Show HN: Five Letters – word puzzle game | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Five Letters – word puzzle game

fiveletters.xyz

31 pointssigvef29 comments

Wordle creator here. Nice work!

Love the touch of showing word definitions after each guess. This is something I wanted to do but ultimately avoided in favor of keeping it all client side.

Interesting to hear about your subscription exploration too. Will keep that in mind if I ever decide to try and monetize.

Loving your game! Thanks for making it :)

Who copied who here? https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

Based on the polish of Wordle alone, clearly the OP did.

These are both copies of TV game called “lingo” which apparently first aired in 1987. All I know is that it was quite popular in France where it was called “Motus”

3$ a month for a word game. It's a sad thing. We've really lost our way with the subscriptions.

$3 is twelve plays at a 25¢ arcade game.

Yeah, buying a newspaper with a crossword on the last page is (well, used to) be way cheaper. But think of ecology! Ditching printing the news on paper in exchange for spending more electricity on charging your phones probably helped it. Maybe. Did it?

Fun!

Apparently doesn't have the word "topsy" in its dictionary though. Perhaps this isn't a US English word. It's not in SOWPODS but is in the app I use for help with cryptic crosswords.

What dictionary does it use?

It uses the scrabble dictionary (SOWPODS, as you mention) -- if it is a playable five-letter word in scrabble, then it is playable here.

I got to _love and tried clove and glove. Neither were the answer. Anyone?

Everything is a subscription these days.

A fun game, but it is not definitely worth the subscription. You can find other alternatives that have a greater value but at the same time are enjoyable and free.

I came across https://bert.org/2021/11/24/the-best-starting-word-in-wordle... on HN the other day, and decided to do my own take on the concept as a little weekend project.

Technology-wise, I wanted to try out two things that I hadn't tried before for this project.

One was to use Expo to release on web and mobile at the same time. I've used React Native quite a bit in a professional capacity, so I wanted to check out the Expo landscape. I discovered that the web part (react native web) didn't quite deliver on what I was looking for, so I scrapped it and ported to Vite/react-ts and dropped native completely.

The other was to see if I could find a low-friction way of setting up subscriptions for a static web frontend with no first party backend. That is the reason why there is a premium subscription tier for a small weekend game like this. Turns out that this was pretty straight forward with Gumroad! In the end, I was pretty happy with the way the flow turned out (except that Apple Pay isn't supported without stepping out of the flow and heading to Gumroad directly).

It was fun until I found the answers in the IndexedDB, https://imgur.com/a/N7QyZUW

That's for the stats feature that shows you e.g. your most guessed word, etc. It's all calculatated client-side. In fact, there is no backend at all!

The only way to monetize this is to make it an ios/android app, and have ads in it or sell it for $.99

I actually really enjoyed this. I don’t want to subscribe but I would pay up to $5 for an iOS version

I have an iOS game based on the same root game but with a different spin — let me know if you'd be willing to be a beta tester.

I’d love to try it!

Does it work on an iPad? I can’t figure it out.

I just finished playing it on my ipad. Worked flawlessly.

It does actually work flawlessly. Turns out I didn’t understand the rules.

Very nice!

One hour later...

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