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I posted Bracket City to HN on February 24th and the game went live yesterday on The Atlantic (!) The game will stay free to play (and not require logging in).

• ehmorris 1y ago
  Congrats!
• jsnell 1y ago
  That's amazing, congrats!
• InitialLastName 1y ago
  Congrats! My only feedback is that it's irritating to be counted "wrong" for naming a correct answer whose clue hasn't been simplified completely yet.
  • jermaustin1 1y ago
    I agree. Thankfully that happened to me in the tutorial, so I went into the real game understanding that.
  • iamjackg 1y ago
    Yeah, this one is tough. I tried doing today's puzzle and I immediately knew the full solution, so I guess the designer's dilemma is whether or not to allow Wheel of Fortune-style "I would like to give the full answer", and if so how to score it. Did you do as much "work" as somebody who solved all the puzzles? I would argue not, so it should probably be scored less, but how much?
  • tallytarik 1y ago
    I see that as the core point of the game! Would it be a whole lot of fun to complete the game in one guess? On the other hand I like when I can ‘skip ahead’ and then try to reverse engineer a trickier inside clue.
    • unethical_ban 1y ago
      The instructions say one can solve any clue, and I could take that to mean any bracketed phrase. If they say "highlighted clue" it may help.
    • bigstrat2003 1y ago
      > Would it be a whole lot of fun to complete the game in one guess? I would say yes. It would feel great, like you are outsmarting the game. Kind of like when you discover a good build in an RPG that helps you get ahead - even though it's often intended by the designer, you feel like you pulled a fast one on the game and it feels awesome.
      • wyldfire 1y ago
        If you look at it instead like a 1D version of a crossword puzzle, then it's not skipping to the end so much as just filling out one of the other words. I see it as a UI limitation that you can't fill it in (how would you show it?). But it's fine as is, I'll just use it to help me solve the adjacent ones.
      • BoiledCabbage 1y ago
        Except the games isn't linear. The goal is to answer all of the clues without getting any wrong. Answering one clue doesn't do that.
        • hiccuphippo 1y ago
          Isn't the goal to get the final answer? I think it should be allowed. Similar to not using all the available attempts at wordle or finding a secret passage to the end in a videogame.
  • RyanOD 1y ago
    I completely agree with this. Edit: And congratulations!
  • bigstrat2003 1y ago
    I would add that the answer detection logic should probably get beefed up a bit as well. When I solved today's puzzle, it counted "race car" as a wrong answer when it expected "racecar". It should accept both forms of a compound word (also "racecar" isn't a word but that's more minor).
    • computerfriend 1y ago
      But "race car" with a space isn't a palindrome.
      • schoen 1y ago
        It wouldn't be accepted by a palindrome-detecting function but it would generally be accepted by puzzle-solving conventions (e.g. for crosswords), which normally ignore spaces.
      • chaboud 1y ago
        There's an ambiguity here between palindromic words and palindromic sentences (where punctuation and spacing are non-breaking): "Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog" or "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama" though it seems that all of the answers (in the one tutorial and one round that I played) are single words, often slid in as character insertions. Just go light on the spacebar, apparently.
        • waltbosz 1y ago
          You wouldn't happen to be a fan of Jon Agee ?
      • jayknight 1y ago
        It seems that every answer is a single word. I don't think it says that anywhere, but the few I've done seem to be that way.
        • secabeen 1y ago
          There is no space bar on the on-screen keyboard on mobile, so it's not possible to type multiple words as well.
  • SamBam 1y ago
    I had the same thought, but agree with others that it's the core part of the game. I've played about a dozen of these now, and very often I can see what one of the big outer clues is way before I've worked out the inner clues. If I just solve the big outer clue, the game is done in 20 seconds or so, and I'm not sure I'd keep coming back. Rather, the challenge is to use what I've understood to work out the inner clues. This is tricky because I've got to keep more in my head at the same time, Towers of Hanoi-style. Or I sometimes write it out. I have my notes in an open notepad from yesterday, so I can reproduce my thinking without spoiling today's: [scold, with "at"]: hmmm, no idea. [something golfers' apparently [scold, with "at"]]: not sure... ["there[something golfers' apparently [scold, with "at"]]]: Ah, ok, got it: [there[X]] has to be "therefore." So I see [something golfers' apparently [X]] is going to be "fore." So if "fore" = "Something golfers apparently [X]" and X is [scold, with "at"], I can see that innermost one must be "yell."
    • 4rt 1y ago
      i think they're saying it shouldn't be counted as a fail, rather than it should be accepted as an answer at that point. if not i agree with you. it'd be nice if it flashed green or something around the entire set of brackets but made you still answer all the sub-clues though.
      • echelon 1y ago
        Eat it and make the user think it's a failure, but don't count it negatively towards the score. "If you answer early, we'll ignore your guess without letting you on."
        • PebblesRox 1y ago
          Or maybe it could give some kind of extra credit for guessing a clue early. Or it could accept it, but still make you guess the interior clues, but when you get to the one, you already guessed, it shows it as already solved.
