Welcome to the devlog! A running journal for sharing progress and behind-the-scenes updates.

January 25, 2026

  • Mobile sharing woes. Spent hours debugging why image sharing wasn’t working on mobile.
    • Image not generating: The share modal was hiding too early on mobile, before the image could be captured. Fixed by keeping the capture area visible (but off-screen) while generating.
    • Safari compatibility: html2canvas doesn’t play well with Safari. Switched to html-to-image that handles Safari better.
    • WhatsApp quirk: When sharing an image with text, WhatsApp sometimes drops the caption if you search for a contact instead of selecting one directly. This is WhatsApp’s behavior, will try different workarouonds later.
    • Clipboard backup failed: Tried copying the share text to clipboard as a backup, but mobile browsers block this unless triggered by a direct tap. Deferred for later.
  • What works now: After a bajillion builds later, sharing works on mobile! Twitter/X shows both image and text. WhatsApp works best when selecting contacts directly from the share sheet.

January 24, 2026

  • Implemented daily challenges.
    • Ran into a snag. Ideally I would want people to share the daily challenge as text in the form of emojis. However, couldn’t find an encoding that would suport text emojis with different backgrounds. Relying on image sharing for now.
  • The prefilled words should be interesting and not random. If we just choose words at random, it will make the challenge unnecessary hard. We use a filtering criteria with some heuristics to choose words that are interesting and at the same time do not give away too much information.

January 23, 2026

  • Added the daily challenge feature. Users can now play a partially filled board once a day.
  • Github actions to run E2E tests automatically so that they don’t get missed accidentally.

January 22, 2026

  • Thorough end to end testing. This is a must have for implementing the daily challenge feature. Once we have this in place, we can rest easy that the current version of the game is stable despite any refactors or new features we add.

January 15, 2026

  • Removed Fazier badge from the website since they are not listing Topamine.

January 13, 2026

  • The reception of the post was positive. I have responses that they found the challenge interesting 1, 2. Someone mentioned they would play more there is a daily challenge version.
    • Unfortunately, the post was removed by moderators for violating Rule #4 (post not being about Wordle). I was so excited last night to post and get feedback that I forgot to read the rules :p Anyhow, I got the feedback I wanted.
    • The best part about this is people didn’t just say just to be nice. Amplitude metrics show that 114 people came from that post and 76 of them played the two games before the post was brought down! I’m glad I spent time yesterday on implementing the tracker.

January 12, 2026

  • Enabled tracking of different marketing channels via the ref parameter.
  • Posted two games on Reddit in the Wordle community to get feedback on whether people would like to solve partially filled boards.

January 11, 2026

  • Started posting on Pinterest to get traffic.

January 09, 2026

  • Launched the partial fill feature. Users can now choose to share partially filled boards. This creates a multiplier effect on the number of boards that can be created.
  • Next step: use this to market the game on social media.

January 08, 2026

January 07, 2026

  • Players would now be able to play partially filled boards.
    • This breaks the montony of Wordle having become mechanical with the best first word(s).
    • Also useful for marketing where we provide partially filled boards and leverage their curiosity to fill in the rest.
    • I had planned to just create posts with partially filled boards with links to an empty board, but Claude pointed out it would be a point of friction when I bounced this idea off of it.

January 06, 2026

  • Added Dragonball, AoT and Person of Interest.
  • Enabled cursor movement using arrow keys on the keyboard

January 05, 2026

  • Added One Piece and Basketball topics.

January 04, 2026

  • Added Baseball topic to the game. I observed on Google trends that sports trend a lot. The only sports topic we had until now was Football and it is always in top 5.
  • Created a landing page to help with both SEO and to add a badge for Fazier.
  • Submitted to Fazier for listing.

January 02, 2026

  • Topamine’s domain rating is 1. Domain Expansion: launch it on directories that needed a DR > 0! While we’re at it, let’s add JJK to the list of topics too ;)
  • A friend suggested to add a challenge button on the main game page. Getting people to share after the game is hard since they keep playing again. Sharing before might help.

January 01, 2026

  • Even though people are spending 20+ minutes playing the game, it will die if it does not spread. If it spreads the environment will motivate people to spend time when they see their friends and family doing it. If it stays limited to a few people, they will eventually quit having finished all the games or being bored of it.
  • So, how do I get them to share? Let’s start with what I currently know about sharing:
    • Sharing is a mechanism of self-expression. People share things to show others who they are.
      • How do I make sharing about them rather than about the game?
    • Memes are shareable.
      • What if the victory is converted to a meme? Will people be motivated to share it?
      • Perhaps, sharing Wordle tiles makes them look uncool so they’re not sharing it?
    • Teens and young adults between ages 13 to 21 are more prone to sharing.
      • Where do people of these age groups hang out online? I can take the game to them.
      • What topics are they interested in? Add those topics to the game so that they are more prone to share?

