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)
JS tends to be slower to load, parse and run than CSS.
Additionally, animations are often tightly linked to your page styles which are set in CSS. It’s easier to reason about them if they’re all in the same file and language instead of split across CSS and JS.
You can't have your cake (one time payments) and eat it too (software gets perpetual updates).
Perpetual licenses with 1 year of updates is a good middle ground, but they have said that the v2 suite will get maintenance updates for some period of time so even that type of license would not have changed this conversation.
Except that you can, because every software company did this for decades… Want to upgrade to a new version of our product? That’s another one time fee for that version.
If you squint, this looks a lot like a subscription model, but with extra steps. Why it’s different is because those extra steps actually matter.
They matter to the people who aren’t subjected to subscription dark-patterns to keep them from unsubscribing for just a little bit longer. They matter to the product, development, and sales teams who know they actually have to produce and deliver something meaningful if they want repeat customers. The matter to the accounting teams on all sides of the transaction, in particular because subscription revenue or expenses can always be counted as “recurring” and this has implications on cash flow which itself can impact many things.
The pitch has always been “we grow with you, this is a win-win”, implying that perpetual license fees are actually good for you to pay. Ostensibly because keeping your supplier in business keeps you in business, but in reality it was totally possible for a software supplier to go out of business and for their customers to continue operating without issue for 5, 10, even 15+ years, before even considering finding a replacement software.
And despite the pitch seeming so sweet, the literature on why you want your software business to operate on a subscription model was always about gaining an advantage over your customers, however marginal it may be, and now the data has borne out that the advantage is stark.
Good question. I like the complexity of the daily, and the practice puzzle is simple enough to be a good introduction to the game mechanics, so maybe an intermediate puzzle (possibly optional?) might be a good idea? Just don't want to bore people to death, I know some will want to get straight to the daily.
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.