Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't a big serious project or anything, but for my first income generating project ever I made a small single player word game for Android that I should have tried to monetise more. Android had only been out for a couple of years at the time so it was easier to get noticed then.

The game was free with an ad-banner during gameplay. I was making a decent amount in ad clicks and also had players emailing me for a paid version that just disabled the ads. Instead of jumping on this to release a paid version and expand the game with more features, I ran into perfectionism issues + decision paralysis releasing any changes.

The game blew up for a few weeks and I got something like 0.5 million downloads eventually but didn't do anything to monetise it more so felt like I missed a big chance.

It was a great feeling checking analytics though to see that there was literally years of collective gameplay time being logged, and I've had several emails and reviews from players saying they've been addicted to playing the game for years.

My biggest lessons are probably:

1) Doing/releasing something is always better than doing nothing so don't let decision paralysis get in the way. "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good".

2) Don't fear releasing or making changes because you might get bad reviews. You'll never please everyone and even the perfect app will inevitable get some brutally unfair and weird/crazy reviews.

3) Some people are obsessed with word games!

Anyway, as a lockdown project for fun, I started making a new web version for mobile + desktop. :)

https://seanwilson.itch.io/wordoid

I just spent way longer playing this than I meant to. I know it's similar to a lot of other word games, but it's really fun and satisfying, and is meaningfully different than other word games I've played. Good luck with it!

Thanks! Yep, I found it interesting how slight tweaks to rules for word games gives them a really different feel and incentivises different strategies.

I need to add global high score tables. The highest score I know so far is close to 3000 which is nuts.

Wow, what a fun game! Projects made for the fun of it tend to have a certain charm to them compared to projects made for profit.

Thanks! Yeah, that's part of what derailed me trying to make a paid upgrade for the old free version. I had to think of what features would be locked away in the paid version, how the player would be nudged to upgrade etc. It's a fair amount of coding work and planning, and it's not fun compared to working on the actual game.

FWIW, personally, I would pay for no ads and maybe brief definitions of the words that I have just crossed out, but I would be turned off by microtransactions like boosts, extra life's or skins.

Cool, thanks! Yep, I hate soulless plays like "buy gems to play more", "wait until tomorrow to get more gems to play", "invite your friends to get more gems" etc.

Word definitions would be awesome. Are there any good free sources for this? That also have offensive words flagged?

I'm not sure how to do a free version of the game that isn't so good that nobody upgrades though to be honest. With the competition on mobile now as well, I feel freeium is a must to get tractor too.

en.wiktionary.org might be good for this. It’s free and marks some words as vulgar.

It's a really fun game. I was a little frustrated by some words which didn't seem to be recognized - I think 'rome' and 'zen' were two, whereas much more obscure words were accepted.

Thanks! Proper nouns (generally, words that start with a capital letter) are disallowed so Rome won't work.

Hmm, Zen was recently added to Scrabble in 2018 though as it's a proper noun but has started being used as an adjective:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/zen-and-the-art-of-scrabble-dic...

Your understanding of the meaning of proper noun is inverted :)

Doh, fixed (hopefully). :)

Neat web version, but yikes did that thing light up my laptop's fans and make FF use nearly 100% of two 2.8ghz i7 cores here. Seems a bit ridiculous considering what's going on.

Argh, I'll look into it because it shouldn't do that. It's using DOM + simple hardware accelerated animations intentionally (over something like canvas) and no polling to keep CPU usage down. Runs fine on Chrome on Mac.

Yeah well, in unaccelerated scenarios like mine that translates into software rendering on the CPU, which there seems to be a whole heck of a lot of happening despite nothing really changing on-screen.

Thanks, I'll need to check some more because the Chrome performance tab is saying 95% idle when nothing is being selected as expected for me.

Either way, I'd be keen to add a battery saver mode because it's not the kind of game I'd want to devour battery on a mobile.

Looks good. On my tablet PC, it's not letting me play by touch. For users with both mice and touchscreens, one has to handle the touch events that browsers have.

Thanks! Hmm, which OS and browser? When I test with the "laptop with touch" dev tools device on Chrome + Mac it works as expected so not sure how to replicate.

Chrome latest on Windows 10. The key point/problem is that because I have both mouse and non-faked touch, the touch events aren't necessarily converted into mouse events, as happens in many other circumstances. Though a lot of this is conjecture.

Fun game, even with trackpad I can do diagonal words. Nicely done.

Thanks, it's tricky to get the selection of diagonals working accurately like that. If you inspect the HTML, you can see each tile has an invisible 45 degree rotated clone on top of it that's used to detect when a tile is selected instead of the boundaries of the original tile.

Cool game. Spelling June didn't register a valid answer.

Thanks! Proper nouns (generally capitalised words) are disallowed so June won't. Not sure how best to communicate this in the game though.

The original had a wall-of-text pop-up of the rules when you first started that I want to avoid and I'd rather players picked up the rules organically. Maybe showing a "proper nouns and capitalised words not allowed" message when you spelled one would be a nice approach but a list of such words would be massive and inaccurate.

I think people generally figure out this rule as they play more but I admit it's not ideal!

It is interesting because the same happened to me while trying the game.

If something happens to almost everybody, why don't you change your game?

When I design a complex system like a game or computer programs, once the system starts working on their own, it talks to me. I learn a lot from the interaction with it.

This is specially important when you have millions of users. They communicate to you what the next step is much better than the best design you could draft isolated on your own.

Yep, I'm up for making change based on player behaviour and ideally the game would have zero instructions. Proper nouns come up often in feedback too.

Adding proper nouns has a few issues though:

- Where would you get an accurate dictionary of proper nouns? This would need to include e.g. people names, places, brand names. If it wasn't constantly kept up to date it could lead to more frustrations than just disallowing them.

- There's so many proper nouns it would bloat the game download. The English dictionary used right now takes about 3MB, which is the limiting factoring getting the game download lower than 1MB zipped. I'm failing to find an estimate but if you include proper nouns, the dictionary would be an order or magnitude bigger. Maybe less of an issue for mobile app store downloads but I want the game to load fast when shared online. A web service to check the words won't work for offline play either.

It's feeling like a "dictionary words only" message somewhere is the only practical solution. I could adapt the (single!) tutorial message at the start of the game to be "swipe in any direction to spell dictionary words" but "dictionary words" would probably be overlooked. There's no menu screen at the start because I know people are impatient. :)

Regarding size, I like to remind myself how much bandwidth it takes to watch just seconds worth of Netflix or YouTube.

Not everyone has a fast connection though and you'll try the patience of new players by making them wait just a few seconds. I also like optimising so if I can make the transfer size x10 smaller I will. :)

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