December 31, 2025

  • Learnings from Amplitude session replay:
    • People aren’t sharing because either they are on a winning streak and enjoying the game too much. Some people played for 20 to 30 minutes!
    • On the contrary, when people lose, they don’t share either, because no one wants to tell their friends that they lost.
    • Someone tried to click the Burger menu which is empty. I should remove it for now.
    • Features people don’t realize are in the game:
      • Cursor: most of them delete the whole thing when they get a letter wrong. Very few players use cursor to fill in the green letters.
      • People use the game keyboard even when on a PC to fill in the letters. They don’t know that they can use their computer’s keyboard.
      • They aren’t aware they can use any valid English word. They don’t have to restrict themselves to the vocabulary of the topic.
  • Potential solutions to the above pain points:
    • Video tutorials
    • Tour guide
    • An autofill feature to fill in the green letters.
  • Would people be eager to share a meme rather than the wordle style blocks? Guess there is only one way to find out.

December 30, 2025

  • Enabled Amplitude session replay to acquire a deeper understanding of how users play the game.
  • Display a preview of what the share will look like for the player. Experiment with different copy to encourage sharing.

December 27, 2025

  • Today’s submissions:
    • Submitted to Openhunts and got a date for launch in May 2026. Can skip the waitlist by paying $9.9.
  • Got reports that the board goes out of bounds on smaller screens. Fixed the issue by making the design more responsive. Tested it using Mobile FIRST.

December 26, 2025

  • Today’s submissions:
    • A post on DailyPings. This one is more like a social media website. I could post here multiple times. Also, share the progress here much like I would at any social media website.

December 25, 2025

  • Today’s launch:
    • Created a launch draft on LaunchIgniter. However, they required a $6.99 fee for skipping the waitlist. The earliest slot available for free is in May 2026.
    • Submitted to Active Search Results. Indexing is pending.
    • Exact Seek submission will go live in 4-6 weeks.
    • Shipybara has a waiting period of four months. I can pay $18 to skip the waitlist. If I add their badge, I will get a dofollow link even if Topamine does not make it to the top 3.
    • Hot100 submission is pending approval.

December 24, 2025

  • Submitted the game to:
    • Startup Roulette
    • Tried listing it on Faizer but it requires a DR greater than 0. Will list here when topamine meets the requirements.
    • Submitted to 10Words, however, the expected launch date is 14 years from now, lol. I can skip the line by paying $19 fee. I will consider this later.
    • Tried submitting to Solopush but it needs you to vote for existing products first. Their voting counter is broken.
    • Listed on Solo Launches. Launch scheduled for December 28th. Their website is so pretty to look at 😍
    • Listing page created on Startup Fame but they too require a DR greater than 0. Will list here when topamine meets the requirements.
  • Enabled analytics on the blog. This would help identify more opportunities to identify the kind of content that resonates with the audience.

December 23, 2025

December 22, 2025

  • Implemented high contrast mode same as Wordle’s as per the suggestions from the Reddit post.
  • I realized I didn’t need ugly and noisy patterns to support the game for monchromacy. Having borders for letters that are correct and present letters with patterns was enough. If players combine it with high contrast mode, they should be able to identify information on all the letters.
  • Made submission to BetaList and Product Hunt.

December 19, 2025

  • As of today 36 pages have been indexed by Google and have led to an increase in impressions!
  • Players collectively spent a total of 10.9 hours playing the game.

December 18, 2025

  • I made a post on Reddit and asked for feedback on the colorblind mode. Most of the replies mentioned that Wordle’s high contrast mode is good enough. The patterns were reported to be noisy. A mistake I made here was to rely on Perplexity and Claude research too much and not checking the sources myself.
  • I will switch to the high contrast mode by Wordle. It really works nicely.
  • Reading some more feeback now, I believe there is a simpler way to make it work without the user of patterns. The levers I have to play with are: text color, box color, box frame/outline and text outline. This reddit comment has some good ideas.

December 17, 2025

  • Continued improving accessibility for colorblind users. While High Contrast Mode helps, relying solely on color is insufficient, especially for ones who cannot perceive any colors.
    • Pattern Mode: Introduced a mode where tile states are distinguished by patterns, not just color.
      • Vertical stripes for letters that are present (yellow/red)
      • A thick “X” mark for letters that are absent (gray)
      • No pattern for letters that are correct (green/blue)
    • Letter Outlines: Added a separate “Letter Outlines” mode that adds a high-contrast outline to text on colored tiles. This ensures legibility regardless of the background pattern or color, helps correct and present letters pop-out, further aiding with readability.

