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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

Stardew Valley doesn‘t have nearly as short of a timeframe but is another labor of love success.

I think it's an even better personal success than Wordle, or at least different. It was a man's labor of love for years, which tied together all his interests: music, art, programming, games.

And better yet he built a career out of doing all of those things and still owns and maintains it years later. Presumably still loves it too.

A lot of breakout successes follow that formula. While I'm not particularly fond of his work, I have nothing but respect for Toby Fox and the years of work he put into bringing his dream to reality.

Toby Fox made undertale, not Stardew. But it’s definitely in the same vein of “labor of love!”

If you looked at the engineer of worldle, he tried a lot of similar games before eg. On mobile.

Dating back since 2013.

So, while it could be created in a short timeframe. A lot of experience/thinking went into it.

Edit: changed 2016 to 2013

The original prototype for Wordle was actually back in 2013 [0]. But yeah he didn't really touch it until mid 2021 when he recreated it from scratch. The improved word list which plays a huge role came then, with the help of his partner classifying all 13k 5-letter words. I believe the share function came much later when he noticed people actually manually typing those colored squares.

[0] https://youtu.be/X_e2IEaR4aA?t=1130

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