Show HN: Feudle – A daily puzzle game built with AI
33 comments
·March 25, 2025nimih
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.
papaolivia92
good feedback!
skwee357
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
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
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
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
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
To be fair, some of the ways the real Family Feud groups answers are really weird and seemingly incorrect.
papaolivia92
Interesting! Noted. Will look into improving the synonym match...
jdprgm
hah that's not too bad. mine matched poptart to pizza.
papaolivia92
hahaha that's hilarious (... fixing this)
roskelld
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
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
+1! Great feedback - sounds like I have some work to do on the pop-up timing, etc.
madarco
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
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
FYI, I can't install this on a Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
nextts
Very good reminds me of Family Fortunes the 80s UK game show
ks2048
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
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.
hatthew
Would it be possible to list incorrect guesses? In case I make a typo, or I forget a previous guess.
papaolivia92
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
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.
oliwary
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
thank you! ah some questions are harder than others - this one was tricky!
CleverLikeAnOx
Can you remove the annoying "give me your email" popup? It's preemptive enshittification.
papaolivia92
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 :)
davidbek
the self-suffiency is clever: players responses filling the survey. how do you do the matching of guesses to the answer board?
papaolivia92
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
this is fun! I enjoyed playing
papaolivia92
thank you! it was fun to build (and I enjoy playing it too!)
I’m a game show nerd who wanted to build a game, despite not being a developer. Using ChatGPT, I created Feudle – a blend of Family Feud and Wordle.
Each day, there’s a survey question, and players try to guess the most popular responses—but the twist is that today’s answers come from real players who played yesterday. After playing, you can vote on or submit new questions, shaping future Feudles.
If I were to start again, I’d explore newer AI-assisted coding tools like Cursor, but overall, this was a great learning experience. Hopefully, this inspires others to experiment with AI tools to bring their ideas to life.
Any feedback? Any tips for AI tools I should explore when iterating on the game?