31–40 of 46 posts
An interesting game idea! However, currently it does lack tension. There doesn't yet seem to be a limited number of "moves" and guesses, so there is no danger of failing, and therefore less of a sense of satisfaction when you win compared to, e.g., wordle.
The biggest thing I need is the ability to delete a letter from a square without having to undo all the way back to when I thought the letter went there. Replacing the letter with a different one doesn't help. I need to be able to get it back to just listing the unused options for that color group, and I couldn't figure out how to do that.
On keyboard, backspace or delete. On mouse, right-click or drag it off the board. On touch, drag it off the board. (I've updated the instructions.)
One question, and I think you partly already answered it - are the boards generated manually?
Nice game! I played it yesterday and came back to it today as well. One question, and I think you partly already answered it - are the boards generated manually?
The underlying board layouts were generated manually, and are reused. They can get flipped for more variety though. Everything else about a puzzle (splitting the chosen board to areas, placement of words on the board, choosing the hints) is automated.
Nice game! Finished a small one now - https://huewords.snellman.net/share/44s0 . Let me try something harder.
and here is today's but if I copy I don't get a link . Just "Huewords Daily #44 solved in 06:17 with no hints! https://huewords.snellman.net/ "
Basically if you allow deep-linking into the daily, they kind of stop being a daily puzzle. They'll also confuse new players following the link, because they'll be thrown into a more complex puzzle than most are prepared to tackle without doing the tutorial and a small puzzle or two. Hence the link to the main menu.
While for the non-daily puzzles, playtesters from were requesting the ability to deep-link into specific puzzles to share them from very early on. And it makes sense for those links to be long-lived, because those puzzles are not being presented as being time-limited unlike the dailies. So the link has a fairly different use case.
On the other hand, automation might explain how I got one grid involving BHAJI (a food I'm not familiar with — I thought maybe you expected it to be familiar to your readers, but now I suspect it was put in by an uncaring computer). The word list knows BHAJI but not KEFIR.
I also got a grid involving TEATS, which doesn't pass the breakfast test. That made the grid somewhat unfair: I've internalized that I can prune search branches involving e.g. STOAS in favor of STOAT, and I expect to be able to prune branches involving e.g. PENIS in favor of PERIL. If it turns out that the only viable solution depends on exploring one of those seemingly-signposted-as-prunable branches, well, that's frustrating. So you may want to take another pass over the word list.
Kudos on a very well-crafted game! Again, it's really impressive that you managed to create so many rewarding puzzles — and even more so (basically incredible) that you managed to come up with an algorithm to auto-generate them!
Very nice game! I'm very surprised that (IIUC) you say you managed to automate the generation of such lively fills. I've gotten words such as SIGMA and ANGST in helpful and surprising positions. On the other hand, automation might explain how I got one grid involving BHAJI (a food I'm not familiar with — I thought maybe you expected it to be familiar to your readers, but now I suspect it was put in by an uncaring com…
It's just the word layout that's automated. The word list (about 4k words) is entirely hand-curated. I had some tooling to make it easier, but every word was selected by me rather than automation. But obviously it's impossible for any single person to be propely calibrated, mistakes can happen, and I'm not a native speaker so there are some odd blind spots in my vocabulary.
"Bhaji" was a word I personally thought was fairly common. If I had to name three Indian dishes, it'd be one of the three. But it might be too regional; when it was brought up in a playtest group, a person from UK thought it was basically in daily use while continental Europeans insisted they had never heard of it. So it'll probably go the next time I revisit the word list.
Re: "breakfast test", I'd not heard it phrased that way before, but immediately know what you mean :) My intended policy was no slurs, genitals, or sexual violence, and no vulgar words for bodily functions or body parts. This doesn't match the classic exclusion list exactly, but is at least similar in spirit. I expected "teats" to be fine, since to my mind it's only used for animals and human constructs (like baby bottles), not humans. But removing borderline words is cheap, offending some players is expensive :)
Note that the game does make a distinction between words that are accepted and words that can appear in puzzles. I mostly move words from the latter to the former rather than remove them entirely, so if you go probing for controversial words, you might find a handful of other examples. But the intent is definitely for there to be a "voice" in the word selection, such that entire categories of words are predictably in or predictably out in a way that the player can get an intuition for.
I'll definitely make another pass once I've internalized the player expectations better.
Fun game, although it would be helpful to have the "How to Play" instructions ( https://huewords.snellman.net/help.html ) explicitly state that shorter letter sequences (2,3,4 letters) do not need to form words. That's an expectation built up from many other crossword games, so it would be good to nullify it through a clear statement that the usual crossword rules do not apply here.
Thanks, I've added an explicit statement to that effect. The instructions were very terse to start with, due to a misguided attempt to keep them to one page even on tiny screens for aesthetic reasons. I gave up on that, but maybe didn't take enough advantage of the now infinite available space.
I was trying to fit right-to-left in some cases initially.