why is it 3 MB?
Show HN: Three Magic Words
61–70 of 143 posts
Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words
#62This game is simultaneously more stressful, less challenging, and less fun than wordle. I especially hate the timer
Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words
#63I had only two letters left, K and L. Words: BUL_Y and PEE_S. Each letter works fine in either spot, but only one way was correct. That kind of annoyed me because I guessed wrong the first time.
I don’t think there can be any easy way around issues like that in games like these. At least this game doesn’t penalize you for it
never generate a puzzle with two solutions, or accept both solutions.
in this case that puzzle had more solutions because it rejected keeps and bully as well
Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words
#64It uses massive amounts of CPU even when idle.
I realize this is common in games, but don't let anyone tell you any different: this is shit code.
Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words
#65why is it 3 MB?
The heavier bits: about 800k of that is the .webp animations showing how to play. The actual game has a bunch of image resources — including font sprites for the timer and the tiles — that are probably a few hundred k as well. The regular site stuff is sveltekit.
The game script is around 300k. I used Phaser [0] — I originally wrote the game in Swift for iOS and utilized one of that platform’s gaming frameworks(SpriteKit). I rewrote it in TypeScript for the web and wanted a similar framework to ease the porting.
Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words
#66This was a lot of fun. Really great work!
Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words
#67I really like the execution on this. One piece of feedback is that the timer gave me anxiety and I closed it. I do puzzles to phase out from stress not to challenge myself in a time bound environment
Completely agree. You could simply remove the timer and it would instantly be a better game. People can compare scores by number of guesses
Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words
#68The game seems to expect a particular solution even when there are multiple possibilities of forming correct words. For example, I tried "peeks" & "bully" but the game only accepted "peels" & "bulky". This is frustrating, as one has to "mind-read" the game.
Another thing to improve is to reduce the frequency of plural forms. Plurals are just a cop-out to turn four-letter words into five-letter words. ;)
Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words
#69I really like the execution on this. One piece of feedback is that the timer gave me anxiety and I closed it. I do puzzles to phase out from stress not to challenge myself in a time bound environment
I hear you. I personally found the game less interesting before I added the "threat" of losing stars — it felt to me more like trial-and-error work. However, I think there is value in embracing its more meditative side and offering untimed (and I supposed, star-less) play as well.
The stars could stay if the timer is removed. You’d just lose them only if you get a red guess on them
Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words
#70I really like the execution on this. One piece of feedback is that the timer gave me anxiety and I closed it. I do puzzles to phase out from stress not to challenge myself in a time bound environment
The timer also really doesn't mesh well with the slow "letters falling down" animation between rounds. The UI is sending very mixed signals with "how quickly can you do this?" and "hold on, gotta wait here for a bit" at the same time.