- Bug: I refreshed the page on my first try and it told me to “come back tomorrow.”
(I opened it in incognito to proceed.)
- Opinion: Failed three times. Felt terrible that I was limited to three goes. The “You’ve used up your tries” approach that Wordle takes only works because you get the satisfaction of learning what the word is.
- Opinion: Timer is stressful. Personally I’d prefer a relaxed game. Just time how long the person takes, don’t cut it off.
- Idea: Use subtle cross-hatching as well as colours to make the game far nicer to play. If you must stay with emojis, then use more creative square-shaped ones.
- Opinion/Idea: Don’t limit the moves. Just show a goal, and let the player exceed. So count tries, overall time (spent trying on any try) and lowest moves. That way people can share “Fast Flood No. 3 with 14 moves in 4 tries over 6 minutes and 10 seconds.”
- Idea: Draw a subtle border around the cells you control. Makes it easier to search for neighbouring cells, and makes it satisfying as the border eats away at the border.
- Idea: Simplify the explanation to “Make all the squares the same colour, in as few moves and as quickly as possible. There’s a new challenge every day.” The mechanics are simple enough that giving players the goal is enough. They’ll figure out the rest, and actually enjoy the process more than if was all laid out for them.
Metacomment: I like your approach of explicitly labelling feedback items as bugs, opinions, or ideas. This allows for quick triaging – as a Show HN’er, I’d love to receive feedback in this format. I’m also going to reuse it for the feedback I give.
I like the move limit- it's part of what gives Wordle and its associated games (have you tried Sedordle?) their charm.
One thing I'd definitely like to see would be the ability to see your score and game state once you return to the page. I'm effectively locked out at this point so I can't share my score anymore.
On iPhone SE (the original small one) the "I'm colorblind" checkbox is cut off below the bottom of the screen at 100% zoom, can't scroll to it or pinch-zoom out, so there's no way to know it's even there. I could see and use it when I set page zoom to 75%.
I thought I might have had the system text size set high, but it's at the 2nd-lowest.
Update: I love the colorblind mode! I was already going to suggest a game mode with more visually interesting emojis and you picked some great ones :)
I actually find it much more fun and aesthetic than the default mode. (At least on iOS, the emojis are very nicely designed. Iirc each Android brand has their own emoji design.)
100% agreed.
It's already fun, but these changes could make it something special. The "adjacent color matching" concept reminds me of an iOS game I like called "Kami 2".
I get that you're following the "once a day" wordle model, but you're going to lose a lot of people who go in blindly (like me), don't understand the game, and then discover they're locked out because they went back out to read the instructions.
Put the instructions in a modal or something or make it clearer you're about to start the "once a day" mode.
Just open it again in an incognito/private tab, no need to clear your cookies.
edit: I guess I wasn't clear, I was trying to say to parent that it is not needed to clear all your browser cookies and opening in incognito is the easiest solution, especially on mobile.
Of course on desktop you can easily delete that single cookie from dev tools, but opening in incognito is still faster.
If, like me, you entered the game and found yourself not fully understanding how to play (because you didn't read the example), then found you couldn't play the game again today, just delete the cookie it leaves in your browser of `has_played - 1`. Then you can play again.
Seems a weird choice to only let people play once when it could be easily randomized or solved in multiple ways, unlike Wordle, which seems to have started the one-a-day fad.
I think this is a bug. If the user goes back to the help page in the middle of their first try, they don’t get another try (but they’re supposed to get three tries).
I like knowing the time but I don't like being cut off by it. Just let it count up. Same with the moves. You can say what "par" is to make a goal to achieve, but let people take as long and as many moves as they want. They will pressure themselves to do better.
Within 60 seconds and while distracted I managed to figure out how it worked and win my first round (also clicked right through the text) - but then I failed the second round by running out of moves, so the first may have been a fluke :)
I think the timer can help avoid people who will over-analyze colors, but it definitely also changes the way our brains allow us to play - maybe a compromise could be a "free-play" option with no timer, but keep the timer by default? Or the opposite with the timer as a "challenge" mode? I could see the interest in both- it would be neat to see how few moves I could complete a puzzle in if given infinite time!
Also replying to another comment, I do think it is the right choice to allow multiple plays (you may have changed that in the past 10 minutes since it seems I was able to play twice)
I actually liked that it had both a timer and move limit - helps prevent analysis paralysis. My biggest complaint was that the blue and purple colours seemed very similar.
I'd probably bump it to 90s, at minimum. I moved what I felt was pretty fast through it, and ended up in the high 50s both tries (1 fail while figuring it out, then succeed).
Why do I have to "come back tomorrow" to play a game more than once? What a weird anti-user feature. Have to delete cookies to play a game! What next, be allowed to play one game a day on my xbox?
The actual, not so secret now, secret sauce for wordle is the instant recognizability of its "game outcome" (I don't know what to call the green, yellow and gray emojis). This might do the same by instead of telling everyone all these details about score, publish the final status of the board. I think that would instantly tell someone how far one got etc.
I have to admit, I don't like the limited tries per day thing. I like the move limit, but it's frustrating not being able to finish the thing and have to wait for tomorrow before trying to figure out a better strategy.
Cool game, but it doesn't work on Safari, Chrome, or Firefox on MacOS 10.14 Mohave. I worked out that it will work if the colorblind checkbox is checked, but I had to clear the cookie to find that out. Problem with the emojis I guess, but there's no need to use emojis just to get a coloured block — you could do that with a couple of lines of CSS.
