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Comment by paulhebert | Hacker News Reader

I shared this last month, but I’m still having a lot of fun working on it.

I made a daily word puzzle called Tiled Words.

Currently about 2,000 people play every day and I’ve released 59 puzzles!

One feature I’m excited about is crowdsourcing puzzles. Today’s puzzle is a “community puzzle” made entirely from clues that players submitted! I plan to do this every week or two.

I wrote about launching and the first month of puzzles if you want to learn more!

https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/a-month-of-tiled-words...

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I started playing a couple weeks ago (and got my Mum and one of her friends playing too).

I enjoy it, but I find the clues seem a bit too easy, and honestly I'm normally terrible at crosswords. Take that for what you will, totally understandable if you're aiming at "cozy/relaxing".

I appreciate the polish of the UI compared to a lot of the other janky word games out there anyway.

Hey, thanks for playing and sharing!

And thanks for the feedback! Balancing the puzzles is really tricky so it’s good to know when folks think it’s too easy or too hard.

It’s interesting to see the range of player skill (and how much they do or don’t enjoy challenge.) On a recent puzzle one player left feedback that it was too easy and another left feedback that it was too hard.

My aim is for puzzles to be challenging but not frustrating. The hard part is frustrating means different things to different people. From my stats I can see some players complete a puzzle in 2 minutes that takes another player 20.

For the daily puzzle I do lean towards making it a little easier but I want to explore a few ideas for making trickier puzzles in the future.

- Releasing additional “bonus” puzzles this are harder or more complex - Letting people build and share their own puzzles at whatever difficulty they choose - Adding settings to allow players to toggle things like hiding the theme at first.

That said, I’m still trying to figure out the overall balance for the daily puzzles! It’s good to know you think they’re a little on the easy side. I should try to gather more feedback and maybe tweak that!

I've been playing it with my wife of an evening. I like the difficulty level. It's nice to be able to solve it in under 5 minutes before bed.

Thanks! Yeah that’s the difficulty I’m mostly aiming for now.

That said, I’d love to offer packs of harder puzzles or user generated puzzles in the future!

I've been playing by just looking at the title of the puzzle and ignoring the clues. I can solve most of the puzzles that way, and it increases the challenge.

Yeah I’ve heard from a few people that they play this way! I’d like to add an official setting for it in the future

I'd love to learn how you grew your audience so fast! I built https://dailybaffle.com but haven't reached your numbers yet.

Daily Baffle looks nice!

I’m not totally sure! Marketing is not my strong suit.

I think my biggest advantages are:

- It’s sticky. A good percentage of players keep playing once they start

- Organic sharing. Lots of people have told me they shared it with friends and family. (I also built a “share” feature)

The pattern so far has been:

- I share it or someone else shares it somewhere.

- There’s a big spike of people trying it out.

- I get some new players.

- The player count stays roughly steady until it gets shared somewhere else that gains traction.

It was featured by Thinky Games. Sharing here got people interested. Someone shared it on Metafilter and that got a lot of views. Other folks have shared it on other sites that have led to smaller bumps.

But I’m still experimenting.

Thanks!

Have you submitted it to those daily -DLE games directories?

I submitted it to playlin.io

I noticed it was added to a couple of others that I didn't submit to (goldles.com and dles.aukspot.com) I'm not sure if there are others I should be aware of.

My partner and I have been playing this almost every morning. We're really enjoying it!

Some feedback: 1) it would be great if the incomplete clues could move to the top. this would avoid having to scroll down towards the end of the puzzle. 2) better collission behavior; it would be nice if we could drag a chunk of words and it would just "move the other words" out of the way. Sometimes we have to spend time to make a path to move chunks of words around.

Thanks for building this!

Hey, thanks for playing!

1) This is an interesting idea! I’ll play with that when I have time.

2) I am experimenting with this but have gotten mixed feedback from players. Some people don’t like it. I’m curious what you think! If I don’t do this I’ll explore other options: https://sunny.garden/@paulhebert/115698266272946749

I like that demo, looking forward to seeing what you come out with.

