects.
It abandoned the Material Design web components project, which, I think, attracted some Polymer people.
Speaking of Polymer, it has evolved into Lit; but I understand there is no more support for that project from Google. Lit has joined the OpenJS foundation to stay afloat. The Googlers that used to work on Lit, and on Material Design web components have mostly left.
Also, remember the Workbox project? A simple setup for service workers? It's barely alive.
The angular material design library is so much better than the react one. And it is supported by google. The material CDK is amazing to create custom components easily
I think JS is still overall more popular than TS, but if your team forces TS then yeah. It's like Java devs reluctantly switched to JS and were like, this needs more boilerplate.
Yeah, I spent years in Java and then even longer in .NET and it felt like everything I was getting a bit fed up of in those worlds had invaded JS. 20 years ago I could never have imagined defending JS as a language but, as time wore on, I started to appreciate its more stripped back syntax. And then a lot of what’s been added in later ES standards has been great so it seems even more unnecessary to layer TS on top.
It took me a while to appreciate JS too. Thought it was just the beginner language until I used it. Also had to learn the hard way that a web backend is hard to do efficiently without an event loop.
It was one hell of a ride, but I would say the Angular team did one hell of a job too, supporting the glue code until v18 (not sure if the latest version still does).
Having both old and new Angular running in one project is super weird, but everything worked out in the end.
Well, the official statement is that 1 and 2 are 2 different frameworks. That’s why they were later named to angular JS and angular, to avoid confusion.
The migration path between angular 1 and 2 is the same as react and angular, it’s just glue holding 2 frameworks together
Easy migration was promised but never delivered. Angular 2 was still full of boilerplate. “Migrating” an AngularJS project to Angular 2 is as much work as porting it to React or anything else.
So yes, people got burnt (when we were told that there will be a migration path), and I will never rely on another Google-backed UI framework.
I'll second that Angular provides a great experience these days, but they have definitely had substantial API changes within the last few years: standalone components, swapping WebPack for esbuild, the new control-flow syntax, the new unit-test runner, etc...
Was going to say, I only vaguely look at Angular code from adjacent projects at work, and noticed all of a sudden the entire structure changed with the ngModule deprecation thing. Glad I'm not knee-deep in that.
I haven't seen "everyone and its dog" doing anything of this sort - the vast majority of blogs nowadays seem to be indistinguishable from one another, just bland and barely styled text.
I am enjoying how bothered people are by it, though.
No. The table is meant to hold tabular data like a spreadsheet. It has special behavior for people who use tools like screen readers because they have vision impairment.
CSS grid is a powerful layout tool. If you think CSS sucks I encourage you to brush up on the newer developments. Flex box and grid and many other newer tools solve a lot of the classic pain points with CSS and make it a pleasure to use if you invest the time to learn it
Yeah this is a good callout. My understanding is that display: contents is not meant to impact the accessibility tree but there is a long and ongoing history of browser bugs that make me not want to use it for elements that have an accessible role
From my testing, as far as I've been able to tell it no longer has any impact on accessibility. The element itself does not appear in the tree, this makes sense display:contents is non-interactive. But all of the children correctly appear in the accessibility tree as if they did not have that shared parent element. But I am by no means an expert at operating screen readers, do you know of any specific issues with it?
A little over a month ago, I was nervously getting ready to launch my daily puzzle game, Tiled Words.
Since then, over 36,000 people have spent nearly 6,000 hours solving puzzles and exploring the site. I wanted to share my experience so far, and talk about the next steps for Tiled Words.
With all my heart, I want to cheer you on. Making stuff is damn hard, and shipping is even harder. You did that, and I applaud you for it.
I do a lot of NYT puzzle stuff every day and some other random puzzle sites before I get out of bed. That said, I'm over 40, love puzzles, love complicated board games, went through your brief explainer, and could not get a sensible handle on how to even start this thing. A new player has to really care about how to even try to begin to figure out whatever this is. I gave it about 20 seconds after the "how does it work?" Honestly, I gave up. I'm really not trying to rain on your parade. You might find a niche audience, and it'll be what you're going for, but I think you need a much, much better rules explainer if you want to be even remotely in the vicinity of a Wordle-level banger.
This thing might be really awesome, but not being able to figure out how to use it is a hard out for me.
It sounds like you read the instructions but they weren’t enough. Maybe a video explainer would be better? Does the gameplay recording on this Reddit post help at all?
People really seem to like it once it clicks (Over 1100 people have finished the daily puzzle so far today) but there is a steep learning curve and I’d love to learn how to help people get past that initial hump.
That was a fun little game! The hinting felt appropriate, only thing I didn't really like was that it got a bit "cramped" towards the end moving things around. Will try it again tomorrow. :)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is really well made! As someone who has built daily puzzle games (ex. sidewords.ca, kickoffleague.com, and just today fivefold.ca), I appreciate the effort it takes to make something that polished! It plays really well on mobile, which is tricky, especially when you’ve got a grid as big as yours.
Hah well one tip would be do NOT make a complex framing/structure for your daily puzzle game like we did with Kickoff League. It was a fun experiment but it mostly just confused people.
A more meta tip is if you make multiple games, try to have some genre or theme overlap so you can build a community among players of your games. I wish I had done this more with my more successful games (which are mobile games, not web games, but the same idea applies).
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/
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.
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.
I’m enjoying this a lot and even got my partner playing. We did one together and now they are off working through puzzles because they liked it so much.
The game design is really good too. It has just the right amount of juice.
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?
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
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!
The game deserves it. As a non-native some of the things are tough without "cheating" but its still fun. Didn't check but do you also support other languages besides English? (In Estonian for example we have some tricky vovels: üöäõ, which might throw some code haywire)
I made a daily word puzzle called Tiled Words.
https://tiledwords.com
Currently about 2,000 people play every day and I’ve released 59 puzzles!
One feature I’m excited about is crowdsourcing puzzles. Today’s puzzle is a “community puzzle” made entirely from clues that players submitted! I plan to do this every week or two.
I wrote about launching and the first month of puzzles if you want to learn more!
https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/a-month-of-tiled-words...
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