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Very nice game! I'm very surprised that (IIUC) you say you managed to automate the generation of such lively fills. I've gotten words such as SIGMA and ANGST in

Very nice game! I'm very surprised that (IIUC) you say you managed to automate the generation of such lively fills. I've gotten words such as SIGMA and ANGST in helpful and surprising positions. On the other hand, automation might explain how I got one grid involving BHAJI (a food I'm not familiar with — I thought maybe you expected it to be familiar to your readers, but now I suspect it was put in by an uncaring computer). The word list knows BHAJI but not KEFIR. I also got a grid involving TEATS, which doesn't pass the breakfast test. That made the grid somewhat unfair: I've internalized that I can prune search branches involving e.g. STOAS in favor of STOAT, and I expect to be able to prune branches involving e.g. PENIS in favor of PERIL. If it turns out that the only viable solution depends on exploring one of those seemingly-signposted-as-prunable branches, well, that's frustrating. So you may want to take another pass over the word list. Kudos on a very well-crafted game! Again, it's really impressive that you managed to create so many rewarding puzzles — and even more so (basically incredible) that you managed to come up with an algorithm to auto-generate them!

jsnell 2y ago
Thanks! It's just the word layout that's automated. The word list (about 4k words) is entirely hand-curated. I had some tooling to make it easier, but every word was selected by me rather than automation. But obviously it's impossible for any single person to be propely calibrated, mistakes can happen, and I'm not a native speaker so there are some odd blind spots in my vocabulary. "Bhaji" was a word I personally thought was fairly common. If I had to name three Indian dishes, it'd be one of the three. But it might be too regional; when it was brought up in a playtest group, a person from UK thought it was basically in daily use while continental Europeans insisted they had never heard of it. So it'll probably go the next time I revisit the word list. Re: "breakfast test", I'd not heard it phrased that way before, but immediately know what you mean :) My intended policy was no slurs, genitals, or sexual violence, and no vulgar words for bodily functions or body parts. This doesn't match the classic exclusion list exactly, but is at least similar in spirit. I expected "teats" to be fine, since to my mind it's only used for animals and human constructs (like baby bottles), not humans. But removing borderline words is cheap, offending some players is expensive :) Note that the game does make a distinction between words that are accepted and words that can appear in puzzles. I mostly move words from the latter to the former rather than remove them entirely, so if you go probing for controversial words, you might find a handful of other examples. But the intent is definitely for there to be a "voice" in the word selection, such that entire categories of words are predictably in or predictably out in a way that the player can get an intuition for. I'll definitely make another pass once I've internalized the player expectations better.
- quuxplusone 2y ago
  Re "bhaji," IIUC from Google, it's a kind of fritter. In American Indian cuisine fritters would be "pakora," and we're also big on "samosas." Re the two word lists — sure, a "legal" word list and a "target" word list, like Wordle. (I enjoy how Huewords manages to combine mechanics from Wordle, crosswords, and sudoku!) But I imagine that the larger your "legal" word list gets, the more difficult it is to generate a puzzle that has only one solution, right?
- quuxplusone 2y ago
  Another wordlist surprise and two UI suggestions. My mother got a puzzle containing HAVES (as in the opposite of "have-nots," I guess!). I think that's not a word; at least it shouldn't be in the answer wordlist. My wife once clicked "Skip" basically by accident — thinking that it would skip to the next square, or word, or something — and found that what it means is "Skip to the next puzzle," with (AFAIK) no way to get back your progress on the puzzle you just skipped. Which was disconcerting. But that mistake happens only once per player... unless they happen to fat-finger "Skip" when they meant "Hint", I guess! Maybe "Skip" should pop up a modal dialog, both explaining what it's proposing to do ("Give up and skip to the next puzzle? Yes / No") and also giving the player a fatter target for their next tap in case they tapped "Skip" by accident. Another thing I've noticed myself having trouble with is when a group of letters contains duplicates: if the group is like "LLSS" and I want to fill them all in quickly, I find it most natural to double-tap "L" then double-tap "S", as opposed to tapping the first "L", the second "L", the first "S", the second "S". Right now, double-tapping doesn't work; it will put the first "L" in the first cell, then undo that and put the first "L" into the second cell instead. I think it should be able to figure out what I mean. Similarly, if I've tapped the first "L" and the second "S" to fill the first two cells, and then for the third cell I tap the first "L" again, I think it should be smart enough to act as if I'd tapped the second "L". Because obviously I don't actually care which of the two "L"s fills that cell — equal letters are fungible as far as the player is concerned. Oh, and it occurred to me to wonder: Is it possible by random chance that one of the letter-groups displayed at the bottom of the puzzle will happen to spell out something vulgar? (If you bother thinking about that issue at all, then I think you could address it by blacklisting certain letter-groups, i.e. shipping a blacklist of anagrams (or even partial anagrams) of vulgar words, instead of a list of vulgar words itself. Or if you sort each letter-group as "consonants first, then vowels," it probably never visibly forms a word.)

