Show HN: Feudle – A daily puzzle game built with AI

(feudlegame.com)

49 points | by papaolivia92 3 days ago

13 comments

  • nimih 3 days ago
    1. I spent around 5-8 minutes on the site and got multiple (4 or 5) modal “subscribe to my newsletter” popups, some within seconds of each other. This is extraordinarily obnoxious and is enough for me to never want to visit your website again, regardless of its other merits.

    2. I’m on mobile, and while the keyboard interface looks nice, it performs much worse than my phone’s native keyboard. There are multiple reasons for this: it’s laggy and routinely drops inputs; it doesn’t allow for alternative input schemes like swiping (I’m not an accessibility expert but I imagine it’s a disaster for anyone with serious accessibility needs), and it “feels” less accurate than the phone’s native keyboard input. Plus, its behavior and letter positioning is just very jarring compared to how I expect my phone keyboard to behave, which adds to how annoying it is to use.

    3. Today’s prompt seemed fine, but the surveyed prompts for “next time” all seem rather low quality. I’m not sure how you’re generating these, but you should probably spend a bit more time doing QA, especially while you’re trying to build a user base; speaking personally, seeing that “Besides white christmas, name a song on big crosby’s white christmas album”[sic] is a potential future prompt really does not inspire confidence and makes me rather uninterested in ever coming back.

  • skwee357 3 days ago
    Cool game. Concept is not new, but good execution.

    Here is some feedback:

    1. Remove the annoying popup 2. Use native elements for input, I don't know what is it in your code, but this is not native, because when I type, Vimium plugin intercepts my input rather than the input box.

    • papaolivia92 2 days ago
      thanks! hmm I used a native element for input but disabled it so I could use the on-screen keyboard. might be time to revisit!
  • jimmar 3 days ago
    I entered "meat" and it matched "chicken" as a correct answer. "Ham" was also a correct answer that I failed to guess. In my mind, both "chicken" and "ham" fall under the "meat" category. If a guess is not specific enough to differentiate between two possible correct responses, I think you should mark it incorrect.
    • roskelld 3 days ago
      I did the same thing, based on the notion that pizza was fine, I didn't think I needed to go more specific. It was odd to see chicken get replaced by my guess of meat, but I didn't think to try more specific meats after that guess.
      • papaolivia92 2 days ago
        very helpful - you're right in that chicken / ham are the same level of specificity so having meat as the right answer (and having chicken, ham, etc. count as correct) would make more sense here.
    • viccis 3 days ago
      To be fair, some of the ways the real Family Feud groups answers are really weird and seemingly incorrect.
      • HenryBemis 1 day ago
        It's what people on the street say. I was watching Kimmel some weeks back and they asked people on the street "how chickens mate". And people were so oblivious (i.e. someone said copulation takes minutes) on basic facts of life, geography, etc.

        Insta and TikTok have done a great deal of damage to the youth...

    • papaolivia92 3 days ago
      Interesting! Noted. Will look into improving the synonym match...
    • jdprgm 3 days ago
      hah that's not too bad. mine matched poptart to pizza.
      • papaolivia92 2 days ago
        hahaha that's hilarious (... fixing this)
  • phil294 1 day ago
    Great game idea. I'd suggest you limit the questions top international topics though. I got a suggestion for "name a hurricane" - this probably wouldn't generate very interesting responses outside of America.
  • roskelld 3 days ago
    I found the popups annoying. I understand that you want to capture an audience, and apparently these pop ups work, but I find them off putting. A box somewhere on screen that people can use would be less invasive. Enjoyed the game though.
    • prawn 3 days ago
      OP, I quit because of the pop-ups. Why would I sign up before I've even had a chance to try the game? Invite people to get notified after they've completed a game.
      • papaolivia92 2 days ago
        +1! Great feedback - sounds like I have some work to do on the pop-up timing, etc.
  • madarco 3 days ago
    great idea! I've toyed too about a daily word challenge, and I've made Acro: daily word challenge: iOS https://apps.apple.com/br/app/acro-daily-word-challenge/id16... Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.madarco.ac...
    • oliwary 3 days ago
      This looks great as well! :) Love the addition of a creative element. I also recently launched a new one: https://spaceword.org (90% of the code is written by cursor)
    • InsideOutSanta 3 days ago
      FYI, I can't install this on a Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
  • ks2048 3 days ago
    I'm wondering how many of the choices were the AI's and how many were yours - like why is it an "unusual" text box - no cursor, on-screen keyboard, etc.

    Also, "not being a developer" means you don't normally do software development or you have no idea what you're looking at if shown source code?

    • papaolivia92 2 days ago
      I had taken a basic coding course over 10 years ago, so I understand the basic structure of a function for example. I've never coded anything before, so this was truly my first foray..

      Through this project, I'm getting better at filtering for AI's less intuitive suggestions; at the start, I naturally accepted most recommendations at face value.

  • oliwary 3 days ago
    Nicely done! :) I think this works well as a daily game, smart to get players to fill in the survey. Quite hard though! I only got one right for today.
    • papaolivia92 3 days ago
      thank you! ah some questions are harder than others - this one was tricky!
  • CleverLikeAnOx 3 days ago
    Can you remove the annoying "give me your email" popup? It's preemptive enshittification.
    • papaolivia92 3 days ago
      I'll look into a better way to collect emails. We have a quite a few people sign-up for the daily email as it's a good reminder to play each day, but we could place the sign-up elsewhere :)
  • hatthew 3 days ago
    Would it be possible to list incorrect guesses? In case I make a typo, or I forget a previous guess.
    • papaolivia92 2 days ago
      Technically it's available in the menu; if you click "My Guesses". I was debating showing them on the main scree as you're playing - would you prefer that?
      • hatthew 2 days ago
        I think I would prefer that, yeah. I think it's a bit buried in the menu considering how relevant it is to the actual gameplay.
  • nextts 2 days ago
    Very good reminds me of Family Fortunes the 80s UK game show
  • davidbek 3 days ago
    the self-suffiency is clever: players responses filling the survey. how do you do the matching of guesses to the answer board?
    • papaolivia92 3 days ago
      thanks! I'm using an AI prompt (via the OpenAI API) to compare a player's guess to the survey's answers, and determining if it's a similar enough match to count as as correct.
  • pullflow 3 days ago
    this is fun! I enjoyed playing
    • papaolivia92 3 days ago
      thank you! it was fun to build (and I enjoy playing it too!)