December 16, 2025

  • Following up on the pain points reported online for Wordle
    • People with colorblindness have difficulty distinguishing between the colors used in the game. Thought about various ways and the simplest first was to add a high contrast mode. Tested it out and it should work for most cases, however, it is a good practice to not just rely on color to convey information as I found here. Will do a fast-follow on this.
    • Furthermore, I just simulated how the game would look like to people with colorblindness. This isn’t as good as someone with actual colorblindness would experience it, so I will try and get some feedback by posting it in relevant communities.

December 14, 2025

  • These two were the pain points among the several that people reported online for Wordle
    • Difficulty in reading the letters because of lack of contrast between the white foreground and the colored background. Improved color contrast as per the WCAG guidelines. The game is now more accessible to users with visual impairments.
    • Difficulty in distinguishing between letters that occurred more than once. Letters that occur more than once will now appear underlined. This enables users to identify multiple occurrences of a letter.
  • Added Physics and Chemsitry topics.

December 06, 2025

  • Discovered that the meta tags for the root index.html were bad. Intially I had intended for them to point to the christmas topic since this website was launched at the time of Christmas. Things have evolved quite a lot since then.
  • Made sharing button pop by changing CSS styles and experimenting with different copies.
  • Realized that sharing has a lot of friction. First people choose the format and then they’re led to the sharing buttons. Reduce friction by removing the intermeidate choice of format selection. Add option to share on LinkedIn and Bluesky as well.

December 05, 2025

  • When watching Wired’s video with the Stranger Things cast answering most frequently Googled questions, I realized that I could find those questions and put them in a blog post to attract potential players. Created a Vecna FAQ blog post.

December 01, 2025

  • I was submitting indexing requests for topic pages on Google Search Console, page by page. It was both inefficient and restrictive. There is a limit on the number of URLs you can submit to Google Search Console. I did some digging and found that I could submit a sitemap to Google Search Console. Generated a sitemap using and submitted it to Google Search Console.
  • After submission, I got an error for the topic pages. The error was “Page is not indexed: Redirect error”. I found out that the issue was that my sitemap was listing URLs without trailing slashes, but my server was serving URLs with trailing slashes. I updated the sitemap to include trailing slashes for all topic URLs.

November 30, 2025

  • Problem: I went to Google Search Console and when I checked the screenshot section for topic pages, I saw they were blank. The reason for that was all content was rendered client-side by JS, so when Google captures screenshots of the initial HTML, nothing is visible.
    • Solution: Static site generation using react-snap to fix blank screenshots in Google Search Console. Topic pages now contain pre-rendered HTML with full content visible before JavaScript loads.
  • Discovered on the Google Search Console that the topic pages are not indexed. The error shown was “Page is not indexed: Redirect error”.
    • Solution: Single the game was originally a single page web app, all requests were redirected to the home page /index.html. Now, that redirect has been restricted to only the /play/* route.

November 29, 2025

  • Separate page for each topic.
    • Motivation: I performed a Google search for “Harry Potter Wordle” and expected to find topamine on the first 10 results page. Of course, it didn’t work.
    • Then, I tried “Harry Potter Wordle Topamine” and it listed Topamine, however, when I clicked on the link, it directed me to a random topic (as programmed). It is so annoying for a user to be directed to a random topic page when they explicity asked for a specific one!
    • It is then I realized that I need to create a separate page for each topic for
      1. Google to know about the topic
      2. to provide a better user experience.

November 23, 2025

  • Made devlog public
  • Requested indexing for blog and devlog pages on Google Search Console

November 22, 2025

  • Blog post for Stranger Things Season 2 Recap

November 21, 2025

  • Start a blog to get traffic to the game
  • Blog post for Stranger Things Season 1 Recap
  • Stranger Things topic - play Stranger Things wordle

January 02, 2025

  • Disney and Friends topics

December 31, 2024

  • My Hero Academia and Code Geass

December 30, 2024

  • Hunter x Hunter

December 24, 2024

  • South Park
  • Display rules when someone logs in for the first time. Since the game mechanics are slightly different from original Wordle (unlimited play and variable length words), I want to make sure that are aware of this when the play for the first time.

December 23, 2024

  • Introduced cursor. Enable players to skip letters. I got early feedback that people found it annoying to have to need to write letters in order to make their next guess. The interface didn’t allow players to skip letters. If they could fill in various boxes with letters they have already guessed, visualization and planning becomes much easier. Not just that, it also makes it easier to try different letters at various places and see what works.
  • Rick and Morty topic

December 21, 2024

  • Christmas carols topic

December 14, 2024

  • Add a navigation bar to organize various modals and links.