Hawker News

Show HN: Wordminos – Crosswords Meet Dominos

wordminos.com

22 pointsby dyarosla9 comments

I built a daily word game in 12 days.

The base mechanic only took an hour. Getting it to the finish line took the rest.

The work was in iteration: design, polish, juice, character. Taste, for now, is still relevant.

Enjoy!

blobdole[2 comments hidden]
Wowza... I am so bad at this. lol

One thing I would say is that when there is a "done" or a "next" button, it took me a sec to see it as a button because the actual button color was too close to white on my monitor. So I thought it was a click anywhere kinda "done".

dyarosla[hidden]
Thanks for the feedback! Maybe I should add another touch animation like the one that teaches you about the levels menu chevron. Or just add some light glows every so often
RestartKernel[2 comments hidden]
This barely feels like a Web game. Well done, especially in 12 days. What was your workflow like? How much use could you get out of LLMs past the basic mechanics (if at all)?
dyarosla[hidden]
Thanks!

Webgames have really evolved far and away past what you may imagine them being able to support

This was actually my first entirely agent-coded, no code read game i made (in 20yrs of coding)

The timeline is here: https://wordminos.com/making-of/timeline.html

My main contributions were the polish, design, character, packaging ideas

dyarosla[hidden]
I also compiled the full timeline of development, which you can browse here: https://wordminos.com/making-of/timeline.html
roldie[2 comments hidden]
Great work, was fun to play!
dyarosla[hidden]
Thanks! It took a lot of tuning!
Bekamakhara[2 comments hidden]
which bit of polish changed how people reacted the most?
dyarosla[hidden]
I think it's still to be seen in the long run but so far two main ones come to mind

- Adding a mascot(s) helped immensely for creating an identity / making it not another puzzler

- Tuning the puzzle generation constraints: how frequent 2-,3-,4-,5- size pieces are, how many shared colors, how colored markers are laid out relative to one another in the board, all helped tune the puzzles from not being outlandishly difficult or mundanely boring.