- Having a timer (urgency) is usually not a very good idea for thinky games. If you insist on having a timer consider making it count upwards.
- Additionally as other commenters mentioned is the game is a time trial it needs an explicit “Start” button. Also stop the timer when user is not playing e.g. reading the rules.
- There’s no point of having a “Play again” option for a Wordle style daily game, the thinking part is already done, so any replay is just an exercise in dexterity.
- It’s okay to be US-centric actually, doesn’t matter unless you are very serious about monetizing it, and even then being US-centric will work.
- Consider showing rules for first time users before staring the puzzle.
- Consider having some sort of overarching thing in your puzzle, so it’s not just five words on a specific topic to guess, but something more, like a hidden word across all five etc. This makes a delightful discovery moment and sometimes might work as a clue.
I think that would not work here as there are though as there are not enough combinations. I quite like this one though, combining the unscramble mechanic with a category. A bit like a combination of connections and waffle.
For the "play again" issue, in my latest game https://spaceword.org I made it an open-ended puzzle, where there is no correct answer, so people can keep improving as long as they want.
Has since faded but anytime I think about it I like to load up the puzzle app and do it.
Another note I had is: keep the words to a specific category rather than a broad category.
For example: the today’s puzzle of “professional sports teams” had 4/5 of the teams from the NBA. The 5th answer was either the Detroit “Lions” (a professional _American football_ team) or more likely the London “Lions” (a _British_ professional basketball team).
What if i'm handing it to a friend/spouse to play to beat my time?
>Consider having some sort of overarching thing in your puzzle, so it’s not just five words on a specific topic to guess, but something more, like a hidden word across all five etc. This makes a delightful discovery moment and sometimes might work as a clue.
That just sounds like your idea for a different type of game. I like his current idea for this game.
I generally find it more effective to improve the parts that concern most of the audience, like the timer that is seen by every player. The pass-and-play use case is valid but seems pretty rare.
>That just sounds like your idea for a different type of game. I like his current idea for this game.
Yes, it’s a part of giving feedback, the author might not like any of my comments and is free to ignore them, it’s their game. But why do _you_ seem so irritated about it?
The NY Times Mini Crossword specifically has a "Clear" button for this very use-case.
then that works better with his suggestion for a timer rather than a countdown
you could retain a challenge aspect by showing average time to solve (or your result compared to others; “You did better than 94% of people!” etc)
As a European who on a typical day uses/watched/reads more English than my native language, I agree. Except sports teams and other more locally phenomena. Those are the worst.
Getting the answer wrong when trying to spell the correct answer in British English spelling ruins the game.
You've essentially described the Jumble puzzle, which appeared in daily newspapers. It's been around since 1954, but I'm not surprised to see it reinvented since few people get a daily newspaper anymore.
You can complete this by just starting words with the letters available of which there are only so many combinations.
Ads aside, I'm curious to know what you think would be a good monetizing strategy for this kind of games (simple, online): subscriptions, sponsorship, donations..?
Sponsorships and/or donations would be a nice “beer money” bonus.
Subscriptions are PITA and too much hassle unless you’re doing them via some third party and they won’t bring a good amount of money at the “online daily puzzle in a browser” scale.
There are more exotic ways like licensing your puzzles to other sites, like online newspaper puzzle pages, Puzzmo is going in this direction IIRC.
The world has sadly changed a lot in recent months.
I know nothing about formal game design education sorry.
Also, because the keys "F" and "G" are adjacent in the keyboard layout, I believe you made a typo in the book title where you wrote Fame instead of Game.
Cryptic Crosswords are almost impenetrable from the US as they're so deep in UK specific words, spellings, and trivia.
That's the game! The 'inside rules' for a cryptic are what makes it cryptic. Without them you just have a word puzzle.
I've looked in the past and didn't have much luck.
the new yorker archives are a great place to start https://www.newyorker.com/tag/cryptic-crossword
Really like the idea though.
Click the calendar icon at top of page for the archive.
