Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175972

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

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.

I've been developing Gram Jam for the last two years with the goal of creating a more challenging word game while learning interactive web design. This week I launched the user account feature which allows user data backup and account sync. I have also spent a _ton_ of time tweaking all the animations and UI flourishes, so I hope you enjoy it!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39604232

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

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

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.

My game for those interested: https://gramjam.app

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.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33140273

Points: 4

# Comments: 1