Very nice! But the white for a placed letter and gray for a original letter is too close - I was trying to figure out why no word would work when I realized I had placed the T - it wasn't an original letter.
Excellent. This focuses on word recognition, which is a large part of vocabulary, omitting the need for meaning. I suppose it also provides chances for people who don't know words to work out new words based on phonetic patterns and which letters remain.
My girlfriend and I just did this and had a lot of fun!
There were a lot of times where I thought I figured a word out but ended up having to go through about 5 or 6 really good guesses before landing on the right one. Sometimes little word games like these really can test my vocabulary.
Thanks for the report. What device / browser is this? You should also be able to zoom the puzzle in and out with mouse wheel, trackpad two fingers or touch screen pinch in the meantime
I feel like it could use some scoring mechanism. I want to feel friction against just making guesses until something works.
Post-completion edit:
It does have a time-based scoring mechanism. That didn't register with me at first. I continue to feel that it could use come mechanism to dissuade low-effort guessing.
One issue: sharing my results was not great. Pasting in iMessage gave the result text and the image; pasting in discord only gave the text; pasting in telegram only gave the image.
Not sure if this is even your fault, but it doesn’t have as nice of an experience there as Wordle (which I assume you’re trying to emulate).
Kind of fun the first time, but I think I prefer a normal crossword. Seems like the only way to progress is to pick an unfinished word and then do tons of guesses back to back of all the possibilities until one turns green, which starts to get boring when there are a lot of possibilities.
Feels more like stenography or data entry than playing a game at that point where you're just typing 10+ guesses without any investment in any one of them.
For example, when I tried the larger version, I got to a point of a 2/3 filled word: _ET.
I then had to sit and enter:
-bet
-get
-jet
-let
-met
-net
-pet
-set
-vet
-wet
and finally, I got to the word: yet. And that's not even including some less common but still valid words I would guess like ret and tet, which I'm not sure are off the table as possibly valid entries. It just felt like a chore more than a puzzle to get that word, and I have to repeat it over and over for the other words. Maybe as you get to a close the letter pool gets a bit smaller so you have less guesses, but that's only after you've guessed out a significant portion of the puzzle.
Wordle avoids this by giving you information on your guesses, making them feel less like a huge string of purely random guesses. Crosswords give you cryptic clues that aren't obvious, but make you feel like any guess was based on deductive reasoning rather than some brute force attempt.
Still, nice job on building and releasing the project! And it sounds like other commenters are enjoying it more than I am, so maybe I'm just a stick in the mud or I like word games too much and have too much time invested in them.
I agree with this. Three-letter words that dangle by one letter are just a chore. There needs to be a balance between discoverability and guessing. Perhaps the auto-generator needs to evaluate the discoverability somehow...
Also, why no cookie keeping your trend? That's what keeps me coming back: not wanting to break a streak! (Not to promote dark patterns or anything.)
Also also, nice UX. I found it easy to navigate, edit, and delete.
One way to make it more enjoyable could be to do it by topic - this way the universe of words would be much smaller, instead of the entire dictionary. Topics could be - music, baseball, food etc
Good feedback thanks and agree this definitely happens a lot especially in the harder version of the game. Maybe I can create a smarter way to show possible letters rather than the entire letters remaining
yeah it's nothing at all like a normal (ny times) crossword which is full of fun and amazingly clever word play and cultural references. There's no sense of "aha!" or awe at the puzzle's design, no chance to learn interesting facts, no reward for one's own experience/knowledge/problem solving. It's just a tedious guess and check procession.
Seems like a lot of commenters like it, so there's probably an audience.
I don't think it'll be a hit with the main crossword community because the crossword constructors put a lot of humor and cleverness in the clues, which is a major draw. The personal touch makes it seem like you're in a community of clever people who are trying to entertain each other.
I suppose this would be a good learning aid for students who are learning vocabulary.
Just did the basic one :) Going to ask my girlfriend to bring her laptop to my apartment tonight and race her on the hard one.
Not sure if that's a piece of observable behavior that helps you figure out a market / how you want to grow this, but definitely speaks to the kind of delight I've got out of your prototype!
