I'm continuing to hack on Tiled Words, my daily word puzzle!
After winning the Playlin Player's Choice award I've noticed an uptick in players as well as some people sharing videos on YouTube which has been fun. I've got a few thousand people playing every day.
I just launched user accounts today so user's can now track their progress across devices and share their stats with each other. This ended up being a bigger chunk of work than I expected but I'm really pleased with how it turned out. (Though I launched it 15 minutes ago so I'm holding my breath for bug reports)
I'm fine-tuning my internal puzzle-building now with the goal of letting people use them to make and share their own puzzles soon!
I can't say I'm a regular user but a while ago I stumbled upon another post about tiledwords while a loved one was in the hospital and it was a fun and welcome distraction to solve some of the puzzles together while stuck in an otherwise grim environment.
Thanks for making this and I wish you all the success in the future.
I’m glad Tiled Words could make that hard time a little easier. I hope your loved one has recovered and is doing better now
I love tiled words, I've actually been doing the daily puzzle for a while, have completed over a 100 of them! It's part of my morning routine :)
I'm not sure if it would fit the theme, but sometimes I end up searching what an expression means, or where does it come from. Maybe it would be cool to have a little info box after you discover what the word is. Just an idea! Not sure if it would clutter things, and you can always search it yourself, but something I've been thinking about. I still remember looking up peanut gallery and sand dollar!
Thanks for playing! Congrats on 100 puzzles!
That’s a fun idea. I often stumble across fun facts while making the clues. I’ll think about this more and experiment a bit when I have time!
I've been enjoying Tiled Words! I find myself playing in a weird way, by totally ignoring the clues. I look at the title and try to puzzle out all the answers myself. I don't know if I'm alone in that, but it could be a neat mode to have a setting to hide the clues.
Thanks! I’ve heard that from a few people! Adding that as an official mode is on my road map but there are a few big features ahead of it right now
Thanks for making this. It's totally refreshingly intuitive while doing the practice puzzle!
Just tried it out on my browser. Will be following this.
Also would love to see your workflow you spoke about, on coming up with puzzle ideas and tile arrangements. Cheers!
Thanks for checking it out! I’ll try to share that soon
Congratulations on the award and the user accounts launch! A few thousand daily players as a solo founder is genuinely impressive traction.
Curious about the user-created puzzles feature you're working toward - that's a classic community moat play. Once players can make and share puzzles, your distribution essentially scales with your most engaged users.
I'm building ad-vertly.ai - marketing agents for solo founders. One thing I find fascinating with puzzle/game products is that the word-of-mouth loop is already there (people share scores, show friends), but it rarely gets deliberately amplified. Are you doing anything intentional to capture that organic sharing energy, beyond the stats sharing you just built?
Thanks
Since the beginning I’ve allowed sharing your daily score. I have thought about extending that (leaderboards, etc.)
Do you have other ideas to amplify it?
this is so cool, i liked the musical instruments one!
would be super interested to hear more about the puzzle-making process too, is it fully automated with AI at this point or is there still a good amount of manual work and fine-tuning involved?
bookmarked already, can't wait to play tomorrow again
Thanks!
It’s a lot of manual work right now. I don’t use AI in the process. I think it could help with some of the brainstorming but I kind of like the human connection of making a puzzle and having people solve it.
Here’s the basic process.
My wife and I do this part together:
- Think of a theme
- Think of words related to that theme, ideally with a second meaning
- Think of clues for those words
Once we have a good set of clues I plug them into a program I wrote to make crosswords.
The program isn’t that smart. It tries making random crosswords. I run it 1500 times and then sort the results to get the best ones. This brute force approach works pretty well for how simple it is.
I pick the crossword I want and then I use another tool to split up and rearrange the tiles. This step could probably be automated but there’s some finicky logic to the best way to split up the tiles and it goes pretty fast manually.
I’ve been meaning to make a video of the process! I’ll share it here when I do
Very nice, the movement and snapping of the tiles is very nicely done, enjoyed today's puzzle!
Haha I spent a looong time perfecting that so I’m glad it’s appreciated!
That's a very fun puzzle, nice work! I'll be telling my friends.
Thanks!
I just tried this out for the first time and really enjoyed it!
Thanks for playing! There’s a new puzzle every day ;)
Oh wow. This seems like it was a lot of work. Bookmarked and installed!
Haha yeah it’s been a labor of love!
The design and dev took a while but building the has been the most time consuming at this point. My wife and I make the puzzles together.
We’re getting close to 6 months of daily, hand crafted puzzles!
I play this every day with my friend group :)
Ahh that makes me happy to hear! I love when folks play with friends of family
It's fun, impressed by how polished it is.
Thanks!
Have played it a few times, it's really good
Thanks!
This is going on my daily puzzle list!
Awesome, thanks!
How did you manage to do the animations so nicely? What is the tech stack?
The animations are all CSS animations. The tiles and grid are SVGs. No libraries or anything there. All vanilla, written by hand.
I’d like to write up some blog posts about this. Are there specific animations you’re interested in?
The overall tech stack is Vue and Nuxt. I just added user accounts and auth using Supabase.
The tile connection border animation is really cool, is it something special with clip path or something?
The main trick there is animating the stroke on a copy of the tile: https://css-tricks.com/svg-line-animation-works/
I also animate the size and color of the stroke and scale and translate the entire tile
I would also love to read about your puzzle creation process :)
This is great!
Thanks!