My first wrong answer was an international spelling issue. It would be nice if it accepted then silently corrected based on equivalent international spellings, but I can also understand why it doesn't, sometimes it might be more crucial to the solution.
It's not for everyone I'm sure, especially if you are unfamiliar with common English phrases (like "bang for the buck").
I’ve showed it to my friends, and it’s stuck. My brother shared it with all of his coworkers and they’re now playing too.
It’s fun watching it “spread” amongst my social group
But pretty creative game. Thanks for sharing!
Second, I think given all this advice a real clear example can be seen by looking at NYT's Wordle[0]. Instructions are the first thing you see and cover the puzzle. You then click start.
Importantly, the instructions have an example. While the puzzle is extremely intuitive, an example can eliminate almost any ambiguity (intuitive for most people but maybe not kids, non-native English speakers, or just things like someone shoves the game into their friends face. Who knows). There can be a button on the side to show instructions again, which should cover the puzzle and stop the timer.
> Having a timer (urgency) is usually not a very good idea for thinky games.
There's plenty of "thinky games" that have timers: Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are two good examples. Almost any TV game is timed. I don't think there's a problem with this and the pressure can make it fun while also conveying that it won't take a person all day.
> There’s no point of having a “Play again”
For the benefit of the audience watching, not the player. You wouldn’t want someone consuming the whole show because they do not make a move. There’s little reason to care about time limits on a game someone plays by themselves.
Personally, I hate the timer. It makes me feel stressed. I guessed the first word then decided to stop playing because of the timer.
It's clear while some people appreciate it, many people won't play the game if it has a timer. So, make it optional.
There needs to be some limit like how wordle limits the number of guesses. The timer is good in that it can put pressure in especially considering how simple the game is. The long length means almost everyone has enough time
Personally, my real life is a continuous sequence of being confronted by my limitations and learning to overcome them or live with them. I enjoy that for the most part, I choose a life that challenges me. But sometimes I get tired and choose to do something that relaxes me and doesn't remind me of my limitations, like play a game, or go for a walk. I suspect this is the case for a lot of people.
At an earlier time in my life, when my days were much less challenging, I did play games to challenge myself. If Elden Ring had come put 20 years earlier I would have loved it, and perhaps I would have appreciated this timer as well. But in the current era of my life, not so much.
- It gave me “TCAAN” which stumped me. Afterwards I pasted it into the Internet Anagram Server, which failed to find any acronyms for it. So I can say with some confidence I don’t think it’s a valid word. Suggest making sure you’re using a dictionary similar to Wordle’s one.
- The game should reveal the solution at the end if the player fails to guess any words.
But, personally, I would remove proper names, to make it more like most other word games (wordle, spelling bee, jumble, etc.). Crosswords do have proper names, but they've got the clue context to go with them.
3 pieces of feedback:
1. Since your time matters, a start button before a new puzzle is presented would be nice.
2. I wanted to play more puzzles but didn't realize the calendar button up top switched puzzles till reading comments. I think fading the screen with an overlay with the existing buttons and adding a "Play Another?" button would hook people in more.
3. Some of the scrambles are too easy. Maybe that's by design, but an example is "PAWSN" in the apr 4th chess puzzle, it's stupidly obvious compared to the other words.
But again really awesome content and would make an amazing mobile website or app.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Today's challenge ("Sports Teams") was particularly easy because each one was plural. That made each one "unscramble a 4 letter word" instead of a 5. Might be a consideration for the future.
1) Keyboard input would be really nice, especially playing on desktop
2) A "give up" button instead of a 5 minute timeout would be appreciated
3) It might be more fun/challenging if you don't give the category, but have to guess the category after unscrambling the words.
What I'd like is an option to show the answers after failing (not by default, so you can still choose to replay if you want). For instance, I cannot for the life of me get the music act that's associated with "FALMO".
