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Show HN: Quorbo – a quick and quirky quest for the quote (quorbo.com)

9 points by projectsforlife ↗ HN
Hey HN,

Today I'm launching Quorbo (www.quorbo.com): a simple letter-revealing game (think Wheel of Fortune with some twists) where you get 6 turns to guess the day's quote!

It's my first post-parenthood side project and first web game. Being a working dad has caused me (for the first time, believe it or not) to focus on simplicity. Up until about a year ago, endless free time secretly plagued me... because I love _building_, and more free time meant: more room to add complexity.

Not anymore! Quorbo is the first of my initial batch of three simple word games, and I can't wait to make more.

Let me know what you think! (improvements, bugs / quirky behavior / stumbling blocks, any and all feedback welcome!)

Enjoy!

9 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 31.0 ms ] thread
mrec
Fun! I can see it being quite addictive; is it going to be possible to play puzzles other than the current day's, once you've built some up?

Edit with some more thoughts:

- Linking to Ebay for the source is an odd choice; is this the monetization plan?

- Layout feels a bit weird and cluttered. In particular, on web (Firefox) the drop-shadowed panel completely hides the onscreen keyboard unless you scroll all the way down for some reason. I just typed guesses, which worked fine.

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projectsforlife
Hey thanks! Yeah, so I have considered that, especially the previous week's puzzles. I am wary of a potential key to wordle's success though, which is--after you've played, the best way to keep playing is vicariously through others

On eBay: yup that's the plan. Their affiliate program has quite generous terms, moreso than Amazon.

On the keyboard issue: sounds like it may be a bug. Did you by chance play the practice round first? Looking into it. [Edit: looks like a display issue for the non-mobile version of the game on certain screen sizes, workin on a fix]

mrec
I don't understand "vicariously through others" - can you expand? I haven't played wordle.

On the bug, I did play the practice round first, but I still get the same thing now on a new page load. Looks like it's caused by the div#modalIdBox having position:relative for no very obvious reason.

projectsforlife
>> "after you've played, the best way to keep playing is vicariously through others"

so, my (non-evidence-backed) hunch is that part of what made Wordle so viral was that the player, after finishing, could not continue playing - but could _continue the experience_ of the game by sharing it with others. In my mind, if the player could play Wordle many more times in a given day, they would burn out before sharing. All of that said, I do like the idea of maybe putting more puzzles behind a Stripe purchase or something.

Thanks on the bug info, that is helpful

mrec
Don't know if you're still reading feedback here, but one more thing - the toggle behaviour when typing guesses isn't as useful as you'd think. I find myself typing out the full (guessed) quote while looking at the hint pattern, and it's annoying to have to keep going back and checking whether I've already typed each letter and typing it again will remove it.
projectsforlife
Thank you! Yes, I still am :) - I have received that feedback from another player too, so I will be adding an alert when you've 'removed' a letter if you're using a physical keyboard. I run into this issue too. Life is crazy here, so this particular tweak may not show for a few days
xypage
I would advise commenting out every console.log() for your production version, I didn't check till after I played but it's pretty easy to just see what the quote is there, and even without that I think having that much of (what I assume is) debug info showing up for users seems undesirable, to me at least.
projectsforlife
Ah right, thanks for that. Had meant to but some life events a few days ago moved up my launch schedule by a few weeks, will clean that up. Thanks. [update: 95% of the .log() messages are now cleaned up including any spoilers, also fixed some display bugs another tester/player mentioned. I did not force push the change out to everyone's PWAs, but if your new to the game or reload manually, you'll see the newest version]