      • zem 1y ago
        yeah, it would be really nice if it turned the brackets around the word you guessed green and then filled it in automatically once the subclues were solved
  • kkukshtel 1y ago
    100% this. I appreciate the puzzle of each individual clue, but I feel like it should be a valid answer if I guess a correct "outer" clue even if I haven't gotten all of its relevant inner answers.
  • tallanvor 1y ago
    Yeah, tried it for the first time and that limitation was enough that I don't expect to play it again. I mean, it's a choice the game designer has a right to make, but it makes it much less interesting for me if I can't try to work through and skip answers.
  • thebruce87m 1y ago
    Yep. Wrong for forgetting to spell in American English, wrong for plural vs singular and wrong for guessing the right word too early are annoying.
• darrenf 1y ago
  C["have you tried turning it off and __ again?"]grats! [stinger]n p[bet against an outcome]ing it daily and really en[ode to ___]ing it.
  • io84 1y ago
    n[frozen water]!
• mk_stjames 1y ago
  My constructive crit: I'd really like to be able to just answer the puzzle without answering any of the intermediate stages. It is a much more challenging feat to just hold it all in your head and then type out the one long answer than to answer the individual stages. It promotes some real mental modelling skills that way. The game, played as-is, is almost no challenge at all. It just feels like busywork.
  • NobodyNada 1y ago
    As soon as I saw "second rock from the", I knew the top-level answer was going to be "Venus". At first I felt frustrated that it wouldn't let me enter the solution, but if it had accepted that then I would have missed out on the rest of the puzzle. In retrospect, I felt like having to work backwards from "Venus" and "sun" to figure out the lower-level clues was much more interesting then if it had just let me skip those clues.
    • drilbo 1y ago
      exactly this! a whole lot of people above suggesting stripping away all the fun
  • djmips 1y ago
    Consider the challenge being: how to get from here to there.
• noman-land 1y ago
  Excellent email address.
• fidotron 1y ago
  Congratulations on a great product and getting it distributed like that! Did they take your product as is in those two weeks or rebuild it?
• adamesque 1y ago
  Fantastic game, and really enjoyed the thought you put into "submit-gate" and entertaining ideas from the peanut gallery.
• p3rls 1y ago
  Very cool how some websites are still hunting for actual fun content and rewarding creators even in the middle of the internet's enshittification there are still a few bright spots
• NobodyNada 1y ago
  That's awesome, congrats! I had a lot of fun solving today's puzzle. One minor bit of feedback/request: maybe I'm too spoiled by code editors, but it would be nice to have a visual aid for identifying matching brackets -- maybe colorizing matching pairs ("rainbow brackets"), and/or a click-to-highlight feature that highlights the entire contents of a pair of braces for you. I felt like I was spending a lot of time trying to count bracket pairs, which made it hard to keep track of where I was in the puzzle and was less interesting than trying to solve the wordplay.
  • smw 1y ago
    Yes! Please!
  • linsomniac 1y ago
    Agreed about the matching brackets, I had sent that suggestion to mayor@ a couple weeks ago, so maybe once this craziness settles down...
  • Eric_WVGG 1y ago
    If the game never has more than three nested levels, you could use [square], then {curly}, then <angle> brakest. You could even do a fourth level with (parenthetical) brackets, but that would mean you couldn't use parenthesis in clues.
    • esperent 1y ago
      I think colors, or even shades of grey for accessibility, would be better for non-coders. Maybe even just put the current bracket in bold.
      • brookst 1y ago
        Side note: colors are fine for accessibility, as long as you think in HSL space and vary at least two of those dimensions. As a red/green colorblind person, bright red versus dark green is fine, as is pink versus bright saturated green. No need to go grey.
  • 1y ago
• anon1094 1y ago
  Congratulations! So glad to hear this.
• rileytg 1y ago
  big fan since you posted! I agree with the feedback on matching brackets. Additionally the fake keyboard is driving me nuts… I get a lot of errors from phat fingering it when my hands are conditioned to use the native ios keyboard. NYT web games had/have similar issues…
  • neilcj 1y ago
    Switching to desktop version of the site seems to work in all the major mobile browsers!
• roughly 1y ago
  Congrats! Great game - I did todays, and then immediately did them for the last week - it's really fun, tricky, and gives that nice little dopamine hit when you untangle the answer. Contra several other people here, I also like that you _can't_ skip ahead - yes, I know that's probably "Venus", which is a good clue for working back up to the clues I _can't_ figure out. It's the journey, not the destination.
• JoshTriplett 1y ago
  Were the terms confidential? If not, would you be willing to share what kinds of terms a deal like this has? (If you have any doubt whatsoever about whether the terms are confidential, assume they are, and don't put anything at risk.)
  • martyvis 1y ago
    Josh Wardle sold Wordle to the New York Times for at least a million. https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911274/wordle-new-york-times-free-word-game-acquisition https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911274/wordle-new-york-...
