small changes

Author: healeycodes

posts/how-i-made-queuedle.md

@@ -9,15 +9,15 @@ description: "A daily word sliding puzzle game inspired by Wordle and Scrabble"
 
 Players pull from a letter queue and push onto the board, and words are automatically highlighted. Your score is the number of letters used in words. Letters can count twice so `MOON` is actually two words: `MOO` and `MOON`.
 
-Playtesters who are into NYT puzzles tend to plan several moves ahead. Since you can see enough of the queue, you can strategize. A big vocabulary helps, as does knowing the Scrabble dictionary (but two-letter words don’t count).
+During playtesting, players who are into things like NYT puzzles tended to plan several moves ahead. Since you can see enough of the queue, you can strategize. A big vocabulary helps, as does knowing the Scrabble dictionary (but two-letter words don’t count).
 
 ![A game of Queuedle being played.](overview.mp4)
 
 ## Daily Puzzles
 
 Famously, Wordle had the next day's puzzle embedded in the source code. You could look it up if you wanted to spoil yourself. However, for Queuedle, there's a bit more setup required. I need to generate a board and a letter queue.
 
-I didn't attempt to do this manually as it's far too much work. I don't think there's much of a payoff for the user if I design interesting starting states because there are too many starting moves – and each move jumbles the board.
+I didn't attempt to do this manually as it's far too much work. I don't think there's much of a payoff for the user if I design interesting starting states because there are too many starting _moves_ – and each move jumbles the board.
 
 In order to generate a board and a letter queue with the same *vibe* as Scrabble, I use the Scrabble letter distribution when I randomly pick letters (Qs are rare, Es are everywhere).
 
@@ -60,7 +60,7 @@ Each date becomes a unique seed. The [Lehmer random number generator](https://en
   }
 ```
 
-The first time I set up the game generation logic, I ran into a problem. The starting board would contain words! In retrospective, it's unsurprising that a random 5x5 board of letters would contain at least one three letter word from the 178691 words in the Scrabble tournament word list.
+The first time I set up the game generation logic, I ran into a problem. The starting board sometimes contained multiple outlined words! In retrospective, it's unsurprising that a random 5x5 board of letters would contain at least one three letter word from the 178691 words in the Scrabble tournament word list.
 
 I decided to throw the user's CPU at this problem. I simply generate boards, deterministically, until the starting board contains zero words.
 
@@ -126,6 +126,6 @@ One design problem I haven't solved yet is how to better communicate when a lett
 
 I tried to solve this problem by cycling through a small pallete of rainbow colors for the different word outlines to better distinguish one word outline from another. However, players kept asking me what the different colors mean, hah.
 
-One idea I had, was to highlight word outlines when a letter is tapped. But I don't want to give up the simple controls of: just tap the arrows. For example, on desktop, if I show that letters are clickable, people will try and move them, etc.
+One idea I had, was to highlight the words a letter belongs to when it's tapped. But I don't want to give up the simple controls of: just tap the arrows. For example, on desktop, if I show that letters are clickable, people will try to move them, etc.
 
-My goal was for [Queuedle](https://queuedle.com) to be roughly as hard to pick for the first time as Wordle. I think I got there. I thought about adding a tutorial animation ... but I always skip them.
+My goal was for [Queuedle](https://queuedle.com) to be roughly as hard to pick up for the first time as Wordle. I think I got there. I thought about adding a tutorial animation ... but I always skip them.