- 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".
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.