Nah, that's too smart of a behavior. What exists now may have some edge cases, but it is otherwise staright-forward and intuitive. The only real "hassle" is swapping two large assembled pieces closer to the end of the game round, but it's not really a hassle. Not a big deal, really.

Yeah, I’ve heard that from a few people.

I’m thinking of adding a “shuffle” button to rearrange the tiles if you get really stuck. It’s theoretically possible to get in an unwinnable state where you can’t swap two tiles

Perhaps do what you showed at the link, but only activate it on long tap-and-hold?

That is, if you hover a piece over some spot for X seconds, then it will shuffle other pieces out of the way.

Congrats, I liked your game and the level of polish you put into it.

Thanks!

My wife and I play nearly daily, it's become part of our routine. So much so that she's across the country visiting her family right now and we have done screen sharing calls to play Tiled Words. It's a really fun game, though the mechanics can sometimes be a little difficult (when I need to join two large halves of the puzzle but they need to be flipped).

Hey, that’s awesome! That makes me happy to hear about your screen shares!

I’m experimenting with a way to make swapping tiles easier but I’ve gotten mixed feedback from players: https://sunny.garden/@paulhebert/115698266272946749

I’m curious what you think! My other idea is to add a “shuffle” button that rearranged the tiles to help get unstuck

I like it! I replied over on Mastodon.

Been playing daily since you last posted it on hn, great fun! For me Im a bit of an amatuer so the level is pretty nice, usually getting sub 5 mins or so.

A little feedback: clues which are cultural references can be pretty frustrating if you don't knw the reference. There have been some where even after piecing it together I've still got no idea how the answer matches the clue.

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

That’s totally fair. Do you dislike all cultural clues or just cultural clues that are more US centric?

Usually just the ones I don't get! ;)

First time I see such a simple but attractive puzzle. I had to try to reproduce it using my Codorex tool, it's semi-functional needs a few more iterations:

https://codorex.com/shared/zIe6BrLCVfaPt1DuWm1DeyoMIIeTPyed

Congrats on the traction!

Thanks for this game, I've been playing it since you last posted it and it's become a regular in my morning brain wake-up routine of Minute Cryptic, Shuffalo at The New Yorker and a couple others, so I like the bite-size nature of it a lot.

Hey, that’s lovely to hear! I haven’t heard of Shuffalo. I’ll have to check that out!

My sister and I are glued to it, and she continues to destroy me, with consistent zero reveals and half the time to complete, as yours truly. We love this game. thanks.

Thats awesome haha, thanks!

My friend from work showed me this a couple of weeks ago, and now we all play it as a daily office ritual. Great game!

Hey, that’s awesome! If you’re comfortable sharing I’d be curious what industry you’re in!

My wife and I play this every day. It's the only fault word games that has ever caught my interest.

The UI is fantastic too.

Thanks! I’m glad you and your wife are enjoying it!

Just to let you know, my friend and I play this every day since I saw it here a little while back. Thank you!

That’s awesome, thank you!

I do a lot of word games (mostly crosswords.) This is great, congrats on launching!

Thanks, I’m glad you like it!

I really enjoy tiled words, thanks for making this new addition to my daily routine!

Thanks for playing!

I'm not really a puzzle fan generally but that is absolutely brilliant!

Thanks!

Have been enjoying it daily since I saw it on HN a few weeks ago. Great game!

That’s awesome, thanks!

This is such a fun game. Thank you.

Thanks!

This is really fun! Great work!

Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed it!

this is really nice, thanks for sharing!

Really fun!

Dude this rules!! Your animations are fantastic. Nice job and I'm really happy to hear you've got a consistent player base!

I also made a puzzle game in a similar vein slidecross.io

Thanks! Slide Cross is fun!

I love UI animations but they can be overkill for a lot of web UIs so it was fun to have a playground where I could lean into that more. (Though I still ended up pulling back from some of my more “out there” experiments haha)

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