This article is part 1 of a series about the development of Duotrigordle. Click here to read Part 2 and Part 3.
Duotrigordle is a member of the -ordle family of Wordle-like games, up there with Dordle, Quordle, Octordle, etc. In the game, the player tries to guess 32 secret five-letter words in under 37 guesses.
In Duotrigordle, players can play a new daily game every day, or play an unlimited number of practice games. Stats are tracked for each game, users can create accounts to sync stats across multiple devices, and a leaderboard allows players to compete on a global stage.
This article describes how and why I made this website, as well as all the features added throughout the website's history.
Stuck at Home
It was March 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic had been ongoing for about 2 years and I was on a study term at university. Despite the campus starting to open in the fall, things had gotten worse over the winter break and our previously in-person classes were now back on Zoom.
Needless to say, being couped up at my tiny dorm room desk sucked.
My friends and I would pass the time playing Wordle, a daily puzzle game that had been steadily rising in popularity. We'd share daily scores with each other in a Discord server.
One day, one of my friends discovered Dordle, a variant where you solve TWO wordle boards at the same time.
I thought that was hilarious.
Another friend then shared Quordle, a variant with 4 boards. At this point I was wondering how deep the rabbit hole went.
I discovered Octordle with 8 boards and Hexadecordle with 16 boards (no longer available, the canonical 16-ordle now seems to be Sedecordle).
There was no 32-word Wordle, as far as I could find. Hey, I have some experience in web development, maybe I could be the first to make 32-ordle.
So that's basically what I did. Bored of attending online lectures, I whipped out my editor and coded up what would be the first version of Duotrigordle in about 3 days.
By the way, the prefix "Duotrigordle" comes from duotrigintillion, the name for (well in North America at least) and is the 32nd -illion prefix.
I bought the duotrigordle.com domain name, then on March 8, 2022
the first version of Duotrigordle went live.
This is what it looked like:
The graphics were quite crude, copying the high contrast black & white color scheme that Octordle and Hexadecordle had at the time, but the game worked and I thought it was kind of fun.
Personally I'm quite happy with how the game turned out, 32 words struck a good balance in being a full puzzle game without being overly drawn-out. Duotrigordle is often completed in 5-15 min, putting it in the same kind of category as a daily sudoku or crossword puzzle.
I shared the game with my friends, as well as the Discord server for my university program—notably this is the only public place where I posted the game.
Blowing Up
After making the website I didn't think much of it until one day I checked the server logs just to see if everything was fine. To my surprise, I was finding that the website was receiving a page view every few seconds, far more than I expected.
I added Google Analytics to the site to track viewership, and after about a month I could not believe what I saw. Unfortunately that analytics data has been lost to time, so here's an artist's rendition of the graph I was looking at.
After only about a month, I was hitting over 100 thousand viewers every day.
The website had spread via word of mouth, somehow ended up on Google search, and was becoming quite popular as it was riding the waves of the Wordle hype train.
What started as a kind of joke ended up getting quite a lot of users, so I figured it was worth my time to develop the website further, adding more features and polishing the whole experience. Coding and UX design were always things I naturally found fun, so working on the website was always enjoyable to me.
Feature Train
The first major feature added to Duotrigordle was statistics tracking, added around May 2022. At this point stats were only saved in the user's browser, user accounts would come over a year later.
I pretty blatantly copied the Wordle stats screen, with the numbers at the top with a guess distribution graph below it. Since times were tracked as well, the stats screen displayed information about your best and average game times.
There was also a feature where you could manually add stats, I think this was added for users to enter scores that they'd recorded on their own before they were tracked. This would eventually be removed.
Practice mode was also added this update, allowing players to play an unlimited number of practice games.
August 2022 brought about a variety of changes including a more refined visual style that (hopefully) was less of an eyesore than the high contrast black & white.
A number row was added at the top to help players visualize the completion of all 32 boards.
A friend of mine came up with board highlighting, which is personally one of my favorite features of the game: You can click on a board to scroll it into view and have the keyboard only display hints for that board specifically. On a computer you can also use the left/right arrow keys to change focus between boards, allowing you to navigate between boards without touching the mouse!
At this point a good number number of configuration options had been added, allowing players to customize the game layout in a number of ways.
In February 2023, Duotrigordle had probably the largest update in the game's development history. Instead of jumping straight into gameplay, the website now had a home screen where players could select which game mode they wanted to play.
The Sequence and Jumble alternate game modes were introduced in this update, giving players more ways to experience the game. These game modes were introduced around the same time when Octordle and Sedecordle added similar modes to their game.
Input hints were implemented, which displayed green letters as ghost letters in the input row. This was very useful as Duotrigordle boards often become very tall, making it difficult to work out exactly which columns contain already solved letters.
The website adopted a lighter color palette with less contrast. Small animations were added throughout various surfaces, which all helped the app feel more modern. The keen-eyed among you will also notice this is the first version of the website with a proper logo.
My favorite detail is this little animation that plays whenever you navigate between pages, it helps give the website a playful character:
August 2023 saw the addition of user accounts, allowing people to sign in with a username and optionally their email. This allowed people to synchronize their stats and daily games across multiple devices and also back up their data in case they lost the data stored in their browser.
When designing the experience for user accounts, I specifically opted not to use a traditional username/password approach, since it is very easy to mess up storing passwords. Storing passwords would've massively increased my liability in case of a server vunerability, which isn't something I wanted to deal with as still a young developer. Thus, I opted for an account key system where my server essentially generates a random password for each user.
The last major update came about in January 2024 which introduced two major features: solve assist and the global leaderboard.
Solve assist is a feature that automatically completes any boards that have enough hints to solve them. This feature helped make the game less tedious, particularly near the end of the game where nearly every board is fully solved but you still need to type out the solution.
The leaderboard lists the daily scores of everyone with an account, allowing people to compete on a global scale. I hoped that this feature would allow players to feel more connected to each other and encourage some friendly competition, from the feedback that I've received this has mostly been the case.
Unfortunately, it's pretty much impossible to prevent people from cheating at the game since it's really easy to look up the answers to any day's puzzle. Although I did implement some mechanisms to detect cheated scores (which I obviously can't discuss in detail), there will always be some illegitimate scores on the leaderboard, which I've certainly received many complaints about. My response is always to encourage players to focus on their own scores, and use the leaderboard to gauge their own progression at the game instead of focusing on others.
As of today, Duotrigordle has been left in maintenance mode and I've mostly moved on to other things. I feel that the project is mostly finished with not many features worth adding. Nonetheless, working on this website has been a big part of the last 3 years of my life, from it I've learned a lot of things about software engineering and design.
Feeding On Feedback
I believe a big part of the success of this project was the frequent feedback I've received from players. I've had over 40 people send me bug reports, feature requests, and other general comments about the game, both on GitHub and via email.
Many of the game's features were directly a result of people's feedback, including but not limited to:
To those of you who submitted any kind of constructive feedback, it is because of you that the game is where it is today. Thank you!
Click here to read Part 2 about adding advertising to Duotrigordle, or Part 3 about the technical behind-the-scenes of creating the website.