I manage to get the word on my last try and it was very satisfying. I've never seen this game before. I was a little sad you only get one word a day.
So fun to see someone start the journey. Enjoy.
Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
81–90 of 271 posts
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stardew Valley doesn‘t have nearly as short of a timeframe but is another labor of love success.
I think it's an even better personal success than Wordle, or at least different. It was a man's labor of love for years, which tied together all his interests: music, art, programming, games. And better yet he built a career out of doing all of those things and still owns and maintains it years later. Presumably still loves it too.
A lot of breakout successes follow that formula. While I'm not particularly fond of his work, I have nothing but respect for Toby Fox and the years of work he put into bringing his dream to reality.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#83The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involv…
Making the whole thing client side also let him scale from a small handful of users to literally millions with basically zero additional work. I hope it inspires future devs to let go of feeling like they absolutely need to beg or require users to create accounts to capture email addresses just so they have a chance at monetizing their thing. Wordle may not have ever caught on if it were preemptively over-engineered:…
> Making the whole thing client side also let him scale from a small handful of users to literally millions with basically zero additional work.
But everyone on HN is telling me that I should move away from client side and render everything server side! In fact, all state should be server side! Use a fancy library that opens a web socket and turn the users 4+core computer into a mindless zombie controlled by a .25CPU VM somewhere.
/s
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm actually sort of a "word" person. I've written books for publishers and do a fair bit of writing for my job. But crosswords have always fallen into the too much work category for me and I've never really connected to word games in general (including Scrabble). But, yeah, I like Wordle and it hits a sweet spot for me.
I played pretty high level Scrabble for a few years and most people who connect deeply with Scrabble are programmers, mathematicians, musicians, scientists, accountants, etc. Hardly anybody at the medium-to-high levels of play are word people. At its core, Scrabble is just a game of probability, memory, spatial awareness, and pattern recognition. The words could be random collections of symbols.
Fascinating. Although I can program I’ve basically ended up as someone who can do fairly in-depth technical writing among many other things. And I’m not generally a word puzzle fan.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#85> It also brings players back into the game, but not in an annoying way like Farmville Facebook notifications. As someone who doesn't play, it's getting more and more annoying. Especially now that there's stuff like Wordle Except It's Four Games At Once demanding space on my social timelines.
We have a "game" channel in our friend discord channel (like 10 or so if us). All interesting content has been completely drowned out with wordle shares, and there's no end in sight. I'm glad people are having fun, but I would like that channel back.
If it weren't this game it would be something else. I remember Animal Crossing dominating all video game discussions for weeks or months at a time.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stardew Valley doesn‘t have nearly as short of a timeframe but is another labor of love success.
If you looked at the engineer of worldle, he tried a lot of similar games before eg. On mobile. Dating back since 2013. So, while it could be created in a short timeframe. A lot of experience/thinking went into it. Edit: changed 2016 to 2013
The original prototype for Wordle was actually back in 2013 [0]. But yeah he didn't really touch it until mid 2021 when he recreated it from scratch. The improved word list which plays a huge role came then, with the help of his partner classifying all 13k 5-letter words. I believe the share function came much later when he noticed people actually manually typing those colored squares.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#87I actually think the OP and the comments are too focused on the programmer-related aspects of this. I'll add a few things. 1. It's not trivial but it's not that hard if you have a decent vocabulary and some intuitive sense for word frequencies (and word pair frequencies) for different locations in a word. The answer list does not seem to include really hard words as naively picking all the words in the MW dictionary…
On #1 - humph was hard for me, I've never encountered it in my reading (maybe I'm not reading a particular genre that uses it? Is it something Jane Austen used?), only got it via a a last ditch guess, because I'm familiar with "harrumph" and I had "-umph" already and "h" was the only prefix that remotely made any kind of sense.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#88The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involv…
When I first discovered Wordle, I immediately looked for a way to keep playing with new random words, something that most clones have implemented. After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. What makes it fun to spend 10 minutes on the game is that it's the only round of the day so there's a pay-off to giving it some thought. When you can keep playing new rounds, it's just not rewarding and I would just close the tab…
The daily bit is clearly modeled off the New York Times daily word puzzles, and it's obvious why the NYT bought it to add it to their collection of daily word games.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#89The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involv…
When I first discovered Wordle, I immediately looked for a way to keep playing with new random words, something that most clones have implemented. After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. What makes it fun to spend 10 minutes on the game is that it's the only round of the day so there's a pay-off to giving it some thought. When you can keep playing new rounds, it's just not rewarding and I would just close the tab…
> After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun.
Absolutely. If that limitation wasn't there, the game would've definitely fizzled out within days and maybe even never made to it the popularity it has now. The slow sustained popularity, with people posting their results on the shared daily word is the key to success here.
It's the only reason people are still talking about it more than a month later.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I were smart enough to coin a catchy phrase that means "the moment some software dropped in quality, when they decided to add user accounts", because I see this quite a lot. I'm looking at you, Postman!
I'm old enough to remember when Google didn't have user accounts.
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