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Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic

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Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic

#101
post #83
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not actually solving the puzzle, for one. Like half the steps are obviously nonsense.

Are you sure about that? It correctly solves the puzzle. Each step (though a little confusing to parse) does make sense in context.

> Each step (though a little confusing to parse) does make sense in context.

The proposed intermediate answers don't make sense, and they're the actual puzzle. You must answer all the intermediates correctly, you can't skip levels.

The following ones clearly aren't correct (I think, I hadn't actually done that puzzle):

["the of nowhere"] -> middle; the model gets that right, but garbles the answer due to not correctly extracting the clue and having trailing garbage

[your [middle] one can get you grounded] -> finger; "room" as suggested by model makes no sense

[two-dimensional [finger] puppet projected on a wall] -> shadow; the model gets this right, but only by ignoring the clue completely, which means the justification is nonsense

[dial ([shadow]-based clock)] -> sun; the model says sundial, which then forces it to make an inane "a sundial represents the sun" argument at the next level.

[[red] spandex halloween costume, maybe] -> devil; the model doesn't give an answer word at all for this, but just says that "a red spandex costume is not a pitchfork"

Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic

#102
post #95
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think they're saying it shouldn't be counted as a fail, rather than it should be accepted as an answer at that point. if not i agree with you. it'd be nice if it flashed green or something around the entire set of brackets but made you still answer all the sub-clues though.

Eat it and make the user think it's a failure, but don't count it negatively towards the score. "If you answer early, we'll ignore your guess without letting you on."

Or maybe it could give some kind of extra credit for guessing a clue early. Or it could accept it, but still make you guess the interior clues, but when you get to the one, you already guessed, it shows it as already solved.

Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic

#103

I love this! Just sent it to some friends. Like others - minor nit -- I can't see what words I've already guessed. I'd guessed a correct word and mistyped it -- took me a long while to try it again.

Yes, being able to scroll down and check already entered guesses would be nice

Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic

#104
post #2

I posted Bracket City to HN on February 24th and the game went live yesterday on The Atlantic (!) The game will stay free to play (and not require logging in). Also, I'm still making all the puzzles! HN provided the first real infusion of players that weren't my mom's friends. So thanks everyone. FWIW The Atlantic's team is amazing and got this live exactly 2 weeks from when we signed the deal. This happened quick an…

That's a fun little puzzle.

I realize it might be easier to write a puzzle than solve one. Writing them seems quite hard at first, but you have the solution and can choose words to break into clues, and from there do the same again until you have a properly complex puzzle.

Congratulations on getting it picked up by the Atlantic.

Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add that the answer detection logic should probably get beefed up a bit as well. When I solved today's puzzle, it counted "race car" as a wrong answer when it expected "racecar". It should accept both forms of a compound word (also "racecar" isn't a word but that's more minor).

But "race car" with a space isn't a palindrome.

It seems that every answer is a single word. I don't think it says that anywhere, but the few I've done seem to be that way.

Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My constructive crit: I'd really like to be able to just answer the puzzle without answering any of the intermediate stages. It is a much more challenging feat to just hold it all in your head and then type out the one long answer than to answer the individual stages. It promotes some real mental modelling skills that way. The game, played as-is, is almost no challenge at all. It just feels like busywork.

As soon as I saw "second rock from the", I knew the top-level answer was going to be "Venus". At first I felt frustrated that it wouldn't let me enter the solution, but if it had accepted that then I would have missed out on the rest of the puzzle. In retrospect, I felt like having to work backwards from "Venus" and "sun" to figure out the lower-level clues was much more interesting then if it had just let me skip th…

exactly this! a whole lot of people above suggesting stripping away all the fun

Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic

#110
post #2

I posted Bracket City to HN on February 24th and the game went live yesterday on The Atlantic (!) The game will stay free to play (and not require logging in). Also, I'm still making all the puzzles! HN provided the first real infusion of players that weren't my mom's friends. So thanks everyone. FWIW The Atlantic's team is amazing and got this live exactly 2 weeks from when we signed the deal. This happened quick an…

It's quite fun and interesting. Well done!
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