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Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
31–40 of 176 posts
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#32I 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…
Fantastic game, and really enjoyed the thought you put into "submit-gate" and entertaining ideas from the peanut gallery.
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#33I 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 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 trying to count bracket pairs, which made it hard to keep track of where I was in the puzzle and was less interesting than trying to solve the wordplay.
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#34Very cool. I was very curious to see how AI would do. I tried Gemini 2.5 Pro: > whats the answer to this where you replace the bracketed sections with words? > the [second rock from the [dial ([two-dimensional [your ["the of nowhere"] one can get you grounded] puppet projected on a wall]-based clock)]] de Milo is discovered by a Greek [guy with a [kind of stop for a [vehicle that's a palindrome ]]chfork that's not th…
I'd like to provide you with some constructive feedback on your comment:
1. You should include what you think is interesting about the large language model's ability to solve the word puzzle. It's not obvious to me as a reader.
2. You shouldn't post the step-by-step solution to a puzzle, regardless of how it was derived. It's unlikely that anyone will read through it, and if they do, they're less likely to try the puzzle themselves.
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#35I 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…
Very cool how some websites are still hunting for actual fun content and rewarding creators even in the middle of the internet's enshittification there are still a few bright spots
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#36I 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…
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 those clues.
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#37Very cool. I was very curious to see how AI would do. I tried Gemini 2.5 Pro: > whats the answer to this where you replace the bracketed sections with words? > the [second rock from the [dial ([two-dimensional [your ["the of nowhere"] one can get you grounded] puppet projected on a wall]-based clock)]] de Milo is discovered by a Greek [guy with a [kind of stop for a [vehicle that's a palindrome ]]chfork that's not th…
I'd like to provide you with some constructive feedback on your comment: 1. You should include what you think is interesting about the large language model's ability to solve the word puzzle. It's not obvious to me as a reader. 2. You shouldn't post the step-by-step solution to a puzzle, regardless of how it was derived. It's unlikely that anyone will read through it, and if they do, they're less likely to try the pu…
I mean, I thought it was an interesting read... I'm sorry you didn't
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#38Very cool. I was very curious to see how AI would do. I tried Gemini 2.5 Pro: > whats the answer to this where you replace the bracketed sections with words? > the [second rock from the [dial ([two-dimensional [your ["the of nowhere"] one can get you grounded] puppet projected on a wall]-based clock)]] de Milo is discovered by a Greek [guy with a [kind of stop for a [vehicle that's a palindrome ]]chfork that's not th…
I'd like to provide you with some constructive feedback on your comment: 1. You should include what you think is interesting about the large language model's ability to solve the word puzzle. It's not obvious to me as a reader. 2. You shouldn't post the step-by-step solution to a puzzle, regardless of how it was derived. It's unlikely that anyone will read through it, and if they do, they're less likely to try the pu…
It's not actually solving the puzzle, for one. Like half the steps are obviously nonsense.
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congrats! My only feedback is that it's irritating to be counted "wrong" for naming a correct answer whose clue hasn't been simplified completely yet.
I see that as the core point of the game! Would it be a whole lot of fun to complete the game in one guess? On the other hand I like when I can ‘skip ahead’ and then try to reverse engineer a trickier inside clue.
The instructions say one can solve any clue, and I could take that to mean any bracketed phrase. If they say "highlighted clue" it may help.
Re: Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congrats! My only feedback is that it's irritating to be counted "wrong" for naming a correct answer whose clue hasn't been simplified completely yet.
I see that as the core point of the game! Would it be a whole lot of fun to complete the game in one guess? On the other hand I like when I can ‘skip ahead’ and then try to reverse engineer a trickier inside clue.
> Would it be a whole lot of fun to complete the game in one guess?
I would say yes. It would feel great, like you are outsmarting the game. Kind of like when you discover a good build in an RPG that helps you get ahead - even though it's often intended by the designer, you feel like you pulled a fast one on the game and it feels awesome.