This is a very neat idea! My problem is with the layout: why is there a black area below the crossword, where if I drag the crossword there the crossword disappears? That area should be a lot smaller
I did very little guessing on the regular puzzle, which took me a little over 6 minutes, but the master-level one did require some brute force at first and took me much longer to finish. Once I got rolling, though, I was able to solve it intuitively. It's more like a sudoku but instead of mathematic logic you rely on your knowledge of English vocabulary and spelling. It may not have traditional clues but by giving you the pool of letters for all words it gets progressively easier as you fill in the grid and eliminates certain possibilities out of hand.
The only real issue is getting your initial foothold, especially if the grid's pre-filled letters are mostly common and not helpful in placement. Having a pre-filled J is much more useful than, say, a prefilled E.
Fun but very frustrating controls. If you mis-type a letter in one box and it's the only letter left of that letter then you can't type it elsewhere which gets me right in a muddle. Also the delete key doesn't appear to work, only the backspace.
Tab really ought to tab through the words as well as arrow keys, which don't cursor to filled in letters which is also frustrating.
I'd like to be able to type a whole word, including over-typing the letters provided.
I'd recommend playing around with the guardian crossword for inspiration of a control scheme.
Seems like the pool of words is quite small; for example with T_RN it was clear that o or u would be the answer, even though a and e also give valid words
How is the Share feature meant to work? It seems to be failing within Android Firefox Nightly (nothing gets copied and for a split second the positioned letters blink away then return)
53 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadGreat stuff!
There were a lot of times where I thought I figured a word out but ended up having to go through about 5 or 6 really good guesses before landing on the right one. Sometimes little word games like these really can test my vocabulary.
https://i.imgur.com/CdIkpVA.png
Reminds me of Knotwords.
I feel like it could use some scoring mechanism. I want to feel friction against just making guesses until something works.
Post-completion edit:
It does have a time-based scoring mechanism. That didn't register with me at first. I continue to feel that it could use come mechanism to dissuade low-effort guessing.
One issue: sharing my results was not great. Pasting in iMessage gave the result text and the image; pasting in discord only gave the text; pasting in telegram only gave the image.
Not sure if this is even your fault, but it doesn’t have as nice of an experience there as Wordle (which I assume you’re trying to emulate).
Feels more like stenography or data entry than playing a game at that point where you're just typing 10+ guesses without any investment in any one of them.
For example, when I tried the larger version, I got to a point of a 2/3 filled word: _ET.
I then had to sit and enter:
-bet -get -jet -let -met -net -pet -set -vet -wet
and finally, I got to the word: yet. And that's not even including some less common but still valid words I would guess like ret and tet, which I'm not sure are off the table as possibly valid entries. It just felt like a chore more than a puzzle to get that word, and I have to repeat it over and over for the other words. Maybe as you get to a close the letter pool gets a bit smaller so you have less guesses, but that's only after you've guessed out a significant portion of the puzzle.
Wordle avoids this by giving you information on your guesses, making them feel less like a huge string of purely random guesses. Crosswords give you cryptic clues that aren't obvious, but make you feel like any guess was based on deductive reasoning rather than some brute force attempt.
Still, nice job on building and releasing the project! And it sounds like other commenters are enjoying it more than I am, so maybe I'm just a stick in the mud or I like word games too much and have too much time invested in them.
Also, why no cookie keeping your trend? That's what keeps me coming back: not wanting to break a streak! (Not to promote dark patterns or anything.)
Also also, nice UX. I found it easy to navigate, edit, and delete.
I don't think it'll be a hit with the main crossword community because the crossword constructors put a lot of humor and cleverness in the clues, which is a major draw. The personal touch makes it seem like you're in a community of clever people who are trying to entertain each other.
I suppose this would be a good learning aid for students who are learning vocabulary.
Should probably not let people delete the initially-provided letters. I did so accidentally at one point and got very confused for a long time.
Not sure if that's a piece of observable behavior that helps you figure out a market / how you want to grow this, but definitely speaks to the kind of delight I've got out of your prototype!
The only real issue is getting your initial foothold, especially if the grid's pre-filled letters are mostly common and not helpful in placement. Having a pre-filled J is much more useful than, say, a prefilled E.
Tab really ought to tab through the words as well as arrow keys, which don't cursor to filled in letters which is also frustrating.
I'd like to be able to type a whole word, including over-typing the letters provided.
I'd recommend playing around with the guardian crossword for inspiration of a control scheme.
But fun core idea!