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Show HN: I've built a words game based on binary search
- another-dave 3mo agothis feels like a fun premise! As feedback, I think I'd enjoy it more with shorter words or more guesses
- captaincrunch 3mo agoI recently did the same (made a daily game) and I am approaching 100k plays since March. https://plot-hole.com https://plot-hole.com - the best thing so far about this app has been the analytics which you can check out here: https://plot-hole.com/daily-analytics-82u4fhrvw https://plot-hole.com/daily-analytics-82u4fhrvw
- captaincrunch 3mo agoJust sitting at 99,736 plays since March!!
- doophus 3mo agoThat's impressive! How have you been attracting players?
- captaincrunch 3mo agoSo far its been direct referrals, which was surprising. I did an initial post on Reddit, and its grown quite a lot since!!
- BrightOne 3mo agoJust played a round, the app claims my play was the 100,000th. I find that hard to believe :)
- captaincrunch 3mo agoYou absoloutly were then! <3
- pimlottc 3mo agoIs this... intentionally growing and shrinking the page size to make the scroll bars animate
- busymom0 3mo agoThat analytics page is crazy detailed!
- apan4 3mo agoyour analytics page is great! How long it took you to get this kind of user base?
- nmstoker 3mo agoLooks good. What's with the submit buttons being put on the left on virtual game keyboards, even though Return/Enter usually on the right on typical keyboards. Wordle also does this.
- captaincrunch 3mo agoI struggled with an input box for the first month on my game, Apple and its crazy UI/UX. I think you made the right choice with the keyboard.
- rfl890 3mo agoHaving the backspace on the left would probably mess up most mobile typers' muscle memory, and since that key is pressed once vs backspace which might be pressed multiple times, it would be a sensible tradeoff to keep submit on the left side
- hidelooktropic 3mo agoI like the idea but it takes a lot of thinking power that I have to come up with actual words that long each time.
- dalmo3 3mo agoI don't get it. I type a word and nothing happens?
- eoanermine 3mo agoThere's "Go" button in lower left corner
- jonwinstanley 3mo agoGo button needs to be a different colour/contrast. I also didn’t see it
- 4chandaily 3mo agoI loaded the puzzle and was presented with an empty 7 character prompt. I tried typing in three different seven-letter words, and each time I hit "GO", I was told the word was "Not in the word list". With no further guidance given, I closed the tab.
- saberience 3mo agoHad a similar issue, several of my words weren't accepted.
- pimlottc 3mo agoSimilar issue, my first guess was "plaudit" and it was not accepted
- ludovicianul 3mo agoThanks for the feedback. I've taken all the 7 letter words from the dictionary and filtered based on different criteria. I'm still thinking what's the easiest automated way to have all valid words, while avoiding offensive, inappropriate ones.
- asalahli 3mo agoI'm genuinely curious, what's the reason for filtering out words based on offensive-ness? I'd imagine it'd be easier to screen the chosen word every day for your criteria and, beyond that, let people type whatever they want as long as what they type is in the dictionary
- ludovicianul 3mo agoYeah. True. Now that you say. Might not be an actual reason. I'll probably load the full dictionary (i have) in the next release.
- ludovicianul 3mo agoNow it allows all 7 letters english words. Apparently 32k words.
- dec0dedab0de 3mo agoI think a practice mode, or letting people play the older games would be good. I can think of a few older people who would love this, but would definitely need a few tries to get the hang of it.
- HikesALot 3mo agoAgree. A practice mode or previous examples.
- vibcdingenjoyer 3mo agoI agree with everyone else who’s commented up to this point. But I’ll say what they’re saying more clearly: it’s a bit too difficult. I love the idea though.
- ludovicianul 3mo agoI've tried with 5 letters and 6. It seemed too easy to guess though.
- xyzsparetimexyz 3mo agoNo archive of previous games?
- ludovicianul 3mo agoPlanned to be implemented in the near future.
