Checked out your puzzles! Very cool. I'm also building a collection of daily puzzles (https://gramjam.app). Would be interested in chatting about your experience with marketing and outreach!
Since getting laid off in Feb, I've been spending my free time polishing up my word game Gram Jam (https://gramjam.app).
I finally finished the (monumental) Svelte 4 -> 5 migration that had been getting dusty for the last year. This unlocked a higher performance ceiling for me to polish my animations and UX. Now I'm revamping my onboarding experience and taking another crack at marketing and promoting it. Last year, I was focusing on setting it up as a PWA and integrating Sentry monitoring and Stripe integration. All important stuff but not what got me excited about the process.
I've been pretty tied up with maintenance and admin work, and haven't gotten a chance to work on the actual game design in a while, so I'm very excited to return to that part of the project soon. I have ideas for new puzzles and modes spilling out of my ears and I feel like with LLMs my prototyping can finally keep up with my brain, now that I have a robust foundation for the game architecture.
Like others in the comments, I also used my pandemic free time to build a game. building a prototype took me a long weekend, but the long tail of adding state management, mobile responsiveness and animations etc has dwarfed the initial development time.
It quickly went from a fun playground for experimenting with mechanics to a long term project. It's been a great learning experience, and still a lot of fun to work on. But the pure creative joy of concepting and building has been supplanted with the tedium of maintenance and bug fixing.
Fun premise! I will note that the dictionary is not as complete as I might hope—it didn’t recognize “tasers,” and there was one other word it rejected that I thought it would get (forgot what it was though). Still, a fun game!
You'll find a lot of variation between dictionaries. I was surprised to discover that curating the dictionary is one of the hardest aspects of building a word game. People have a lot of opinions on what should or should not be included, I've spent a lot of time manually filtering out profane and questionable words. Another interesting constraint of this particular game is that unlike Scrabble there's a lot of accidental word discovery, which can create a poor user experience if a bunch of obscure words clear and ruin a player's intended word.
P.S. I will probably add tasers after you flagged it
I played this for hours last night, I'm going to need to block it :) Set myself a target of 2048 for nostalgic reasons, turns out it takes a long time (for me anyway).
You're right about the dictionary, actually the whole time I kept wondering about how annoying it must have been to choose a dictionary for this game. Even though not accidentally making non-obscure words without noticing is part of the challenge, accidentally making obscure words is annoying!
Maybe I just don't know enough words - but looking through my game log, I was annoyed by "cony", "smit", "huic", "yipe", "nome", "torii", "agon", "mairs", "imido" and "sial", some of which don't display a definition when you click them, but all of which appear in all the scrabble dictionaries referenced on the website you just linked. Meanwhile I was sad to discover vape is so far only in one scrabble dictionary :) And annoyed to discover "oxalic", which is also in all the dictionaries on that site, was not accepted.
I guess there's a spectrum between "advanced scrabble player level vocabulary" and "fun word game", because I imagine (and suspect you have probably had feedback along these lines) _not_ allowing a word which is obscure but still unambiguously used in the modern era would be worse UX overall - the sort that's more likely to make you rage-quit.
I can see why you'd try to get a bit of wordle-esque shareability out of the daily mode even though I like the classic mode more myself. But I think the tutorial popup isn't as comprehensive as it needs to be for someone's first game to be fun. The first time I clicked the link I did an abysmal job at the daily challenge, I think it wasn't obvious that swaps didn't need to be neighbouring like the given example. Something that might be better is to make an interactive tutorial for first-time visitors - come up with a 5x5 board that is quickly solved and demonstrates several strategies and then walk the player through clearing it. I also think the help popup being one click away would be useful.
I would also have liked the help popup to let me know that progress is saved if you close the page, I ended up checking in an incognito window because I had no time to keep playing but wanted to come back and try to reach the target I'd set myself another time!
Anyway - criticism and suggestions aside - well done, it is a fun game and concept!
I started developing Gram Jam several months ago as an educational exercise in web and game design/development. I had originally hoped to ride the coattails of all the other Wordle-likes that were popping up and then drop the project when I got bored of it like my countless other side projects. But I had so much fun working with Svelte and engaging with players that I developed it out into a fully-fledged game, with a leaderboard and curated puzzles.
This week I launched Gram Jam Daily, a new puzzle mode that challenges you to clear a 6x6 board in as few swaps as you can. Check it out and give me your feedback.
