[HN Gopher] Show HN: Huewords, a Word and Logic Puzzle
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Show HN: Huewords, a Word and Logic Puzzle
This is a game I wrote over the last month and a bit. The effort
allocation was pretty different from what I've done in the past.
The game design snapped together very quickly: I had the initial
idea, played a couple of games on a spreadsheet to get a feel for
the idea, and made one change based on those plays. After that
everything felt just right through multiple rounds of playtesting.
Likewise the puzzle generation is nowhere near as elaborate as in
my previous game, fairly simple methods worked well and provided
good variety. Instead I ended up spending silly amounts of time on
curating the word list (including using LLMs to guide the curation)
and on iterating on the UI. The basic UI concept never changed, but
the details basically never survived for very long after starting a
new playtest round.
Author : jsnell
Score : 41 points
Date : 2024-06-04 07:01 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (huewords.snellman.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (huewords.snellman.net)
| mock-possum wrote:
| Oh this is fun - takes a second to wrap your head around, but the
| way the groups of letters fit into the grouped slots is a neat
| way to lead the player along into guessing the correct placement
| tantalor wrote:
| Took re-reading the tutorial to realize TAB key was required to
| switch groups.
| jsnell wrote:
| Thanks. Is there something you tried doing instead for
| switching groups, or was it more that you didn't expect to need
| to do it?
| nilstycho wrote:
| Tripped me up too. I didn't expect the need. Then I thought
| maybe there was some restriction of which blocks could go
| where, or which blocks needed to be placed first. The first
| letters I placed, by coincidence, worked fine, so that
| contributed to my confusion.
|
| I thought color would be assigned automatically as soon as
| possible. So if there was an ABCD block and a ABEF block,
| then you could place an uncolored B, and as soon as you
| placed an F in the same block that block would get ABEF
| color.
| jsnell wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation!
|
| Wanting to just type and have the game do the right thing
| is a very reasonable expectation, and auto-assignment is an
| interesting idea. It might need to be a one-way street to
| avoid unpredictable cascades though, such that you can go
| from "any letter A" to a "concrete letter A in that
| specific group" automatically, but not from a "concrete A"
| to "any A".
| rockostrich wrote:
| Very fun. It definitely gives the crossword muscles a little
| workout once the logic for the given word is figured out. I guess
| I'll have to add it to the daily rotation of brain games to play
| daily...
| smeej wrote:
| 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.
| jsnell wrote:
| 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.)
| bpm140 wrote:
| Has a lot of similarities to Knotwords
| (https://playknotwords.com/). I like both implementations. Well
| done!
| bitsinthesky wrote:
| Im surprised there are more word games out there that are
| legitimately fun! Good job with it. I like the design choices of
| the site as well.
| gothink wrote:
| This is a really fun and novel word game! Thanks for sharing it.
|
| I did find one small bug while playing: if you drag a letter off
| the grid, it doesn't properly update the squares on the grid for
| that group. The space where you removed the letter stays blank,
| and the remaining places don't show the recently removed letter
| as a possibility. I noticed that it works as expected when right-
| clicking to remove the letter, however.
| jsnell wrote:
| Thanks for the report, and the kind words!
|
| I couldn't reproduce the bug on three different browsers, so
| there's probably some kind of an additional constraint for just
| what triggers the bug. Based on the description there should be
| an exception printed in the the JS console. If this happens
| again, I'd appreciate seeing the top of the stacktrace.
|
| (And in the meanwhile, this is is an object lesson that
| exception reporting to the server has to be included even in an
| MVP. Anything that one player reports, dozens of others must
| have seen and not reported.)
| gothink wrote:
| I had left the tab open, so I checked the console and there
| weren't any exceptions, just the output generated from the
| game being set up. I refreshed the page to test again, and
| selecting "small" brought up the same puzzle that I
| previously confirmed the bug with. This time, everything
| worked as expected though!
|
| I'm using Firefox on Linux which could very well be the
| culprit here -- I recall an issue with drag and drop that was
| fixed in a recent changelog. I'll reach out if I run into the
| issue again.
| murphyslab wrote:
| 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.
| jsnell wrote:
| 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.
| digging wrote:
| Really great controls. All the mouse interactions are very
| intuitive. Keyboard slightly less so, but they work well once
| they're understood.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I found it very addictive. Is it guaranteed that there is always
| enough information to solve it with just one given word?
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(page generated 2024-06-04 23:01 UTC)