- some_random 3mo agoCool in principle, but I had an awful lot of trouble finding 7 letter words on the wordlist.
- chrisweekly 3mo agoWow this is pretty hard. I usually do well with word games, this one not so much. I may have just dodged being nerdsniped if I can just let it go.
- ronbenton 3mo agoThink this needs calibration, it's way too hard!
- snarf21 3mo agoThe high/lo feels unintuitive to me .. Down on a P makes me thing R-Z not A-O. I actually think left/right is a more clear visual and mental model. I like the game and it is quite difficult sometimes to come up with a legal word that gives you an improved anchor point for the binary search.
- ludovicianul 3mo agoThe name of the game is a combination of High and Low. So high would mean right or after the letter and low would mean left or sooner in the alphabet. I’ve added a one time display of the rules before the first game.
- snarf21 3mo agoApologies, I meant that the UI shows the up and down arrows in the blocks in a way that is unintuitive to me.
- SubiculumCode 3mo agoFun game. The concept is good. However: I couldn't find the go button for a while...finally realized it was part of the keyboard...that could be better I don't get the colors on the keys, as intuitively it seems like it should be the available letters in the current position, but they don't change based on the letter spot I would be currently typing in. I wanted to share my result with a friend who loves word games, but there was no share button. Also pasting the link does not come up with a web preview in slack/messengers. It would be nice to be able to go back and play past days. In terms of difficulty,hard but achievable. Might think on a difficulty slider, or a climb (first solve 5 letter, if won, 6, then 7?
- ludovicianul 3mo agoThanks for the feedback. I'll try to incorporate as much as possible. For now it was mainly played by family. :D
- mostly_harmless 3mo ago7 letter words are too long. I'm finding trouble thinking of any.
- GordonS 3mo agoI really like this, it kind of reminds me of "Hangman"! A few ideas, if you don't mind: 1. Have a "normal" mode and "master" mode, where the normal mode has words with maybe 5 letters and the master mode uses 7 letters 2. Have an archive of previous games - kinda sucks that I can't play the old ones! 3. Contrast on the up/down arrows on letters isn't clear enough, at least not for me (colour blind)
- ludovicianul 3mo agoThanks! Archive is in progress. As for the length of the words, I initially though a 5-6-7/esy-medium-hard, but It seemed very easy to guess the 5 letters once you play some games. I'll reconsider.
- rbrodie 3mo agoI love word games and this was pretty fun. One recommendation I have is to have the most recently typed word at the top rather than the bottom, so that it's easy to reference when typing your next word. There could be plenty of reasons against that and I'm no game designer but that's what popped into mind. I'll definitely try more, this is a fun idea!
- mNovak 3mo agoDefinitely agree, I was very confused to see the latest guess (and with the most narrow letter ranges) at the bottom of the list.
- ludovicianul 3mo agoThis is not something I intentionally design that way. I'll consider switching the position. Thanks!
- troyvit 3mo agoI see a lot of people saying 7 letters is too long, but I feel like the additional hints about where to go when you guess wrong helps make up for that. It took me a minute to get what was going on and I wasted a few guesses but I like that it requires a new strategy. I was able to adapt my first go-to wordle words to 7 letters and realized that they should be different because of what you learn from guess to guess. I suck at wordle and got this in like 7 guesses. Is your model to keep it on your site or do you plan to license the game?
- ludovicianul 3mo agoFor now, the plan it's to keep it on the site. But might extend in the future depending if people find it interesting to play regularly.
- SomewhatLikely 3mo agoCool idea. This might be a time where an option to have an alphabetically ordered keyboard would be useful. By the way, I like testing AIs on new games as they aren't in the training data and gpt5.6 sol high thinking was able to get from my second guess result to the correct answer. One letter was already locked and four more were down to a five letterish range. Still impressive as I remember models up until about the second generation of reasoning models really struggling with games like wordle.
- jszymborski 3mo agoVery clever! My main issue with Wordle is that it feels like it's largely a question of chance, but this one feels like there's a lot more strategy involved.
