Hacker News Reader

jessecolemanon Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

Checked out your puzzles! Very cool. I'm also building a collection of daily puzzles (https://gramjam.app). Would be interested in chatting about your experience with marketing and outreach!

jessecolemanon Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

Since getting laid off in Feb, I've been spending my free time polishing up my word game Gram Jam (https://gramjam.app).

I finally finished the (monumental) Svelte 4 -> 5 migration that had been getting dusty for the last year. This unlocked a higher performance ceiling for me to polish my animations and UX. Now I'm revamping my onboarding experience and taking another crack at marketing and promoting it. Last year, I was focusing on setting it up as a PWA and integrating Sentry monitoring and Stripe integration. All important stuff but not what got me excited about the process.

I've been pretty tied up with maintenance and admin work, and haven't gotten a chance to work on the actual game design in a while, so I'm very excited to return to that part of the project soon. I have ideas for new puzzles and modes spilling out of my ears and I feel like with LLMs my prototyping can finally keep up with my brain, now that I have a robust foundation for the game architecture.

jessecolemanon Show HN: Whittle – A shrinking word game

Cool, the description reminded me a bit of my word game https://gramjam.app, but after playing they're pretty different. I like your UX!

jessecolemanon Making small games, which is fun in itself

https://www.anagrammer.com/scrabble/tasers

You'll find a lot of variation between dictionaries. I was surprised to discover that curating the dictionary is one of the hardest aspects of building a word game. People have a lot of opinions on what should or should not be included, I've spent a lot of time manually filtering out profane and questionable words. Another interesting constraint of this particular game is that unlike Scrabble there's a lot of accidental word discovery, which can create a poor user experience if a bunch of obscure words clear and ruin a player's intended word.

P.S. I will probably add tasers after you flagged it

jessecolemanon Making small games, which is fun in itself

Like others in the comments, I also used my pandemic free time to build a game. building a prototype took me a long weekend, but the long tail of adding state management, mobile responsiveness and animations etc has dwarfed the initial development time.

It quickly went from a fun playground for experimenting with mechanics to a long term project. It's been a great learning experience, and still a lot of fun to work on. But the pure creative joy of concepting and building has been supplanted with the tedium of maintenance and bug fixing.

My game for those interested: https://gramjam.app

jessecolemanon I made Gram Jam, a challenging daily word game

I started developing Gram Jam several months ago as an educational exercise in web and game design/development. I had originally hoped to ride the coattails of all the other Wordle-likes that were popping up and then drop the project when I got bored of it like my countless other side projects. But I had so much fun working with Svelte and engaging with players that I developed it out into a fully-fledged game, with a leaderboard and curated puzzles.

This week I launched Gram Jam Daily, a new puzzle mode that challenges you to clear a 6x6 board in as few swaps as you can. Check it out and give me your feedback.