Site I've been working on every evening for six weeks - ycnews feedback would be awesome
clutu.com
clutu.com
This is the sort of concept that you infinitely play around with. Some ideas for your to-do list:
1. Widgetize it
2. I know its collaborative, but throw in a few features that cater to the solo user
3. Add in some kind of top-score list or top-user list and put on home page
4. Screen shot of game on home page
5. Allow users to pick games based on predefined categories and difficulty levels
6. Allow users to race against a clock to complete the puzzle if they want.
Typical :-( I tested in IE7 (and firefox, safari, and opera). Thanks for the heads-up.
Thanks for the ideas also!
It wasn't obvious to me that the anagram clues were anagrams. Woul it really kill you to spell out "anagram?" Maybe even put "Anagram:" before the clue instead of putting it in parentheses afterwards?
What's the point of the "play" button? Why not just give the user a puzzle right out of the gate?
The delete key should let me delete a letter, and probably go back to the previous letter.
There should be some way to choose the direction of my typing with the mouse when I click a square that starts both an across and a down arrow. For example, perhaps add a little "right" arrow and a little "down" arrow in opposite corners of the square that users can push? At the very least, if I'm entering a "down" word and I click a square in that word that's also part of an "across" word, it's confusing for it to switch to the across word.
Let people make their own puzzles. A really easy way to do this would be to simply ask the user to enter 40 or 50 word-clue pairs, which you could then assemble into a new puzzle. This might also be a source for new clue ideas.
Relatedly: let users rate clues. This will allow you to refine your database. Your rating options might be something like "Hard," "medium," "easy," and "unfair." Clues that get several "unfair" ratings could be automatically weeded out of the database. Once you had a substantial database of ratings for clues, you could offer puzzles with varying difficulty levels based on the ratings.
I've been working on it every evening and a couple of weekends for six weeks now, after being inspired by counttonine.com
If you want to play clutu fast, you can instantly see what your friends are doing thanks to ajax. If you prefer to play slower you can bookmark your game and/or subscribe to an rss feed for it.
clutu runs in sbcl, using hunchentoot as its web server, on an ubuntu vps. Crosswords are generated continuously and the best ones are kept in a pool so that a request for a new game is quick if the pool isn't empty.
Most fun thing so far: finding a very fast way to generate anagrams.
Least fun thing so far: trying to get invite emails past spam filters - I spent more than a week on this and it's still not reliable.
Thanks for any feedback!
Random thoughts:
-I know I've been docked for saying this before, but a facebook app that ties in with your site might be a good way to virally grow the user base.
-My first reaction to the site's name was a play on Cthulhu: you might want to capitalize on that and make a (dyslexic?) cthulhu be the site's mascot.
-An idea for crossword generation is to take the top stories on reddit and make crosswords be based on key words (and their clues) from the stories.
Sometimes single-clicking on a square made that square get the next letter typed, sometimes it didn't. Other than that it seemed smooth.
I don't think there's a reliable route past spam filters for any kind of web-site invite. You might give users some text to cut/paste into their own email to friends.
I really should have noted that you can just cut and paste the url of you game and send that to your friends if the emails don't get through.
"Sometimes single-clicking on a square made that square get the next letter typed, sometimes it didn't"
I've never seen this myself - what browser/os?
Thanks again.
The puzzle itself looks nice, but I think there is a slight contrast problem with the black-to-white fading of the white squares against the black background. It just feels slightly off, no big deal.
However: You've clearly got some bad bugs in this. I went to answer "Country whose capital is Tehran" and it took a good minute before I could enter the answer. I clicked on it, the correct row highlighted green, and when I went to type "I", the second letter filled in "I". Then I pressed the first square of four, but the attached (horizontal) row highlighted. So I clicked on the IRAN squares again, typed I-R-A-N, it didn't work, and after some fiddling, I typed it again, and it seemed to enter I-I-A-N, then I-I-I-N, then it highlighted the last square, which flashed I then R then A then N as I typed them, then finally I typed it again, it seemed to go I-I-I-I, then changed to IRAN, finally. ???
It's possible the site is overloaded to the extent that ajax messages are getting lost (I have no resend mechanism right now).
Out of interest though, what browser/os are you using?
I tested a little more, and the worst problem seem to be that in a situation like this:
EDIT: I can't get the formatting to work, but picture a horizontal "HELLO" with "LEMON" coming off the HELLO's second "L".
... and you click on the "l" in lemon, it highlights "hello". You really should NEVER have ambiguity like that. Maybe a second click should alternate between them.
That's exactly what it does, for me. Thanks, I'll test with ff1.5 and see if I can reproduce this.
But lesson learned: Other people are going to be stupid, too.
And apparently my earlier problems were due to latency. If you go too fast, the updates come up a little oddly, and the letters switch 1) When you type, 2) A moment later to something historical, and 3) Back to what you typed.
I clicked the letters and tried backspace and delete - didn't work, gave up.
Thanks all the same though.