- emaro 3mo agoThere are strategies (especially if you know the word list). Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v68zYyaEmEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v68zYyaEmEA, highly recommended.
- Laurel1234 3mo agoReally cool. Everyone's given feedback about the length and such but mine is about the keyboard: it feels like the high/low/allowed colours should update as you go from slot to slot but they don't so it's pretty useless.
- pimlottc 3mo agoYeah, I don't really understand what it's showing me. If they are based on letter possibilities over the entire word, that's not very useful.
- pimlottc 3mo agoThe "up/down" arrows are a bit confusing, I don't think it's self-evident whether "later in the alphabet" would be considered "higher" or "lower". "left" or "right" might be clearer, at least for English, and it would map directly to the range bar visualizations beneath each letter.
- ludovicianul 3mo agoHigher = right = after, Lower = left = before. Once you play some games, it will become more natural. At least this was the feedback from friends playing the game.
- pimlottc 3mo agoBut why use two different axis (down/up, left/right) for the same thing when you could be consistently just use left/right?
- ludovicianul 3mo agoA combination of visual identity of the game, with the Highs and Lows and helping players visualise with the before and after. I’ve implementarea the letters fading in each position on the keyboard, so that you only see the letters that are valid for that position.
- jasmar 3mo ago[dead]
- pimlottc 3mo agoNot to get a spoiler, but the post-game definition given for today's word (rot13: ybatrfg) uses an obscure secondary verb form instead of the much more common usage...
- mNovak 3mo agoNoticed this as well. And the additional definitions under "explore this word" are all relating to the root word, not the actual form of the answer
- albinn 3mo agoI'm very interested to know why 7 letters was deemed most appropriate, I could not come up with more than 2 words and had to get a dictionary to find. Maybe I've played wordle too much...
- ludovicianul 3mo agoI've tried with 5 letters. After playing some games it was too easy, as it gives you more hints than Wordle on the positioning of the letters. I've also tried 6, but settled on 7 with 5 guesses as it seemed the most balanced.
- laomos 3mo ago[flagged]
- vova_hn2 3mo agoI tried the game on mobile first and couldn't figure out the you are supposed to press "go". On my phone it looked just like all other buttons and was not highlighted in any way. Not sure if the reason is mobile browser or dark theme.
- simonreiff 3mo agoNice game -- a bit more of a challenge than the usual word games, so I appreciated it. I suggest including a little demo before the game starts to showcase how it works because it was slightly unclear how the game would work before the first turn. It also would be really nice to let users choose a difficulty level based on the length of the word. I might consider encapsulating all the numbers of the turns left, or even making it a flexible option that the user can lower in order to increase difficulty. The only other nit I noticed was that the dictionary seems to be returning the secondary meaning for the word today. Overall I really liked this game as it was genuinely different and the hi/lo nature added a very different dimension to the guesswork.
- midaef 3mo agogood game, but very hard find
- bfdm 3mo agoI would ask you to let me type letters in arbitrary boxes (out of order) to I can more easily construct words. It's pretty difficult to juggle the letters without placing them.
- zote 3mo agoGot it on my second guess. Neat game, neat idea. Others have already given feedback that would make this even better, but I’ll repeat this one: being able to play previous puzzles would be really nice.
- ludovicianul 3mo agoI’ve added an archive link in the menu.
- gaoqian2580 3mo agoI guessed five times, but it was still a great experience, thanks
- ludovicianul 3mo agoThanks everyone for the feedback. I've implemented several suggestions from the thread, that tweak the user experience: allow all 7 words list as valid words, better contrast, make Go button more visible, as you type letters, the keyboard will fade out letters which are not possible for that position, fixed share + a few more. Archive + easier mode planned for the next weeks.
- pwheslop 3mo agoThis was really enjoyable! Last week I had the chance to build out a game I’ve been thinking about for a while https://sixfold.pwheslop.com/play https://sixfold.pwheslop.com/play 9 words - 6 categories