When the vertical bar is very short, like two or three letters only, it is hard to find space to tap and drag the bar up or down. A more generous vertical tap-and-drag region, or handles, or up/down arrows, would be nice on a phone.
That was fun. Wasn't able to get the hints, it just said "reveal word". But I got most of them. Be aware that swiping can trigger page back on phone browsers
I agree - I will add a mute/unmute option. Right now the results are only shown for registered players. Given that most people do not sign up, then I think it would make sense to make a scoreboard for all players.
During yesterday Word Slicer got quite good traffic due to getting on the first page of Hacker News again. The post got back on the first page with it hit 50 points.
I am tracking two goals: "Start game" and "Complete Game". This is what I got yesterday:
Goal: Start game
Returning visitors conversion rate is 10.98% ,
New visitors conversion rate is 6.79%
Goal: Complete game:
Returning visitors conversion rate is 8.54% ,
New visitors conversion rate is 4.29%
Total disaster or quite ok? Let me know what you think. Thanks!
Very good point about the accessibility perspective regarding font size and contrast. I will also look into if the font should be replaced with a more readable one.
iPhone 15 Pro here and for me (old, eyesight finally starting to give up) they are a bit small and the contrast low - difficult to distinguish between the F and P in the middle channel of today's puzzle.
Could maybe do with the vertical bars being about 50% bigger and the letters scaled a bit more than that. Plus a high contrast option (white channels with black letters with white letters in the middle bit? Something like that anyway.)
It was probably looking for "SKI". I think it could benefit from having two dictionaries - one with common words to draw answers from and one with _everything_ to exclude possibilities. (So, generate sliders which allow for `n` words to be created from the small dictionary but zero additional words from the large dictionary.)
Hi. I worked quite a lot on the dictionary part when designing the game. What I came up with was to only use common nouns, like "river," verbs, like "dance," or adjectives, like "bright." Also all words are in their base or dictionary forms, like "happy" instead of "happier".
Great to hear. There is a Daily Slicer every day, and then there are "free to play" games that you can play as many as you want :-) Three levels of difficulty for the "free plays": 3, 4 and 5 letters.
Thank you very much. One of the things I am considering is how to use the screen real estate better. Right now I prefer the experience when the game is installed on the home screen of the phone as a progressive web app. Perhaps the better option is to develop an iOS and Android app. Any thoughts on that?
Glad you liked it. When you get a hang of it, then it becomes a bit easier. I have made experiments to figure out to make it not too easy and not too hard - not sure if I succeeded :-)
This looks as fun as the game you replied to but the mobile usability is nowhere near as good. Smaller letters, the scroll is not as satisfying (maybe because it does not feel anywhere as accurate)
Still both are very fun games, also you don't need to have a novel idea for it to be a worthwhile idea.
I agree on the mobile experience in a browser is not too good. As a PWA it is much better. I am considering building a mobile app, but want to see if people like the game before I put in the effort :-)
That is right. Hacker News is driving a lot of people to Word Slicer the last couple of days. Now the real test is if people are coming back again. Fingers crossed.
- The difficulty felt challenging yet doable
- The UI looks polished
- I agree with others that the word-forming UX could be improved; maybe by typing letters, or maybe by more generous drag behavior