Show HN: Colorfle – A daily color mixing game inspired by Wordle | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Colorfle – A daily color mixing game inspired by Wordle

colorfle.com

96 pointstothemoon31 comments

Hi HN,

I was inspired by Wordle to make Colorfle, a different take on the genre where the goal is to mix colors together to match the target color within six tries. There were some interesting problems to tackle in making this game, one of them being the difference between mixing digital colors and real-life behavior (in RGB, blue + yellow = grey!). I hope you enjoy it -- any feedback would be much appreciated!

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The color "keyboard" is way too esoteric for this to make any intuitive sense.

In Wordle one uses the alphabet as an input (things we know) to make up words as an output (things we also know). Here one is using colors we don't intuitively know to make up equally unexpected color answers which are waaaay too specific to be fun. 99.7% correct, JFC are you kidding me?

To solve the issue with the input, one could use primary, secondary and maybe tertiary colors + black / white / and no more than 2-3 shades of gray to come up with colors.

And the issue with outputs would also benefit from a reduced solution space. Wordle has 5-letter words instead of 20-letter words for a reason.

The concept is OK, but the execution left a bit to be desired.

I liked the game although I am a fan of color games so I'm a big biased. I think it's a great balance of color theory and information theory. I personally like the choice of using quirky colors for the keyboard, as it forces you to pay close attention to the hue and saturation of each "key". Adds a layer of difficulty.

Though perhaps the author can add an easy mode with simpler colors, because as you pointed out, the original wordle game is much easier since the player knows the alphabet. I don't think I've lost a game of wordle yet. But I lost my first game of colorfle (though losing on normal helped me get the hang of it and win on hard!)

I found the instructions really confusing. It wasn't obvious at all that the order left-to-right was 50%, 30% and 20%. I have no idea if it'll work once I understand that going in, as it was I figured it out partway through playing.

Leaving the colors that did match with a black outline on the "keyboard" would work better if it showed me that it was yellow or green in addition to graying out.

Otherwise, it seems decently implemented. I'm not sure about the gameplay. I don't know if color matching is really as interesting as thinking of words. I don't know if that's just my personal interests or is more general.

Surprisingly difficult, but very fun. It feels kinda unintuitive in an intuitive way. I wonder if it'll become easier to develop an intuition the more I play.

Hard mode feels easier than normal mode, if only because it's easier to quickly rule out colors or just make random guesses until you match some of the right color.

Colorfle 4 6/6 ⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜

My average color accuracy was 90.6%!

Colorfle 4 (Hard mode) 6/6 ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜

My average color accuracy was 84.2%!

Agreed, hard seems easier. I think wordle could have a similar feeling. Four letter words would be harder than five because you rule out fewer letters each turn.

The last 20% has so little impact on the final color it’s impossible to guess. There are just too many colors to choose from.

I lost normal mode with 96.6% and barely won hard mode in the last try.

I really like this game, it's very challenging.

The only part I still don't get, is the colour mixing additive or subtractive? I played assuming it was additive (because we're on a computer) but now that I read your comment in the OP I'm no longer sure.

Glad you enjoy it! It does incorporate the subtractive RYB color model to produce more life-like results. However, it is more of a color blending!

Colorblind person here. This is unplayable. I'm actually pretty amused at how hard I failed at this one.

5% to 7% of the male population (and about 1% of the female population) has some form of color perception issue. If you are doing commercial games (or even UI in general), you need to know this or you're going to have a significant number of unhappy customers. It's usually not that hard to design around, and many modern games have pretty decent colorblind settings.

I'm not mad, just taking the opportunity to educate.

This public service message has been brought to you by the color Plaid.

But this is a game of colour perception. Isn't your comment akin to "Dyslexic person here. This is unplayable" leveled at Wordle?

I accidentally tapped (I'm on mobile) after the solution showed up and it went away, and now l have no idea what it was :(

Wordle will show the result until the next day on refresh, you may want to do that to.

It's an interesting concept, but I think it lacks the "I'm getting closer" feeling from wordle because the "color grammar" is not so straightforward, i.e. I get 6 combinations that were close to the end result starting from different inputs. Maybe restrict to rainbow colors and use more inputs?

This way you can think "I need more red" or something like that.

The solution should show up if you click the stats menu! (It's on the upper right). Thanks for the feedback!

