alt.hn

12/11/2025 at 2:01:22 PM

Show HN: An endless scrolling word search game

by marcusdev

12/11/2025 at 7:57:11 PM

Super fun, congrats! Works really well

My only feedback is just that the homepage had a lot of elements that distracted me initially - I wasn't sure if I had to type something (the input examples changing all the time made me think it was important to fill it out)

I ended up clicking "Start Game" on a whim and was glad that I could check it out immediately. Maybe make the "I just want to play now" option/button/CTA larger/more obvious (i.e. giving it more focus)?

To test it again, I just typed some words in the input bar, it forced me to login, I chose the Google login, I was then brought back to https://endless-wordsearch.com/#/sso-callback but the top right button still says Sign In, and my input was lost. So I assume the login didn't work?

I typed my input again, a popup appeared (mentioning Clerk)... then it finally logged me in. Now I'm back at the homepage, and my input has been lost again :-)

I typed my input a third type, and now I'm getting "Generation failed".

by gregsadetsky

12/11/2025 at 8:25:53 PM

Awesome, glad you like it! Thanks for the feedback. I've just bumped my Gemini API key limit, fingers crossed that fixes things for you.

by marcusdev

12/11/2025 at 8:02:30 PM

The infinite grid is a cool idea, but the game as a whole did not feel very engaging. There was no way I was finishing even one full screen of this, which is the bare minimum threshold for getting any value from the infinite grid. I'm not a word search guy, but it feels like the idea might work better with a different puzzle type.

The drag to pan, hold-then-drag to mark felt really clumsy with a mouse. The hold delay is just too long. Maybe consider drag-with-left-button to mark, click/drag-with-right button to pan.

The word list seems odd, half the words I tried were rejected. You don't need many failures to accept a reasonable word to lose faith in the game. Is the idea that only the words at the bottom are in the dictionary? Doesn't feel like it can be, given it only shows about 20 words, is not scrollable in any way I can see, and many words not shown in that list were actually accepted.

by jsnell

12/11/2025 at 7:56:54 PM

Lot of missing words like kit, sit. And wth is kinkajou? I also did word game many years ago, it took maybe 1 day to code but the rest of the week I've spent filtering out garbage from corpus (names, shortcuts, non-words, non-English words). You can use it: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dvhx/game-word-puzzle/refs...

by dvh

12/11/2025 at 8:09:27 PM

You must have been playing the "Wild Animals" category. A Kinkajou is a tropical rainforest mammal according to Wikipedia :)

The 5 built-in word lists that you can play without signing up were generated by Gemini 3 Pro - there are a few obscure ones in there!

by marcusdev

12/12/2025 at 5:54:15 AM

I saw that "ape" was a valid word, found it diagonally, but it didn't register. Guessing I found an "accidental" ape. cool though!

by mpalmer

12/13/2025 at 6:15:44 AM

I had a similar issue with "ant", except it was horizontal and the game refused to acknowledge I had found it. I'm wondering if it only registers the ones that it initially generates and doesn't double check when you select others or something. I did notice when you move it, it updated the list to reflect that there were two aardvark's so I'm not sure why it didn't recognize the 'ant' that I located.

by Suppafly

12/13/2025 at 2:01:35 PM

Thanks for this! It was a tricky one to solve, but finding an "accidental" match now grants a point.

by marcusdev

12/12/2025 at 12:33:18 PM

Ha. I read this comment and found the exact same diagonal "Ape"

by sh4rks

12/11/2025 at 8:15:28 PM

This is really nice! I think it has a great aesthetic and works really well. Just a couple of thoughts:

- the long press feels a little bit too long on mobile. At least I think it is? I thought nothing had happened because my thumb was covering the active state of the letter that I pressed down on. Potentially a combo of the two

- you can "cheat" by moving the board and tracking when your word disappears

by StrangeSound

12/11/2025 at 9:36:21 PM

It's too easy to "cheat" by panning around until a word toggles in the list, effectively telling you which corner of the screen the word can be found in

by retropragma

12/11/2025 at 10:02:46 PM

I highlighted a word, it was added to the bottom and greyed-out, but the original word didn't disappear.

I'll see if I can repro.

by badc0ffee

12/11/2025 at 10:05:10 PM

Actually it seems like duplicate words are listed, and only one gets crossed off.

by badc0ffee

12/11/2025 at 9:51:48 PM

It’s not clear to me what the changing colors of the words mean as I scroll around?

by johnnyo

12/11/2025 at 8:40:58 PM

The pulsing letters are both performance heavy and distracting. Firefox

by djent

12/12/2025 at 7:05:11 PM

Thanks for the feedback - fixed!

by marcusdev