GoKawiil
Tech News
The developer behind the daily word puzzle game Jointter has posted a follow-up Show HN, adding a tutorial after users struggled with the game's mechanics. The creator reports that many players start the puzzle but few finish, identifying a common misunderstanding: players assume revealed letter fragments dictate the exact word to enter, when any valid word fitting the pattern is accepted.
A UX designer describes an eight-week collaboration with Raph Koster, author of 'A Theory of Fun,' to study how video game design principles could inform app UX beyond traditional gamification tactics like achievements. The piece explores the initial tension between game design's use of 'juicy' visual feedback and tension-building mechanics versus UX design's typical goal of minimalism and simplicity.
A player analyzed Factorio's Space-Age DLC quality system, which uses a pseudo-random number generator rather than true randomness to determine item and building quality upgrades. The write-up documents an in-game implementation that exploited this predictable RNG, though it notes the technique breaks under Factorio version 2.1 due to changes in how the RNG is invoked, while the underlying algorithm remains the same.