And yes, being able to do all of these in pure HTML/CSS would be awesome. Though we are getting there with things like `details` and the newer `popover` features which should make things like rich tooltips, menu buttons, etc. a lot easier to implement. IIRC, there are also several anchor CSS properties to make positioning a lot simpler.
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!
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.
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'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.
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.
My partner and I have been playing this almost every morning. We're really enjoying it!
Some feedback:
1) it would be great if the incomplete clues could move to the top. this would avoid having to scroll down towards the end of the puzzle.
2) better collission behavior; it would be nice if we could drag a chunk of words and it would just "move the other words" out of the way. Sometimes we have to spend time to make a path to move chunks of words around.
1) This is an interesting idea! I’ll play with that when I have time.
2) I am experimenting with this but have gotten mixed feedback from players. Some people don’t like it. I’m curious what you think! If I don’t do this I’ll explore other options: https://sunny.garden/@paulhebert/115698266272946749
Nah, that's too smart of a behavior. What exists now may have some edge cases, but it is otherwise staright-forward and intuitive. The only real "hassle" is swapping two large assembled pieces closer to the end of the game round, but it's not really a hassle. Not a big deal, really.
I’m thinking of adding a “shuffle” button to rearrange the tiles if you get really stuck. It’s theoretically possible to get in an unwinnable state where you can’t swap two tiles
My wife and I play nearly daily, it's become part of our routine. So much so that she's across the country visiting her family right now and we have done screen sharing calls to play Tiled Words. It's a really fun game, though the mechanics can sometimes be a little difficult (when I need to join two large halves of the puzzle but they need to be flipped).
Been playing daily since you last posted it on hn, great fun! For me Im a bit of an amatuer so the level is pretty nice, usually getting sub 5 mins or so.
A little feedback: clues which are cultural references can be pretty frustrating if you don't knw the reference. There have been some where even after piecing it together I've still got no idea how the answer matches the clue.
First time I see such a simple but attractive puzzle. I had to try to reproduce it using my Codorex tool, it's semi-functional needs a few more iterations:
Thanks for this game, I've been playing it since you last posted it and it's become a regular in my morning brain wake-up routine of Minute Cryptic, Shuffalo at The New Yorker and a couple others, so I like the bite-size nature of it a lot.
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 love UI animations but they can be overkill for a lot of web UIs so it was fun to have a playground where I could lean into that more. (Though I still ended up pulling back from some of my more “out there” experiments haha)
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?
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