jsnell 2y ago

Thanks! It's just the word layout that's automated. The word list (about 4k words) is entirely hand-curated. I had some tooling to make it easier, but every word was selected by me rather than automation. But obviously it's impossible for any single person to be propely calibrated, mistakes can happen, and I'm not a native speaker so there are some odd blind spots in my vocabulary. "Bhaji" was a word I personally thought was fairly common. If I had to name three Indian dishes, it'd be one of the three. But it might be too regional; when it was brought up in a playtest group, a person from UK thought it was basically in daily use while continental Europeans insisted they had never heard of it. So it'll probably go the next time I revisit the word list. Re: "breakfast test", I'd not heard it phrased that way before, but immediately know what you mean :) My intended policy was no slurs, genitals, or sexual violence, and no vulgar words for bodily functions or body parts. This doesn't match the classic exclusion list exactly, but is at least similar in spirit. I expected "teats" to be fine, since to my mind it's only used for animals and human constructs (like baby bottles), not humans. But removing borderline words is cheap, offending some players is expensive :) Note that the game does make a distinction between words that are accepted and words that can appear in puzzles. I mostly move words from the latter to the former rather than remove them entirely, so if you go probing for controversial words, you might find a handful of other examples. But the intent is definitely for there to be a "voice" in the word selection, such that entire categories of words are predictably in or predictably out in a way that the player can get an intuition for. I'll definitely make another pass once I've internalized the player expectations better.

quuxplusone 2y ago
Re "bhaji," IIUC from Google, it's a kind of fritter. In American Indian cuisine fritters would be "pakora," and we're also big on "samosas." Re the two word lists — sure, a "legal" word list and a "target" word list, like Wordle. (I enjoy how Huewords manages to combine mechanics from Wordle, crosswords, and sudoku!) But I imagine that the larger your "legal" word list gets, the more difficult it is to generate a puzzle that has only one solution, right?
quuxplusone 2y ago
Another wordlist surprise and two UI suggestions. My mother got a puzzle containing HAVES (as in the opposite of "have-nots," I guess!). I think that's not a word; at least it shouldn't be in the answer wordlist. My wife once clicked "Skip" basically by accident — thinking that it would skip to the next square, or word, or something — and found that what it means is "Skip to the next puzzle," with (AFAIK) no way to get back your progress on the puzzle you just skipped. Which was disconcerting. But that mistake happens only once per player... unless they happen to fat-finger "Skip" when they meant "Hint", I guess! Maybe "Skip" should pop up a modal dialog, both explaining what it's proposing to do ("Give up and skip to the next puzzle? Yes / No") and also giving the player a fatter target for their next tap in case they tapped "Skip" by accident. Another thing I've noticed myself having trouble with is when a group of letters contains duplicates: if the group is like "LLSS" and I want to fill them all in quickly, I find it most natural to double-tap "L" then double-tap "S", as opposed to tapping the first "L", the second "L", the first "S", the second "S". Right now, double-tapping doesn't work; it will put the first "L" in the first cell, then undo that and put the first "L" into the second cell instead. I think it should be able to figure out what I mean. Similarly, if I've tapped the first "L" and the second "S" to fill the first two cells, and then for the third cell I tap the first "L" again, I think it should be smart enough to act as if I'd tapped the second "L". Because obviously I don't actually care which of the two "L"s fills that cell — equal letters are fungible as far as the player is concerned. Oh, and it occurred to me to wonder: Is it possible by random chance that one of the letter-groups displayed at the bottom of the puzzle will happen to spell out something vulgar? (If you bother thinking about that issue at all, then I think you could address it by blacklisting certain letter-groups, i.e. shipping a blacklist of anagrams (or even partial anagrams) of vulgar words, instead of a list of vulgar words itself. Or if you sort each letter-group as "consonants first, then vowels," it probably never visibly forms a word.)