My wife and I just finished our morning Tiled Words and Bracket City. It's become part of our morning routine. Thanks for it, it's a lot of fun!

That’s awesome, thanks!

Bracket City is great! Definitely one of my favorites

Than you for Tiled Words. It quickly became a morning ritual to complete the daily puzzle. I wish there were more mobile games that are not obnoxious. The idea and the execution are top notch.

My only concern is that there is a buzzing noise if the app is in the foreground and some audio is playing in the background. This is on pixel 9a

Thanks for playing!

Oh interesting, thanks for the bug report! I hadn’t heard that one yet. I’ll look into it

You're welcome, thanks for making it! The noise is intermittent and may simply be CPU/GPU overload and the resulting sound distortions. But it could be something else. It is quite reproducible on my phone.

It may be related to the library I'm using for sound effects

I think I am getting close to a 100 day streak. Thanks!

Awesome, thanks for playing!!

I don't play every day, but I've been a big fan of Tiled and showed it to a number of other folks.

Thank you so much for keeping it going!

Thanks for playing and sharing!

How did you go from 0 users to 3,500? Genuinely curious how people get their games off the ground.

It's been a gradual process over the last 5.5 months. Here are some of the things that worked for me:

- I applied to showcase the game at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game Squad. They accepted me so I was able to showcase it at the expo for a day. This got me some players right off the bat

- I shared it on HN, Reddit, Mastodon, etc.

- The website Thinky Games wrote an article about it

- The YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic shared it which got a lot of new players. More recently a couple of other YouTubers (Timotab and Stro Solves) have been posting videos regularly

- I link to it from my blog, and this unrelated rant went semi-viral in web dev circles: https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/shadcn-radio-button/

- Winning the award gave me more visibility and players

I've also tried using things like Instagram and Discord but haven't had much luck there. I don't really get how those platforms work.

To be honest I'm not great at marketing. I've just been experimenting and seeing what works.

---

I would say the most important thing is the game itself:

- I've worked hard to gather feedback and incorporate it into the gameplay.

- I focus on keeping the puzzles fresh and striking the right difficulty level. (Challenging but something most people can do in 10 minutes.)

- I built a sharing feature that ~300 or so people use a day

I think all my marketing would have been useless if people didn't like the game and want to play again and share it with their friends.

I remember seeing this! It was cool, and I will remember to play it more.

Re creating puzzles, does this mean you have to manually do them one per day? Is there a way to automate them ahead of time (as in have an app generate a bunch of puzzles you can pick from or tweak)?

This is something I’ve been grappling with.

I’ve automated parts of the process. Once I have the words and clues I can autogenerate crosswords and pick the best one.

I’m hesitant to automate the creation of the theme, words, and clues though. I worry that the quality would go down but there may be some opportunities to speed up brainstorming there. I’ve been noodling on this.

That's a lot of fun, good work.

Thanks!