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…
C["have you tried turning it off and __ again?"]grats! [stinger]n p[bet against an outcome]ing it daily and really en[ode to ___]ing it.
Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
171–176 of 176 posts
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#172Countering some recurring feedback here: I find the design decisions you’ve made strike a good balance between simplicity and inviting the player in to find their way round. I’m viewing on mobile.
- I can’t easily parse a top-level clue structure but the lack of colours keeps it neat - Guess history would have been useful but omitting it keeps each guess low stakes for a first time user - The keyboard is fine, don’t let the unicode universe in for an ascii input field
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#173Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#174Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#175- it would be nice to have a list of the incorrect guesses that you've made. Sometimes I come back after a while and can't remember if I already guessed something or if I just thought about guessing it but wasn't sure... Of course this also dovetails a bit with what some of the other people mentioned about guesses being counted as incorrect even when they're guessed early because then if you have a list of all earlier incorrect guesses then an earlier incorrect guess might now be correct, so I would also change that, that a guess which is only incorrect because it's not available yet isn't counted as incorrect, and instead it says something like "not yet!". Another related problem for me though was I got stuck once and it turned out I had just made a typo in my earlier guess and hadn't noticed, which is why it would be nice to see your earlier guesses. Oh, and also related, I think it counts multiple incorrect guesses of the same word (again not 100% sure since I couldn't see my earlier guesses)
- it would be nice to improve the stats, maybe give you some kind of distribution to see how you're doing, maybe on the calendar you could colour code to show what days you've done well and what days you did worse or something