Colorfle 4 6/6

X X X

Y X X

G G X

G G G

My average color accuracy was 91.8%!

---

I didn't enjoy this, though that might be because I've never been strong on the creative side. I think a few things could've made it easier for me, though:

* having the color keyboard place the colors in a way where I can make intuitive guesses as to what changes I need to make to find the right colors. You can see my thought process a bit in the last few guesses for today's edition (#4), e.g going in one direction with one of the colors, seeing the percentage go down, and going in the other direction to compensate: https://i.imgur.com/Db1uVgZ.png (spoiler)

* Since it's not intuitive, some instruction around interpreting the % relative to the color keyboard would be helpful. For instance, if I get a pretty decently close percentage but none of my colors match, while I figured out it meant I should try some much different colors, it might not be super intuitive for the casual player.

That said, it might make for interesting mental training for people who like to paint on canvas. I just didn't enjoy it, and that's totally fine.

A few thoughts:

The name is great and the animation at the end was cool

I had trouble initially understanding that the idea was to match the color on the right half of the circle (in wordle the hidden secret is what I’m guessing, so I didn’t expect it to be shown)

The percent amount in the mix wasn’t obvious. Your UI and tutorial were helpful in hindsight but I still didn’t get it initially.

I struggled with the last box because the mix is so small it had little effect. This was definitely not fun!

The contrast of % text is hard to read.

A few ideas:

Consider if it might be more fun to have people guess HSL (a row of hue, a row of saturation, and a row of luminance in the “color keyboard”). This is easier to understand than percent mix and might teach people about color! As a bonus you could then hide the goal color as now the guesses would get closer organically

As a separate idea, consider using the web color names somehow. They are quite enjoyable and I could imagine them being fun if you found a way to use them.

Consider making it dark gray background instead of white (I found the lighter color a bit glaring)

Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for playing -- I appreciate the feedback! Web color names incorporation and dark mode are both definitely on the to-do list :)

This is excellent! And super fun to play. Really nice work! : )

This was a lot of fun. I think I'll add it to my rotation of wordle-likes. I suspect my color intuition is better than most HN readers, though, if the other comments are anything to go by. I got both with a guess to spare.

One thing I would request is a dark background mode. I had to turn off my dark mode extension to see the colors accurately, and the glaring white background is a little annoying.

I have to disagree with all the negative criticism here. While the instructions may not have been entirely clear up front, actually playing the game just once clears everything up.

And I absolutely love color blending or sorting games, like Blendoku or I Love Hue, so I'll definitely keep playing this game, unlike Wordle or its other clones.

Thanks for creating Colorfle! Please don't change too much.

I feel like this game might be more fun if your score was based on how close you get to the correct color, instead of a binary success or failure.

In the case of the solution being not reached, the game shares your closest guess result instead:

Colorfle 4 X/6 ⬜⬜⬜ ... My closest guess had an color accuracy of 95%!

[The green and yellow box emojis do not seem to be supported in the text comment here]

I enjoyed it! One minor thing; typo on the final summary: “My closest guess had an color accuracy of XX%!” => (“…a color…”)

"hard mode" is actually the easier one

Just like in Wordle!

Neat game, I find mixing paints really enjoyable so this right up my alley. I solved the hard game, no problem, but after my first selection in the regular game, it X'd out all of my picks, even though I got 93.5%. My subsequent attempts got me further away.

It seems like you can get close using the wrong colors, so part of the trick feels like figuring out what adjacent colors are that would fit

I like it because I have zero clue about colours so it's so damn hard lmao

For anyone else who enjoyed this (like me!), another color-based game that's very good is I Love Hue.

This game is pretty fun. A lot of people say it's not intuitive, but you just need to learn basic color theory then you can start making reasonable guesses. Also I agree that "hard" mode is easier.

Normal 6/6:

XXX

YXX

XGG

GGG

(Got stuck on getting the first one for the last one.)

Hard 5/6:

XXXX

YXXX

XYGY

XGGG

GGGG

My brain has no idea what it’s doing here. I can vaguely guess things like “red and blue makes green” but I have absolutely no intuitive sense of how to generalize that visually.

This makes me naturally not want to play anymore. So my advice would be to think about how to handle someone like me and keep me interested… although maybe it’s just not for everyone.

> “red and blue makes green”

That’s… about as incorrect as you can get. I guess it’s just not a game for you.

Lol I mistyped that but generally agree with you

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