But it also feels like one of these things where a ChatGPT could help you create the game data very easily. It excels as these things like "give me 1000 categories of 6 letter words grouped with 5 in each category". That would have been a chore, but now it's just easy. Not sure if that's what you did here already.
I am the maintainer of parolottero, another word game (I made it to be used on plasma-mobile) and finding good word lists is not easy at all.
I have a decent one for italian but not for english. Which one are you using?
I think adding a theme to all the words like food, names or something random like that could make it more fun. It could also make it easier to there's that too. Nice game though
So giving a sandbox where there is no pressure will probably be more fun for a large subset of players
My only real complaint: please include a puzzle version number in the auto copied share link so that if I solve yesterday's you know that's different from you solving today's
Incidentally you could probably let people try historic puzzles from the link if you wanted (compete on that one vs play today's), that would be a nice wordle feature
^ I think the humans make games podcast
Managing accounts is a huge headache both for yourself and for your users. It's a bunch of code and responsibility for you to manage people's private data securely. It's one more password to manage for your users. You could just use cookies to track daily progress, like catfishing.net does. So what if that doesn't let me have my data available across browsers? It's just a game, tracking progress does not matter that much.
Edit; oh ok I get it now..
It could be fun but now I know what to do it’s not very challenging. The speed is more determined by the speed I can type that the words. Maybe one letter longer?
At some point I just moved on, and solved the next word, Chess, in like 2 seconds. The results claimed I spent a whole pile of time on Chess, since it has no idea which result I'm thinking of solving (though all the wrong guesses for Catan should have been a clue that the time should have gone towards Catan.)
I'm not sure the per-word time values are useful if they can't be trusted to be accurate.
I know, who cares, only three people in the planet use Firefox on Android. But if you want to know anyway...
The problem is the sizes are not adjusted correctly and so the fixed header/upper part overlaps the scrambled word list, almost completely hiding the first word. You can, through some tricky scrolling, manage to see it and then solve it. But it's tricky. And ugly.
As others have mentioned categories could probably have broader/non-US content but that's easy. The site/format itself is great.
Edit: coming up with a reasonable algorithm for scoring is far more difficult than it looks. I guess most of the word games floating around don't have scoring for a reason.
- let me use keyboard input - don't include proper nouns! I did't get catan because I wasn't expecting that - show the answers at the end. Still didn't get catan after, and anagram solvers didn't find it. It was only when I came here that I saw the answer
Only improvement ideas I have are for a smoother start for new players:
1. Let the user start the game themselves so that they have a chance to read the rules without a stressful first impression.
2. Use a different label text than "Build your word here" as it sounds like a drag and drop target rather than an output.
Just visited and turns out some people still play!
All American teams, so I got very few of them / care very little about them.
#1 (1:02) #2 (0:43) #3 (0:29) #4 (0:43) #5 (0:32)
SPOILER BELOW
Took a few games to notice but one minor issue is that in each game the pattern for each row is the same, e.g 3rd row is 2,4,1,3,5. Randomising this would make it better.
The icons at the start and end of each row were distracting and confusing.
#5 (0:46) #2 (0:04) #4 (0:09) #1 (0:21) #3 (0:06)
#1 (0:05) #2 (0:04) #3 (0:05) #4 (0:04) #5 (0:05)
#5 (1:18) #3 (0:04) #4 (0:46) #1 (0:27) #2 (0:09)
Your mom liked the game I played with her too.
Got em.
Tried four puzzles and all were done in 15 seconds.
UI is splendid.
I block all such tracking, so thanks for allowing me to play without that tracking.
I do realise that such blocking affects your stats so if you could devise a way to track without using an external service that would be great.
What dictionary are you using OP?
edit: IT'S CATAN.
Smh
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ladel
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ladel
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/spellcheck/english?q=la...
OED has it as an incorrect/unusual variant:
https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=ladel
It's misspelled constantly on the internet, but "ladle" is the correct spelling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Hawks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Lions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Spurs
Previous puzzles don't have many plurals, but its the correct choice for this puzzle.