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Show HN: Three Magic Words

threemagicwords.app

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Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words

#121

Post by bonestamp2 »

beepy wrote: post #31
msoad wrote: post #15

I 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.

A "Competitive" mode and a "Zen" mode.

Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words

#122

Post by bonestamp2 »

andjd wrote: post #74

I know that you're not copying the wordle vibe necessarily, but the animations seem too over the top to me. They're pushing into candy crush territory, and to me that a strong detractor. One of the thing I appreciate about wordle is that it isn't trying to be more than it is, and this feels too much like the free games that fill app stores and employs a bunch of dark patterns to hook your attention.

One improvement would be for the animations to at least happen in parallel, having them sequential seems over the top. It's a few seconds of waiting for a new puzzle to finish all of its animations. It would be nicer if they all happened together in about 500ms.

Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words

#123

Post by bonestamp2 »

peeters wrote: post #80

I enjoyed this but I think it could use some refinement. I feel like you should either remove the timer, or accept any correct three words. Being punished for coming up with three words that fit, but aren't the three words you expected, is kind of frustrating. To be honest I find the fact that it evaluates one word at a time to be pretty jarring. I want to be able to try letters in spots without the game yelling at m…

You can drag letters to any position you'd like. The red dot just seems to be a helping hand for when you want to tap a letter to commit it to a spot.

Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words

#124

Post by thaumasiotes »

beepy wrote: post #102
joeframbach wrote: post #98

This isn't a logic game, this is a game of "guess what word I'm thinking of". - - G G Y - E E - S - - - - Y O P U B F K L L Possible solutions: b u G G Y p E E k S f o l l Y f o G G Y p E E k S b u l l Y f o G G Y p E E l S b u l k Y I wrote down the solutions ahead of typing them in, in this order, and was extremely frustrated that the answers I came up with, which were correct, did not read your mind. Even more fru…

It ought to do a better job of explaining that there are specific words it's looking for. Originally I did explore the game you thought that this game was — create any 3 words using all the loose tiles — but the problem is, there are around 12K five-letter words in standard word game play. My game has an imperfect list of less than 33% of these that can be recognized by most people. It would be too easy to guess an a…

> My game has an imperfect list of less than 33% of these that can be recognized by most people. It would be too easy to guess an acceptable word, only to have the remaining words technically legal, but not among the remaining guessable words, and worse, possibly offensive.

Given the restriction that you can only guess "words", you need to improve the wordlist anyway. I had "denty" rejected as a guess, which was not a good look when "folky" turned out to be an official answer.

My other suggestion would be to revise the keyboard input - it's much easier to type the entire word I want to guess than to look at which letters are missing and only type those.

And while it's not a suggestion, I would note that your "cruelly challenging" difficulty level is noticeably easier than the levels that are supposed to be below it, because it provides no clues. This makes it much easier to determine which letters go in which word.

Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words

#125

Post by 1123581321 »

Edd314159 wrote: post #118
kamranjon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that this is exactly how wordle works right?

In Worldle you need only guess one word. The player can do whatever they want to get there, but there is only one valid solution. Having two (or more) valid solutions to a game, but only accepting one of them, is unfortunately a recipe for frustration. The equivalent would be if Worldle made you also guess each intermediate word to get to the solution.

Why does guessing a series of words change whether it's bad to have one solution?

Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words

#126

Post by aidenn0 »

Edd314159 wrote: post #118
kamranjon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that this is exactly how wordle works right?

In Worldle you need only guess one word. The player can do whatever they want to get there, but there is only one valid solution. Having two (or more) valid solutions to a game, but only accepting one of them, is unfortunately a recipe for frustration. The equivalent would be if Worldle made you also guess each intermediate word to get to the solution.

Wordle starts out with thousands of valid solutions, right?

Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words

#127

Post by amelius »

Curious, why was this implemented as a native app? From what I see, this could have been implemented as a webapp as well. This would have enabled a greater reach, and the possibility to embed this inside different websites.

Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words

#128

Post by jimmydorry »

mgas wrote: post #76

Game Play: maybe you want it this way, but the animations are an impediment to gameplay. I like to type the words, and in a timed situation, typing quickly should be an asset to the player. The animations make good players worse, even on first guesses before you slow the animations. I like slowing the player after multiple bad guesses, but don't hamstring us from the start. Word Lists: far too many plurals. Especiall…

I like it too. Wrt. to the animations, why not pause the clock during the transitions?

Re: Show HN: Three Magic Words

#129

Post by jimmydorry »

yunwal wrote: post #105
beepy wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It ought to do a better job of explaining that there are specific words it's looking for. Originally I did explore the game you thought that this game was — create any 3 words using all the loose tiles — but the problem is, there are around 12K five-letter words in standard word game play. My game has an imperfect list of less than 33% of these that can be recognized by most people. It would be too easy to guess an a…

Requirements imo, should be 1) All used words are guessable 2) There are no possible alternate solutions with unguessable words I haven't done the math, but I suspect there are plenty of solutions like this, you'll just have to calculate them.

It would probably make the difficulty guide inaccurate, unless you take the lowest possible difficulty as the guide where ever there is more than one solution.
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