[sigvef]

I came across https://bert.org/2021/11/24/the-best-starting-word-in-wordle... on HN the other day, and decided to do my own take on the concept as a little weekend project.

[sigvef]

Technology-wise, I wanted to try out two things that I hadn't tried before for this project.

One was to use Expo to release on web and mobile at the same time. I've used React Native quite a bit in a professional capacity, so I wanted to check out the Expo landscape. I discovered that the web part (react native web) didn't quite deliver on what I was looking for, so I scrapped it and ported to Vite/react-ts and dropped native completely.

The other was to see if I could find a low-friction way of setting up subscriptions for a static web frontend with no first party backend. That is the reason why there is a premium subscription tier for a small weekend game like this. Turns out that this was pretty straight forward with Gumroad! In the end, I was pretty happy with the way the flow turned out (except that Apple Pay isn't supported without stepping out of the flow and heading to Gumroad directly).

[MisterSandman]

It is not "highly ethical", this game has existed for decades. That's like saying Candy Crush copied Bejeweled; neither games were origina.

[beepy]

This - and Wordle - are games that existed before the internet. I played this on paper as a child.