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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

#141

Post by purple-leafy »

no_wizard wrote: post #136
purple-leafy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey congratulations! Did you approach Atlantic, or did they approach you? I’ve had a word game in-mind for years, and several attempts to implement it. It’s a tricky one but I’ll crack it one day :) My plan is to be acquired by a news company. So, how did you go about this? I have some ideas myself

>My plan is to be acquired by a news company. I feel like this is going about it the wrong way. This puzzle game licensed by The Atlantic for example, was made because they wanted to provide a fun game experience for their patrons. With games, the best games come from an organic experience. Its almost worse to have a preset plan. Not to mention, making a game is work - you have to have approachability, rules think th…

Thanks for your comment, I’ve toyed with this game idea for about 7 years, no preset plan from the get-go, but within the last year see an opportunity with aligning with a news site.

But I had all the game logic and flow mapped out long before I thought about platform.

Yes games are tough to make, I’ve made a few so far and it’s always a struggle

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

#142

Post by martyvis »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #62
brgross wrote: 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…

Were the terms confidential? If not, would you be willing to share what kinds of terms a deal like this has? (If you have any doubt whatsoever about whether the terms are confidential, assume they are, and don't put anything at risk.)

Josh Wardle sold Wordle to the New York Times for at least a million. https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911274/wordle-new-york-...

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

#144

Post by mmoustafa »

mNovak wrote: post #124

Congrats, that's a great achievement! I'd be very curious if you could share what that process looked like in general? Did they reach out to you, how did they find you? Were they interested in the gameplay alone, or the player count / growth? Was it much work, technically, to get integrated on their website? And of course, how long does it take you generate one full puzzle?

Second this, I've built some puzzle games (e.g. https://snoozpaper.com) but lacked distribution :)

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

#145

Post by lobsterthief »

ajjenkins wrote: post #45

Can you color code the brackets so it’s easy to see how the clues are nested? Like outermost brackets are red, one level of nesting is blue, next level of nesting is orange. My brain is having a hard time parsing all of the clues.

I have the same feedback. Very creative and fun game but it’s giving me flashbacks to years of looking for mismatched curly braces and parentheses in code.

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

#146

Post by altncatchfire »

Awesome project!

I've been playing through the archives, and they are challenging but fun. My criticism is that sometimes the answer is very ambiguous.

For instance, (spoilers ahead), in this case

> there[something golfers' apparently [scold, with "at"]]

I know the answer is "therefore". But the inner bracket could be shout/scream/yell.

It's quite frustrating when I get docked for this, hopefully the clues can be better constructed/beta tested in the future?

Thanks again for the fun game :)

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

#147

Post by cdelsolar »

diggan wrote: post #57
noitpmeder wrote: post #10

What kind of money is involved in a deal like this?

Probably around 5 digits in total, would be my guess

it seems like it would require ongoing support too though, to generate more puzzles?

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

#148

Post by serial_dev »

martyvis wrote: post #142
JoshTriplett wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were the terms confidential? If not, would you be willing to share what kinds of terms a deal like this has? (If you have any doubt whatsoever about whether the terms are confidential, assume they are, and don't put anything at risk.)

Josh Wardle sold Wordle to the New York Times for at least a million. https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911274/wordle-new-york-...

Wordle was extremely popular even before NYT bought it. I doubt the terms would be similar

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

#149

Post by esperent »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #88
NobodyNada wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome, congrats! I had a lot of fun solving today's puzzle. One minor bit of feedback/request: maybe I'm too spoiled by code editors, but it would be nice to have a visual aid for identifying matching brackets -- maybe colorizing matching pairs ("rainbow brackets"), and/or a click-to-highlight feature that highlights the entire contents of a pair of braces for you. I felt like I was spending a lot of time tr…

If the game never has more than three nested levels, you could use [square], then {curly}, then brakest. You could even do a fourth level with (parenthetical) brackets, but that would mean you couldn't use parenthesis in clues.

I think colors, or even shades of grey for accessibility, would be better for non-coders. Maybe even just put the current bracket in bold.

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

#150

Post by thaumasiotes »

felideon wrote: post #72
brgross wrote: 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…

Congrats! Some feedback, if you're taking any: - Without the tutorial, it's confusing that you're not supposed to click and you're supposed to start typing. I wonder if placing the text box at the top would make that more clear. - Some of the clues are confusing due to inconsistent punctuation. For example: [to ___fish, to lure someone in using a fake internet persona] = cat [do this or cut bait] = fish [taking a pay…

> Some of the clues are confusing due to inconsistent punctuation.

> The first line uses a comma, the second line uses "or", the third and fourth lines don't have any punctuation at all, so the sentences make no sense.

... There is no inconsistency there. The 'or' and the comma in lines 1 and 2 are not parallel to each other; they're doing different things. Neither could be replaced by the other without changing the meaning of the clue.

Similarly, in line three, nothing in it could be replaced by a comma or by a disjunction. (But, and I want to emphasize this, line 2 doesn't even contain a disjunction; you appear to have misunderstood all of the clues.)

Line four is a bit different in that it contains a grammatical mistake. It should say [rocks that when added to soda will NOT cause your stomach to explode]. Other than that... it's a fourth style of clue. It isn't comparable to the other three, and there's still no inconsistency.

What do you imagine would add "consistency" to these clues? #s 1, 2, and 4 could be unified like so:

    [to ____fish, to lure someone in using a fake internet persona]
    [____ or cut bait, common idiom]
    [____ rocks, rocks that when added to soda will NOT cause your stomach to explode]
But clue 3 can't be rendered in this style; the closest you can come is [pay ____, taking one of these is a bummer], and the parenthetical isn't really the same as it is for the other three.
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