Daniel Rodríguez, creator of Wordle in Spanish, speaks: this is how he adapted the trendy online game into “two afternoons”

“I am quite surprised, I launched the version of the game without any particular intention. I wanted to do the test in Spanish because it caught my attention and I am a programmer, without more,” he explains Daniel Rodriguez, the developer who created the version of Wordle, the game that has transcended meme, in Spanish.

Daniel is Colombian, he is 30 years old, and he left his native Bogotá after studying Electronic Engineering to move to Austin (United States), where he works as a software engineer. “I am dedicated to making data analysis infrastructures for companies, not to front-end, but since I have some basic knowledge of Javascript, in two afternoons I made the version of Wordle in Spanish. I launched it on Thursday, January 6, and over the weekend I polished up some details that were missing, “he explains in a slow voice, like someone’s oblivious to the fact that there are thousands of people who overnight have integrated open their creation into their routine.

Words already assigned until May 2023

Wordle has quite a few peculiarities. It does not look like a game from the twenties, but from the nineties or the first 2000. It does not ask for registration, does not show advertising, does not store user data, does not intend to trap them. Simply offer one game a day, one word every morning. When the user guesses it, he has nothing else to do on that website until the next day. A lovely anachronism.

“When I started making the game I realized that the words that the original game uses are not random, but are predefined. I saw that in Spanish there are extremely rare five-letter words, if those appeared, they would frustrate the player So I sat for three hours at the list of five-letter words and started sifting. There were about five hundred words left, they are already randomly scheduled for the next 500 days. ” That is, there are already games ready until the end of May 2023.

However, there will be changes. The word for January 9 was “titan.” That was no accident. “On Saturday I was watching videos on YouTube about the premiere of the new season of ‘Attack on Titan’, which was Sunday the 9th. I realized that ‘titan’ has five letters, so I decided to put it on the same day as the premiere. There were people who noticed the wink. In the future I will do similar ones on certain dates“.

One of the aspects that has yet to be finished is that of accessibility. Right now, Wordle in Spanish cannot be played by a blind person, and a colorblind person also has it almost impossible because she cannot distinguish the colors of the boxes. “That’s the next thing I’ll polish. It’s relatively simple, I just have to sit down for a while and code each action,” he explains.

There was something that made him wonder if it was worth making some changes from the original game because of the language differences. “I saw people who know much more about these topics than I do commenting that English is more appropriate for this game because of its grammatical structures, I thought perhaps it made more sense in Spanish to make it six letters, or four letters … Then I found that there are Enough five-letter words and that experience is good too. “

No plans to monetize its 52,000 users … and going up

We asked Daniel about possible plans to monetize the game, such as activating purchases for unlimited games or access to tracks, or perhaps advertising integration. He denies that he is considering anything like that. “I have no monetization plans and I doubt that I will have them in the future. Maintaining this does not cost me a lot of money, I get almost free, I just did it for people to have fun for a while“He also does not plan to introduce new game mechanics to access random words without the 24 hour lapse.” A lot of people have asked me, but the magic of the game is not to do this. “

And it continues with the defense of the old Internet. “I work with technology companies that immediately talk about how they can monetize anything, how to scale it, how to achieve a growth of hockey stick… At this time everyone wants to catch us, make us register, show us advertising … Not this, It is just a game for while you have your coffee in the morning. That’s all. No company today would launch such a game, which avoids getting hooked. “

On the first day of the launch of Wordle in Spanish, 1,000 people accessed it. The second, 20,000. The third, 40,000 and on Sunday 9 there were already 52,000 people who played. The vast majority, from Spain. The next countries in the ranking, far behind, are Argentina and Mexico. Then come countries with percentages lower than 1%.

Something that contributes to its dissemination is the game’s impromptu and free marketing campaign on networks like Twitter, where the messages with the emojis of colored squares representing the progress of each one’s game have multiplied in a few days. “That has been fundamental, people feel complicity when they see it, they understand what they mean. In addition, the share button serves to copy the message in plain text, without prompting you to take it to any social network. I also like that a lot” , concludes. Morning mental gymnastics.

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