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Products that do what I made a daily puzzle game about mixing colors does
While on paternal leave, I wanted to create a game my newborn daughter could eventually play and learn something from. I was heavily inspired by the daily puzzle games I consistently play such as Wordle and Strands. Refractor is a game about connecting colored tiles together to reach all the goals. Use "refractor" tiles to combine two colors together but be careful not to trap yourself in! The game is won when all goals are fulfilled. The tech stack is: Laravel + Inertia, React + TypeScript, and DaisyUI + TailwindCSS. Open to any questions or feedback. Hope you might find it interesting!
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Hi HN, I was inspired by Wordle to make Colorfle, a different take on the genre where the goal is to mix colors together to match the target color within six tries. There were some interesting problems to tackle in making this game, one of them being the difference between mixing digital colors and real-life behavior (in RGB, blue + yellow = grey!). I hope you enjoy it -- any feedback would be much appreciated!
2022 · colorfle.com
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This is the first iteration of a short game I’m making that tries to interactively explain some of my favorite math questions / ideas. My goal is mostly to get the player curious and not necessarily to explain absolutely everything. There were a lot of fun technical parts to building this: - For implementation reasons, it’s much easier if the lines all have integer intersection points with each other. To do this, when a new line is added I “cheat” by rounding intersections to integers and then splitting the old lines at the intersection into new linds (with potentially different slopes)…
2024 · rahulilango.com
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Hello, HN! Figure is a little side project I’ve been working on. Someone described it as Bejeweled meets Wordle. I built the puzzle interface and website in Next.js and React, which was a first for me and overall a great learning experience. The daily puzzle data is queued up in a PostgreSQL table. Another table stores anonymous solve stats. Once a day, a cron job hits a serverless API that promotes the next puzzle as “live” and prompts Next.js to update the prebaked static site with the new data. The game state is managed with Redux and your stats are persisted to localStorage. Framer…
2022 · figure.game
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I’ve been working on a puzzle game for a few years as a side project. The game is based on a small region of tiles in a grid that is mirrored, modified, and mirrored again. It’s based on a novel phenomenon I noticed where, once these mutations happen a few times, the original region can be hard to recognize. You have a feeling there are symmetries in the image, but they are just out of grasp. Going further, if only part of the region is visible, such as mirroring off the edge of the board, it adds to the feeling and it becomes a satisfying puzzle to solve. I originally published this on the…
2024 · hidden-mirrors.com
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2022 · mathler.com
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2025 · color-me-same.franzai.com
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Hi HN, I was late to wordle, so I am also late to making my own version. In Spindle, you rotate words on a grid with the aim of assembling the day’s target word. I enjoy it, so I thought some of you might enjoy it too. From a tech perspective, it’s a very simple Laravel / Livewire app. My happy place in recent years has been Typescript and SvelteKit, so this was a bit of an adjustment, but it allowed me to take advantage of an existing shared hosting server meaning no additional financial outlay. Happy to report a positive experience with PHP and this framework, although I do miss…
2023 · playspindle.com
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Sep 2025 · swapple.fuglede.dk
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This is a game I wrote over the last month and a bit. The effort allocation was pretty different from what I've done in the past. The game design snapped together very quickly: I had the initial idea, played a couple of games on a spreadsheet to get a feel for the idea, and made one change based on those plays. After that everything felt just right through multiple rounds of playtesting. Likewise the puzzle generation is nowhere near as elaborate as in my previous game, fairly simple methods worked well and provided good variety. Instead I ended up spending silly amounts of time on curating…
2024 · huewords.snellman.net
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Forkle (forkle.co.uk) is a daily word game where two thematically linked crosswords occupy the same grid simultaneously. Every tile contains two letters - one belonging to each puzzle - displayed as a diagonal colour split. Where the two puzzles intersect, some tiles share the same letter, giving you a foothold into both crosswords at once. The mechanic has two layers: the shared grid, and the connected themes. Each day's two crosswords are thematically paired around a central idea. For example, a previous puzzle was "Same House, Different Kingdoms" - same home, same humans, entirely…
Apr 2026 · forkle.co.uk
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I created a puzzle game after some recent years of hiatus from game development. It was a puzzle game where you have to assemble a randomized tiles. You can view the preview using eye icon on the top right side. You also can undo your previous step. I created this game using Unity because I am already familiar with it. If you encounter the tiles is not randomized, please try recreate the tile again, I don't exactly know why it's happenning. Thank you
2024 · yunusefendi52.itch.io
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A week ago I launched Tiled Words, my own unique spin on the daily word puzzle genre. Tiled Words merges tile-placing board game mechanics with crosswords. You rotate and rearrange tiles to find clues and rebuild a broken crossword. Every day there's a new themed puzzle for you to solve. The game is web based: the graphics are SVGs, animations are powered by CSS, and Vue/Nuxt are used to power templating, reactivity, and routing. Most of the complex logic lives in TypeScript modules. The whole thing is responsive. It's been a long time in the making. I started the first version in the…
Oct 2025 · tiledwords.com
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Hello! Try out a 3x3 puzzle and click the question mark in the top right for a tutorial. I'd really appreciate any feedback! Thanks
2024 · slidecross.io
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A while ago I discovered three.js, a JavaScript library to manipulate 3D objects. It looked really interesting, but I had no real need for it... To change that I recently challenged myself to make one 3D web game per month with three.js. And I just release game #2, a puzzle game called Cuboid, and you can try it here: https://www.thomasfriday.com/cuboid/ Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback. Thanks!
2023 · thomasfriday.com
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2022 · playlinkr.net
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Hi HN, I made this small game in my spare time. It's quite addictive, I spent a lot of hours playing instead of polishing it. My own highscore is 96,792. Source code is at https://github.com/MikeBellika/tile-game. It's made with react, tailwind, and framer motion. Hope you enjoy!
2024 · bellika.dk
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As a fan of dense New York Times-style crosswords, I challenged myself to create topic-specific puzzles. It turns out that generating crosswords and efficiently placing words is a non-trivial computational problem. I started the project, "Joystick Jargon" combining traditional crossword elements with gaming-related vocabulary. Here's the technical process behind it: 1. Data Source: Used a 3.8 Million Rows Reddit dataset from Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/datasets/webis/tldr-17). 2. Data Filtering: Narrowed down to gaming-related subreddits (r/gaming,…
2024
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Hi everybody. I occasionally make little browser-based games, and this is my latest attempt. It's not quite done, but it's quite playable (note: it does include audio): https://www.omiword.com/ This has been my occasional tinker target for ~5 years now, starting in the early days of Covid. The objective is to drag letter tiles within certain boundaries to spell four common American-English words. It hasn't got ads or anything, it's just supposed to be fun for its own sake. If people happen to like it, I might add an option for folks to make a small, one-time payment to unlock…
2025 · omiword.com
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2015 · github.com
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