Battleship Solitaire

An intricate and complex update to the puzzle generation - it tries speculative solutions, detects partial-solution contradictions and commonalities, and generates often-much-harder puzzles (the code on the page is un-minified, for the curious). I added a save-checkpoint system to help people solve them. Also 'permalinks' for sharing particular puzzles. People on /r/WebGames seem to dig it - hardmode now accounts for about 30-50% of traffic. I'm slightly addicted to it on my phone.

The site is popular but doesn't make much money via the banner ad, about $30/mo. And I don't like ads much anyway. It's branded "mindless podcast companion", so why not put a convenient podcast player on there instead of the ad? Surely 10% of visitors would use it. And podcasters would likely pay $5 or $10 to get their podcasts featured on there to a receptive audience. I program a simple "minimum viable product" podcast player with some top podcasts and put it up there for a week to test it out. Let the floodgates open!

Of thousands of visits, only one person plays a single episode. Oops. I guess that's why testing an idea is important before investing too much time. Player goes down and ad goes back up.

My multi-year magnum-opus game-in-progress Infintroid (infinitroid.com) isn't getting much traction, so I seek solace in some small, non-multiyear projects (lukerissacher.com), including Battleships. I add a whole bunch of usability polish, instructions, touch controls, a link from my website, and voila, it's born to the world. A post about it on reddit WebGames becomes popular and sends in a wave of traffic. Bounce rate only 11%! People are digging it. They share it on HN and Metafilter and it pops up here and there around the web.

I got curious how hard it'd be to write a solver / generator for Battleship Solitaire puzzles, a regular feature in Games Magazine. After a feverish few hours of coding, it's up and running - nobody knows the URL but me. I discover they're mezmerizing and enjoyable to play while listening to podcasts. I forget about them for over a year.