    • serial_dev 1y ago
      Wordle was extremely popular even before NYT bought it. I doubt the terms would be similar
• felideon 1y ago
  Congrats! Some feedback, if you're taking any: - Without the tutorial, it's confusing that you're not supposed to click and you're supposed to start typing. I wonder if placing the text box at the top would make that more clear. - Some of the clues are confusing due to inconsistent punctuation. For example: [to ___fish, to lure someone in using a fake internet persona] = cat [do this or cut bait] = fish [taking a pay one is a bummer] = cut [rocks when added to soda will NOT cause your stomach to explode] = pop The first line uses a comma, the second line uses "or", the third and fourth lines don't have any punctuation at all, so the sentences make no sense.
  • thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > Some of the clues are confusing due to inconsistent punctuation. > The first line uses a comma, the second line uses "or", the third and fourth lines don't have any punctuation at all, so the sentences make no sense. ... There is no inconsistency there. The 'or' and the comma in lines 1 and 2 are not parallel to each other; they're doing different things. Neither could be replaced by the other without changing the meaning of the clue. Similarly, in line three, nothing in it could be replaced by a comma or by a disjunction. (But, and I want to emphasize this, line 2 doesn't even contain a disjunction; you appear to have misunderstood all of the clues.) Line four is a bit different in that it contains a grammatical mistake. It should say [rocks that when added to soda will NOT cause your stomach to explode]. Other than that... it's a fourth style of clue. It isn't comparable to the other three, and there's still no inconsistency. What do you imagine would add "consistency" to these clues? #s 1, 2, and 4 could be unified like so: [to ____fish, to lure someone in using a fake internet persona] [____ or cut bait, common idiom] [____ rocks, rocks that when added to soda will NOT cause your stomach to explode] But clue 3 can't be rendered in this style; the closest you can come is [pay ____, taking one of these is a bummer], and the parenthetical isn't really the same as it is for the other three.
    • felideon 1y ago
      Good points. I think clue 3 is weird because what is a "pay one"? You can't take a "pay one", but I get how to read it now---it's like an anaphor for the word. But yes, for consistency a blank space would have worked: [taking a pay ____ is a bummer] I think my confusion with clue 2 was that I had never heard of the idiom "[to] fish or cut bait" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_or_cut_bait https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_or_cut_bait
• comex 1y ago
  Some feedback: On mobile, why is there a custom keyboard? I found it pretty annoying. I kept getting missed taps, and at least one wrong guess due to a typo I didn’t catch before. It doesn’t seem like the system keyboard’s spellchecking would interfere with the puzzle, so why not just use it? Is it an issue with layout consistency? Otherwise I quite liked the puzzle.
  • BoiledCabbage 1y ago
    Not having a 'space' button was helpful for me in getting going without the tutorial.
  • kkukshtel 1y ago
    I also find the keyboard so terrible!
  • ericmcer 1y ago
    Yeh use native inputs unless you absolutely need a custom one.
  • jonwinstanley 1y ago
    These kind of games rely on custom keyboards. Using the native control would be a lot more difficult.
  • kfajdsl 1y ago
    Same feedback from me, puzzle was great but the custom keyboard is really hard to use, seems to misplace clicks a lot and it has no haptic feedback
• aequitas 1y ago
  Congrats. I missed the HN post, but I found your game through https://lemmy.zip/c/dailygames https://lemmy.zip/c/dailygames. Glad to hear you will still be making the puzzles yourselves. There is one point of feedback and it's that I would like to have a native keyboard on iOS instead of a virtual one. For the rest this game is great.
• Sardtok 1y ago
  That's a fun little puzzle. I realize it might be easier to write a puzzle than solve one. Writing them seems quite hard at first, but you have the solution and can choose words to break into clues, and from there do the same again until you have a properly complex puzzle. Congratulations on getting it picked up by the Atlantic.
• mperham 1y ago
  It's quite fun and interesting. Well done!
• purple-leafy 1y ago
  Hey congratulations! Did you approach Atlantic, or did they approach you? I’ve had a word game in-mind for years, and several attempts to implement it. It’s a tricky one but I’ll crack it one day :) My plan is to be acquired by a news company. So, how did you go about this? I have some ideas myself
  • no_wizard 1y ago
    >My plan is to be acquired by a news company. I feel like this is going about it the wrong way. This puzzle game licensed by The Atlantic for example, was made because they wanted to provide a fun game experience for their patrons. With games, the best games come from an organic experience. Its almost worse to have a preset plan. Not to mention, making a game is work - you have to have approachability, rules think through alot of scenarios even for "simple" games to make sure things make sense etc - and if you haven't even done it before I highly suggest you actually try and make a game first
    • purple-leafy 1y ago
      Thanks for your comment, I’ve toyed with this game idea for about 7 years, no preset plan from the get-go, but within the last year see an opportunity with aligning with a news site. But I had all the game logic and flow mapped out long before I thought about platform. Yes games are tough to make, I’ve made a few so far and it’s always a struggle
• adamc 1y ago
  That's fantastic and congratulations!