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). Also, I'm still making all the puzzles!
HN provided the first real infusion of players that weren't my mom's friends. So thanks everyone.
FWIW The Atlantic's team is amazing and got this live exactly 2 weeks from when we signed the deal.
This happened quick and I feel very lucky. The HN community of solvers keeps me honest with much helpful technical and editorial feedback. I love it all -- here or at mayor@bracket.city
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.
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.
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.
Nice work - congratulations! ...and, yes - I had to paste the text of today's game into vi so I could use the bracket matching to untangle the clues... :)
Also, I would make it more obvious which clues are eligible for solving at the moment rather than penalizing us for not being able to discern which ones are.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
- 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.
> 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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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…
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.
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
The game will stay free to play (and not require logging in). Also, I'm still making all the puzzles!
HN provided the first real infusion of players that weren't my mom's friends. So thanks everyone.
FWIW The Atlantic's team is amazing and got this live exactly 2 weeks from when we signed the deal.
This happened quick and I feel very lucky. The HN community of solvers keeps me honest with much helpful technical and editorial feedback. I love it all -- here or at mayor@bracket.city
T[Tom who befriended a volleyball] HN
PS my original post! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43160542