I design games as a hobby. Both analogue board and card games, and small JavaScript games that can be played in a browser on your computer, or sometimes, when I feel like punishing myself on a phone. Given Wordle’s popularity, and the fact that all the game designers I follow online seem to be talking about either Wordle or Wordle variants, I figured I should maybe try to piggyback on Wordle’s success and make my own Wordle variant? Coming up with a twist wasn’t hard - what if you had to solve a 5x5 grid of letters? The tricky part was figuring out how the clues should then be presented. Once I had an idea for that everything fell into place sort of quickly. After only a weekend of coding and making some basic artwork I had a working prototype that gave you a grid of extra colorful emoji-squares to share your result on social media. I named the game Squardle (for non Pokémon reasons) and gave out the links to a few friends and tweeted about it from an account with almost no follower. Twitter, for all its fault, loved it! I’ve had more visitors the past hour than I’ve had the whole month before I released Squardle. I’m trying to not get addicted to watching the numbers go up on Google Analytics, but... Tumblr, if you want to play a free ad-free indie game, maybe try out Squardle?Â
