Tiled Words 6 Month Update | Hacker News Reader

Tiled Words 6 Month Update

paulmakeswebsites.com

68 pointspaulhebert41 comments

Tiled Words turned 6 months old last week!

I wrote a little update about the first 6 months and what's coming next.

Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions!

For an extra challenge, I try to solve it without looking at the clues, and only using the theme. (some themes are harder than others) Though if a word turns orange, I sort of glance at the clues to see whether it's the wrong direction or built incorrectly. Maybe they could be different colours, like red/orange? Thanks for making it!

Another option here is an auto-rotate if assembled in the wrong orientation.

Oh yeah this is a good idea as well. I could merge the tiles if you build a word in the wrong direction, then let you spin them. Hmm…

This is good feedback, thanks!

I want to add an official “clue-less” mode in the future as a more difficult setting.

I’ll add a note to distinguish “built wrong” from “wrong direction”

I usually solve the across words with the clues and then try to do the down words without the clues.

It would be nice if the board were a little bigger to give you more room to try and organize the wordlets (not sure what to call the letter groups?) and try different arrangements.

Oh that's an interesting play style! It's fun to learn about the challenges players layer on to the base game.

Good feedback about the board size... that's tricky. The problem is that many people play on their phones with small screens. If I increase the grid size then each individual tile shrinks. In my testing that can make it harder for people with poor vision to read the tiles and also make it harder to use the touch controls.

But, I agree on desktop it would be really nice to have more space. I may explore letting people configure the grid size when they submit custom puzzles and use that as a test of larger grids!

I play on full size Ipad, FWIW. You might be able to check viewport size and scale accordingly?

For sure, the tricky thing there is that people share their scores and compete.

It seems unfair to give a larger grid to some players than others.

Thank you for this. Tiled Words is a morning ritual for me now. It's a brief part of my day when I sit down with a coffee and solve it just before starting my work. It's a part of my day I most look forward to. Thank you again.

EDIT: if there is a tip jar or a paid tier for the game, I'll be very happy to chip in!

Ditto to all of the above.

Thanks! There is not yet but a few people have asked so maybe I should set one up!

Are there paid features you would be interested in? Would you want to buy a sticker or other merch?

my biggest ask would be for custom colour themes? And maybe a one-time paid app to avoid any future ads (if you are thinking of going down that road). An app or a game with ads and no way to pay my way out of them is an instant uninstall.

Someone in another comment mentioned that they do a timed challenge with friends. This would require signup etc. Even though I sometimes do a race against my son I'd probably not sign up/register just to do this. But if it's purely optional then I think there is some merit there and people who are signup happy may take advantage.

I may also like to see perhaps a second (premium) daily challenge. Not unlimited mode because that would just make me gorge on it and get fed up. But two daily challenges instead of 1 might be something to ponder. Maybe even for a small pay? Just don't make it obnoxious with nags and popups etc.

These are fun ideas!

The custom color theme is really interesting. Are there specific things you'd like to do with the custom color theme? That seems like a fun feature to build.

Having a second daily challenge would be great, but a lot of work. When I launch player puzzles I'm hoping to roll some of those out along with the daily puzzle so that on certain days you get a "bonus player puzzle!"

On custom colour themes. I have no good ideas. I just know when I like a theme and when I don't. The deafaults in the game, are.... not great for me. Especially the light theme (I generally prefer light themes). I use the dark theme in the game now because light is not that great but dark is also a bit ho hum. So maybe a theme store would be good? A buck a theme or something? I'd rather not do theme imports etc. Too much work and I don't know what I'd like. I'd rather just swipe through a bunch of themes and hit "buy/pick" when I find one I enjoy. That's all.

One small feature I'd propose is that maybe you want to have a "hard mode" baked in where no hints are available? I personally do not use hints to solve the puzzles. I can usually piece everything together just with what's on the board and the word descriptions and never reach for hints. Hints feel a bit like a cop out so I avoid them. Maybe having this as a different game mode is a good idea? I'm not sure - it depends on the complexity of your implementation of you want to create a feature flag or not.

Great feedback, thanks!

Really good fun. I accidentally completed a word at one point when I was trying to rotate a large section that wouldn't fit anywhere, but other than that, everything worked really smoothly. I thought the "right word, wrong construction" error was, possibly, too generous—I was expecting one of the twists to be that you needed to work that out yourself.

Thanks! I’d like to add various difficulty options in the future and this could be one of them!

We have a little group chat going where we compete each day to be the fastest to complete these. We could do with some sort of time penalty for reveals or something because right now we just enforce that with pure shame!

Really enjoyable game.

Haha thanks!

Having reveals affect your score is interesting. I’ve been thinking about added a leaderboard which would make this more important (and shame less effective haha)

What do you think a fair penalty would be? 30 seconds per reveal?

I told my friend that in my mind I add five minutes every time she does it, but 30 seconds is probably more fair.

Perhaps not being able to use them for the first few minutes, but I guess it's not ideal to make it more annoying for people not playing by our shame rules!

Haha maybe 1 minute is a good compromise?

I discovered it the last time it was shared in here, and I must say it's one of the few I bookmarked _and_ actually come back to on a regular basis.

Thanks for coming back and playing!

I love the game. Thank you for making it. Please make doing older puzzles easier. Right now I have to open them in new tabs since your pagination is a moving target.

Great feedback, thanks. This definitely needs improvement!

I have a few ideas:

1. Change the pagination so the “…” is a drop-down that lets you pick a number

2. Let you filter out puzzles you’ve already completed

3. let you jump to the first puzzle you haven’t completed

Does one of those sound like a good solution!

I'd imagined a big "calendar" type layout that shows small links to every puzzle ever.

Ahh yeah a calendar view is interesting! I’ll play with that when I have some time

Yeah, the way I've been doing it is when I complete an old puzzle I hit back to get to my next "old" puzzle. Still have to keep a tab open so I don't have to click through the pages of puzzles I've completed though.

Good feedback. I’ll work on a fix soon!

Hey, there’s a new feature that should help here!

On the past puzzles page you can now hide all puzzles you’ve completed to filter down to only uncompleted puzzles.

Also here to say wonderful job with this. I never got into all these other daily word games, something about Tiled Words scratches the itch though!

Awesome, I’m glad you like it!

I got to know about this game because of this post and I have played 4 games already.

Awesome, enjoy!

Love this game wish i could commit to playing it everyday

Doing something every day is a big commitment! I didn’t want it to feel like a chore so you can always play past puzzles after the fact in the backlog

An excellent game, with a great UI. Thank-you.

Thanks!

great game. i'm too stupid to play it, but i love it!

Haha thanks! That’s how I feel about a lot of word games.

I think Tiled Words gets easier after a couple of plays!

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