It's good that you didn't use a JS framework, though given that the only changes to the page as the game progresses are updating the grid cells and a couple of bits of text, it would be pretty crazy if you did.
Also, I was amused that the example gif is over half the total page weight. You could do a mini demo/practice level instead in much less.
Cool game mechanic, I haven't seen anything quite like it.
I think you could remove the UI options at the bottom entirely.
Instead have the user click on the adjacent squares directly. Basically if I click a red square on the board, that would be equivalent to selecting the red square in the UI options.
Then add have a hover state that indicates what is going to happen after they click. And make everything bigger such that so the user can't avoid mousing over the squares.
If the hover state is good enough, it should teach the rules without the need for instruction.
Oh and make the color blind option the default / ditch the squares. The emojis look cooler.
They don't render in macOS 10.13 (the latest version I can install on my girlfriend's 2009 iMac) either.
I've found that any time I'm using emojis for something substantial, I end up using rendered images for them. Even when the emojis are all supported, they can differ across devices and look like something that wasn't what I was going for. Though kinda defeats the fun of using emojis.
I’m going to rub the other way here and state that I didn’t enjoy it. Times puzzles aren’t fun since it eliminates time to think about strategy. I’d tweak it a bit to remove the timer and limit it to one solution per day(if you want to keep the daily model). This way the player would have time to pick the solution but mistakes are unforgiving if you want it perfect every day).
My strategy was simple: Scan the boundaries of the area of cells stemming from the top-left corner cell which are of the same color, and attempt to determine which of the other colors has the highest number of unique cells which have at least one edge in common* with that region.
Very fun. I like the timer and move limit to add a bit more pressure, but agree with other commenters that it may not always be desirable. My suggestion is to have different modes. A practice mode to learn the mechanics, a “strategic” mode where you can turn off the timer and/or move limit, and a competitive mode when you’re ready to tackle the day’s puzzle.
Nice game! One cool / weird thing that happened to me is that I got better each try (solved it on the third one) but still have no explicit opinion about what the right strategy is, and what I was doing better. It's interesting to see one's brain take over.
I was a little confused by the game mechanics at first so it took the first two rounds just to figure out what's going on... maybe animate the active colored blocks with sth like a shake/highlight effect?
Like you say, it's obviously inspired by Flood-It. I should clarify: I had never heard of Flood-It before the Mac OS 9 port ("Assimilate") was posted to HN last month, and I was curious if that posting was what inspired this remake.
> the original (which was apparently made 11 years ago)
I'm not sure what the true original is--I found a still-playable version[1] from 2006, from back in the brief heyday of Web Gadgets and personalized web portals[2].
Seems like a fun game but I don't think it'll hit the worldle success because the dividide the middle and aim straigh for the diagonal strategy gets you a win pretty much every time. Mechanic wise I really like it. The delays and limitations would make you want to play it more too. Probably if you improve the algorithm you use to generate the blocks you can make it harder. Also maybe make the board bigger.
- I had to considerately speed up my game after realising I was running out of time
- The frenetic pace is not very enjoyable
- I don't see any emojis
- It doesn't feel like a puzzle because of the time constraint, I'd remove the timer and lower the max moves allowed, so that you have to think in advance instead of just scanning for max adjacents color and then iterating colors
I skimmed the tutorial and just clicked around my first round, not rly sure what was going on until around the end of the round.
Second round I understood the mechanics but ran out of time, was confused a bit about why I lost before I realized there was a timer.
Finally... Fast Flood No.3
→
⌛ → 51 seconds
▶ → 17 moves
→ 3 tries
I didn't complete the first game and reloaded the page and now I can't play until tomorrow. In this case I think the imposed limit is kinda "artificial" and would work better having a unlimited number of games/puzzles as opposed as in Wordle
I can't try it since trying to press 'back' using mouse 4 entered me into the game. Trying to copy the emoji entered me into the game and then my 3 moves were used?
Can the board be made larger? I found the game was over too quickly and there was little scope for strategic thinking by looking ahead for channels with lots of branches.
Quite fun! Nicely made.
My (hopefully constructive) feedback:
- Bug: I refreshed the page on my first try and it told me to “come back tomorrow.”
(I opened it in incognito to proceed.)
- Opinion: Failed three times. Felt terrible that I was limited to three goes. The “You’ve used up your tries” approach that Wordle takes only works because you get the satisfaction of learning what the word is.
- Opinion: Timer is stressful. Personally I’d prefer a relaxed game. Just time how long the person takes, don’t cut it off.
- Idea: Use subtle cross-hatching as well as colours to make the game far nicer to play. If you must stay with emojis, then use more creative square-shaped ones.
- Opinion/Idea: Don’t limit the moves. Just show a goal, and let the player exceed. So count tries, overall time (spent trying on any try) and lowest moves. That way people can share “Fast Flood No. 3 with 14 moves in 4 tries over 6 minutes and 10 seconds.”
- Idea: Draw a subtle border around the cells you control. Makes it easier to search for neighbouring cells, and makes it satisfying as the border eats away at the border.
- Idea: Simplify the explanation to “Make all the squares the same colour, in as few moves and as quickly as possible. There’s a new challenge every day.” The mechanics are simple enough that giving players the goal is enough. They’ll figure out the rest, and actually enjoy the process more than if was all laid out for them.